it doesn't "just work"
I've been all over the map on PDAs, from Palms to PocketPCs to a Zaurus, over the past 10 years. Recently I decided to dump my Palm once again and move definitively to WM. Within a month of that decision I'm already second-guessing myself. Why? Because it doesn't "just work". It's as though Microsoft's motto is "making simple things difficult, and hard things impossible".
Over the years I had very few problems with Hotsync. But in only a month, I'm now up to 4 different synchonized files folders on my desktop, having suffered two hard resets, and my ActiveStync 4.5 (latest version) says it's connecting to Device #5. We're on the 6th major version of the operating system and Microsoft still can't make an application that syncs my device to my desktop reliably?
Other elements of the OS are unbelievably kludgy. It's as though the engineers that designed it never actually eat their own dogfood. One simple example: At home I run a wireless network with fixed IP addresses. It took a lot of effort to figure out how to make my PPC-6700 connect to this network. And each time I venture out to an internet cafe where they have DHCP, I have to try to remember where exactly in the bowels of the OS have the IP settings been buried. Then the same thing again when I come home. Microsoft, steal a concept from Apple and introduce the concept of Locations!
At work I plug my PDA into a sync cable and ActiveSync springs to life. Then it insists on re-syncing every five minutes, all day long. Each time, it bogs down my PC (a 2.8 GHz P4) while it takes up to 10 minutes to sync. There's no way to stop this behaviour except by mucking around in the system registry. Even then it springs back into action like a zombie, and you can't close ActiveSync except by killling the WCESCOMM process in the Task Manager. And oh, you wanted to have internet pass-through from your desktop to your PDA so you can test out some websites on PIE? Good luck finding out what registry settings you have to change to make that work!
Now Microsoft says it knows what's wrong, and it will only take another two iterations of the OS to fix it all. The unmitigated gall! Even if they deliver an all-singing, all-dancing version of the OS in the very next iteration, it'll help few users, since many device manufacturers and many carriers choose to refuse to provide OS updates to their customers.
No wonder Apple has captured more market share in just six months than all of Microsoft's partners have in the past several years. And in that short time they've not only issued several updates, but offered them to every single owner of their iPhone product.
Come to think of it, the iPhone is the only PDA-like device I haven't tried yet. Maybe I should give that a shot next. Knowing Apple's reputation on the desktop, I have a good expectation that, finally, I may have a device that "just works".
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