View: When is a smartphone not so smart? By: Anthony Newman, Thursday 14th August 2003, 18:03 GMT
When is a smartphone not so smart? When you can't back the damn thing up, that's when. Anthony Newman rants over the lack of proper backup utilities for Smartphone 2002.
Microsoft are probably best known for their cock-ups, and it's certainly true that they made a few in the first iteration of their smartphone product, Smartphone 2002.
Sure, it is impossible to resend a text message should it fail, and to create playlists in Windows Media Player, and to browse the file system without a third-party program - all true. But these are all pretty minor gripes compared to a much greater menace.
That menace is the lack of a proper backup solution for Smartphone 2002, and it's a problem that stems from treating the SPV and its brethren as phones, not as PDAs. When all of one's text messages and contacts are stored on a SIM card, there's no real problem other than theft to worry about. As soon as the phone itself becomes the repository for information - and in the case of smartphones, that is potentially a lot of information - then it is imperative that users have a way of painlessly backing up and restoring that information in the event of problems.
Now, PDAs have a whole range of third-party backup solutions, and almost all have some kind of offering built in to the ROM. Smartphone 2002 devices have no such feature, and no third-party solution that I know of has yet stepped up, other than a small freeware utility to copy a system folder to the storage card.
A whole load of reasons line up to point and laugh and call this a really stupid decision. Firstly, phones are easily lost. I like to have backups of things I'm likely to lose. Secondly, Smartphone 2002 isn't very stable by any stretch of the imagination, and it's great to be able to go back to a working configuration. Thirdly, smartphone backups will never take much space, so it's hardly a big chore. Finally, and most importantly, is my current biggest gripe with Microsoft: their esoteric design of file systems.
I recently moved SPVs (the luxury of a journalist), and really wanted to move some couple of hundred text messages across. Easy, I thought: even though I can't synchronize them like e-mails, or back them up to the PC, I'll be able to root around the SPV until I find them. Not so. I managed to locate 571 files which were the body text of the SMS messages that I sent, but no inbox and no headers in sight. To my great dismay, I eventually had to give up and apply a rather inelegant 3rd party workaround. Not exactly what one would expect from a platform that seems to have more in common with PCs than phones, is it!
Secrecy and ineptitude make very poor bedfellows, and combined they amount to a critical failure on Microsoft's part. I don't like the feeling that if my phone dies I have to spend hours reinstalling and setting everything up - not to mention the thought of losing my precious text messages. Let's hope an enterprising company fills the gap before the nightmare becomes reality, eh?
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