tl;dr

I despair at Windows Mobile, I really do. Here’s just the latest in a two year series of issues, hiccups, problems, and bloopers.

I was planning on buying an iPhone on Friday (I say was…) and so I turned my attention to getting my contact and calendar data off my current HTC TyTN (running Windows Mobile 6.0) and into Outlook. From there, I can sync them through iTunes directly onto the new iPhone, saving me retyping all those hundreds of phone numbers, addresses, etc. Good times.

Now, this phone has been around a bit so it already has two sync partnerships on it; one with my workstation in my last job and one on an older personal laptop I don’t use any more. I want to sync it now with my new work laptop, which is also my primary personal machine. Naively, I plug it in, and to be fair it quite happily connects, runs off to Windows Update, refreshes the HTC_USB driver, installs Windows Sync Centre Doodad, and offers to create a partnership. So far so good — this is somewhat slicker on this Vista machine than it was on the previous XP machines. And then It Happened.

It was a really innocuous dialog that I really wish I’d taken a screenshot of that looked not entirely like this:

Sadly, I didn’t screenshot the actual screen I saw. It was quite similar to this one but instead of showing me the partnership from my laptop to the TyTN — the one I made earlier — it was showing me the two partnerships my TyTN was already engaged in when I started today — one with my old workstation and one with my old laptop. Clearly my phone is a sync slut.

Now, it turns out Activesync only supports two partnerships in total so the dialog I saw earlier didn’t quite look like that one above. It said “I only support two partnerships at once. Please delete one of these two” and then it listed “timora” and “Windows PC 2″ (I love that second name). Knowing full well I don’t have access to either of these machines again, I just clicked on one, then the other, selecting a nicely drawn Vista-ised bubble button down at the bottom that said simply “Remove Partnership”.

One of these — I forget which — took a long time to respond. That should have set alarm bells off but I was multitasking too much and didn’t see what was going on. Perhaps you, dear reader, are more alert than I and have guessed where this story is leading.

Anyway, on with it. I created my new partnership, synced across, and opened Outlook to find… no contacts. Eh? Closed and opened it again, no contacts. Disconnected and reconnected advice, watched Sync Centre go from “Disconnected” to “Syncing” to “Done”, no contacts. Rebooted laptop, reconnected device again, confirmed the sync partnership definitely covered contacts, opened Outlook, no contacts.

Opened Pocket Outlook on the device. No contacts.

Gngh.

It seems that when a Windows Mobile device acquires a contact record over a sync, the record is tagged where it came from. And when you delete the sync partnership? Boom, record gone. With no warning that this seemingly disconnected event at the other end of the GUI will be deleting the most valuable data your device has.

Stupid old me only had a six-month-old backup too (after all, Activesyncing is supposed to be your backup isn’t it…). On the good news side, my contacts data is pretty static so I won’t have lost much. On the bad news side, I’m sure I’ve lost at least one or two new phone numbers or birthdays that’ll cause me annoyance down the road.

More seriously, the backup was taken after the last time Activesync freaked out and duplicated all my contacts but before I went through and deleted the three hundred of so duplicate entries. So I have to do that again. I suspect some sort of VBA into Outlook is the answer here. (Aside: I had Palm PDAs for three years, and moved around between three models, and it never ever mismanaged a sync).

My central point remains, however, that a user interface capable of deleting your most central and valuable data whilst doing something that, on the face of it, is entirely unrelated to that data and doesn’t see fit to even warn you is just plain dumb. Go away please Windows Mobile.

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