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.

Personal Rants, Tech

Dear Sir or Madam,

As your own advertising has been only too keen to point out, the iPhone 3G is one of the most significant new devices O2 has launched in years. After slow initial sales of the original iPhone, the price cut and sales boost have built huge pent-up demand for the 3G model. You were clearly aware of the scale of this demand, as you put in place a pre-registration process for potential customers to be alerted by SMS when preorders became available. Indeed, that SMS said “Demand will be very high, so it’s first come first served”.

It is therefore with astonishment and disappointment that I am forced to contact you to register my disgust at how incredibly badly O2, as an organization, has bungled your customer services during this highest of high profile launches.

I switched to O2’s SIM-only contract nearly six months ago with the intention of upgrading to the iPhone 3G when it was released. I registered my interest on the O2 website within hours of the product announcement. I was on the website and attempting to preorder my handset within an hour of receiving the SMS advertising that sales had begun. Unfortunately, as my purchase was an upgrade of an existing account, I was forced to use the upgrade website and not the one for new customers. I have read that the website for new customers remained operational, as did Carphone Warehouse’s website. Sadly the upgrade website did not fare so well.

From 9am to 4pm I made dozens of repeated attempts to fill in my details on the site. I was repeatedly presented with errors as your servers were clearly incapable of dealing with the load they were placed under. This was O2’s first failing: you clearly had an idea of user numbers, as you sent each potential user of the site an SMS, and yet you still failed to ensure there was enough capacity in the servers. In the past I have performed scalability analysis for such high profile ecommerce websites as ThomasCook.com; I know full well that designed scalable websites is not a black art. If a website I had specified had performed as badly on launch day as yours did, I would have resigned immediately.

Eventually, at around 3pm, I managed to make the website direct me to https://upgrades.o2.co.uk/failover/ok.html, a page which told me that my order had been received and that if there were any problems with my details I would be contacted. Shortly afterwards the website changed to a “no stock” notification. However, I had no confirmation number of any kind, no delivery date, and even after several hours I had not received an email from the site. Suspicious, I contacted your customer service department on 0870 600 3009.

After requesting my call be escalated to a manager, as first line support seemed to have no information at all, I was informed that you had actually sold out of all the iPhone 3G stock at around 11am so there was no way that I could have a valid order. It seems that the website continued to give out seemingly valid orders for many hours after stock had actually run out; it also seems you have only secured a laughably small stock allocation. This problem was very widespread; the manager I spoke to in your call centre said she had dealt with 41 phone calls in the last hour from people in the same position as I am. As far as I can see, your failover cluster did not have any sort of online stock level fulfillment against the main live server, and hence had no ability to know it was double selling stock. Meanwhile anyone who wasn’t an existing O2 customer was able to buy up that small amount of stock from the “new customers” website without any technical problems. Essentially I was at a disadvantage because of my customer loyalty; surely this is not good business?

The final customer service blunder came when I asked the manager in the call centre to try and confirm my order details, just in case my order had slipped through. She informed me that your call centre staff could not see details of the iPhone orders placed on your web site, and that the only way for me to check was to see if the money had been taken from my bank. How were these staff supposed to do their jobs and support online sales without any access to the information coming from the website? It frankly baffles me how poorly thought out this entire process seems to be.

The iPhone 3G launch should have been a high point in O2’s financial year, and it was certainly a device I was greatly looking forward to owning. Instead I have wasted hours of my life today battling your poorly designed systems in a futile attempt to persuade you to take sell me an expensive 3G device — on top of a report in this month’s PC Pro magazine that, in addition to having the worst 3G coverage of any UK network, O2 also has the worst 3G network speeds.

Sadly, I now feel like a complete idiot. I would invite O2 to please give me some explanations for what went wrong today and a reason why I should not simply request my PAC at once and migrate to T-Mobile, whose mobile data service and customer services departments are more than an afterthought.

Yours faithfully,

Richard Gaywood

Edit update 2008-07-08: I have now had a reply from O2.

Personal iPhone, Rants, Tech

John Gruber writes:

…the more I think about it, the more baffled I am that Narayen said anything specific at all. Talking about technical progress only serves to focus attention on the fact that it is Apple’s decision, and by all appearances, Apple does not want Flash on the iPhone.

He then goes on to list some reasons this can’t happen, including technical (Apple don’t want inline media in the browser for performance reasons), legal (the iPhone SDK specifically does not allow any VM type environments, which certainly disbars both Flash and Java), and commercial (Apple are quite enjoying their control of the iPhone environment and would really like to not give a chunk of it to Adobe). Clearly Apple are quite serious about this, as they went to some efforts to write a special YouTube application, including a bunch of stuff on the YouTube server end like different codecs and whatnot, entirely so they could do YouTube without doing Flash.

That said, I don’t think it’s very hard to decode what Abode are doing here. The legal problems Apple could resolve if it chose to do so by simply giving Adobe a special licence. And although the iPhone is very slow by modern computer standards, Mr Gruber himself claims that it’s is roughly on a footing with the original “Pismo” G3 Powerbook. I’m pretty sure I’d used some Flash apps on machines of that era and that they worked, perhaps not well. So I don’t think the technical argument is unsolvable.

No, the real reason Apple don’t want Adobe — or anyone else — to port Flash or Java or any of those things to the iPhone is simply control. Apple want to control what can run on the iPhone so they can sell more apps through the iTunes App Store, which is a reasonable enough thing for a commercial software/hardware vendor to want to do. There isn’t much Adobe can do to change this… except to attempt to strong-arm Apple by going directly to the iPhone users, all wounded and bruised and sincere, and saying “well, gee, guys, we wrote this real pretty Flash thing for the iPhone and all and we’d just love to give it to you for free but them nasty types at Apple just won’t let us! We know! Why don’t you just go call them and let them know what you think of that?” They are gambling that enough people want Flash on the iPhone badly enough that they’ll pressurise Apple. I wouldn’t like to call whether or not this will work — ask me in a month when I have my iPhone and can tell you if I find the lack of Flash annoying or not — but I’m sure this is what they are up to.

So I think what Adobe is up to is pretty easy to understand, and I find it vaguely odd that Mr Gruber, who is normally so goddamned sharp, finds this so mystifying.

Personal iPhone, Tech

Hmmm, interesting. Writeup on Engadget here if you’ve missed the highlights. Some thoughts:

• No word yet on UK pricing, although Apple claim it will be “the equivalent” of $199 around the world ($299 for the 16Gb model) — representing a 50% price cut over the outgoing 2G models. The BBC claim that is £100 but if it sells here for £100, with the UK’s high import taxes and VAT, I’ll be exceedingly shocked. O2’s site just says “come back tomorrow”. Teasers.
• Also about pricing, it sounds like Apple are abandoning the business model they used with the iPhone 2G, where there were no operator subsidies on the hardware and you could walk out of the shop without a contract. Engadget notes “both pricepoints require a contract”.
• I’m very surprised that it didn’t get a capacity bump to 16Gb/32Gb but in light of the vastly reduced RRP this is likely a cost-cutting measure. It has been suggested to me that we may see a capacity bump in the usual late autumn iPod update window — that seems possible.
• The battery life getting longer is a welcome boost and not one I saw coming. Having gotten used to charging my current phone, a 3G HTC TyTN running Windows Mobile, every single day, the iPhone 3G’s 5 hours of talk and 300 hours standby sound like a very nice upgrade.
• The unnamed GPS manufacturer who said he was “shitting himself” about a GPS iPhone needs some new trousers — unless he works at TomTom, who are not taking this sitting down. Apple not supplying their own turn-by-turn navigation solution creates a good opportunity for these guys.
• Man, the iPod Touch is a terrible deal now! No wonder they are giving them away.
• Vaguely disappointed by the things they didn’t fix — no MMS still, no copy&paste (that anyone has found yet). Apparantly it can bulk delete SMSs now though.

Overall? I’ll see you in an O2 shop on July 11th! If hackers break it all the better — but if not, I’m out of contract and on an O2 SIM-only tariff anyway, so upgrading to the proper iPhone tariff isn’t a great hardship. At least then I’ll get that hella nifty visual voicemail.

Personal iPhone, Tech