Mike Temporale
08-02-2005, 08:15 PM
I've just returned from an extra long cottage weekend. (I left Friday morning, Monday was a holiday, and I woke up nice and early Tuesday and drove back home. :) ) This was my first trip up there this year, and I I was hoping that Fido's (http://www.fido.ca) new expanded network (thanks to the Rogers (http://www.rogers.ca) buy-out) would have made it possible for my cellphone to receive a little signal at the cottage, but it appears to fall short. In fact, it's 1.5 miles short to be precise. :cry: So, for most of the the time, my phone was left in Flight mode. Now, I've used Flight mode when I go to visit people at the hospital, during meetings, or when I don't want to be interrupted. However, I have never used it for an extended period of time - until now. All things considered, Flight mode worked great. It's the various applications I have installed that didn't do so well. My complaint is that a number of applications don't check the current status of the phone before trying to get a connection and update their info. Each time I would grab my phone to play a little SuDoKu, (http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8906) check my calendar, or what have you, I would have at least 2 and sometimes 3 error messages telling me that some application failed to find a connection and thus could not be updated. Well, of course it failed, I'm in flight mode - there is no radio! As such, I was forced to go into each app and reconfigure it to not fetch new information automatically. Otherwise I would have been pressing Ok over and over again all weekend long. Once I was back in the city, I had to go back into each application and turn it back on. What a pain. :x To me, and I assume many others, this is very annoying, shortsighted, and an all around poor design on the part of the developer. You can not just assume that now is a good time to preform your update. Check the status of the phone first. I'm sure it won't add too much overhead to the applications and it makes for a better user experience. ;) I hope we'll see something change in future applications.