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Archive for 25. February 2008
Not smart enough for my "Smart Phone", I guess
25. February 2008 by Martin Suter.
Last summer, at contract renewal time, I migrated from a Blackberry to a Windows Mobile Smart Phone (AT&T 8525 made by HTC). It had gotten good reviews, and I liked the slide out QWERTY keypad, so I took the plunge.
Besides the dismal battery life, the move has been mostly a bust, and today I’m dusting off my "old" Blackberry and taking a step forward by taking a step backwards.
"Why?", you might ask…
To make a long story short, complexity.
Short on device memory, I have spent (literally) hours on-line trying to figure out how to free up memory. I want to move a single file (PIM.vol) from my local memory to the SD card, and to then have the sync engine sync with it in its new location…Did I say that I’ve spent hours trying to find out how to do this?
The "solution" is to download a 3rd-party Registry Editor, and to then find and change several registry entries, re-boot a couple of times and then cross your fingers. Now I consider myself to be fairly technical, but why is this my problem? Why should I be mucking around in low-level registry entries to hack a fix when I should be able to open up Windows Explorer and drag the PIM.vol file from one place to another and then have the applications figure it out.
I’m not the only guy with this issue. I came across hundreds of entries from people with the same problem. How many of them will still be Windows Mobile device customers or Google Mobile customers is anybody’s guess, but I’m betting that people won’t have to hack their registry with a Google device.
Smart is not designing something that only engineers can figure out, smart is designing something that everyone can figure out.
C’mon Microsoft, you can do better…No, you NEED to do better. What’s the old maxim about it costing 10X to get a new customer than to keep existing ones? If you lose/alienate your early adopters, it will be very difficult, and maybe impossible, to gain back this market share.
That’s my .02!
Martin
(martin.suter@iplicensing.net)
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