GearWERKZ TechBlog

Last night I posted a link to a PC Magazine article by Lance Ulanoff which I suggested I did not agree with, but thought was good food for thought. And then I read the article a second time and picked apart some more granular details. And I was wrong. This is not good commentary. Let me say why.

Follow up:

First, the writer admits that his time spent in the Windows Mobile OS prior to his most recent experience has been limited. You guys have heard me say it over and over again. The value you get out of a review from a person who has spent a week with a device is exactly that...a one week review. When you buy a device, you are going to be in it for months. People think that it is easier for computer geeks and the media to formulate an opinion about a device quicker. However, there is a negative effect from that as well and it should be weighed when reading someone else's review. Because we go through so many devices so quickly, and are very in tune with what we like and don;t like, we rapidly acclimate to the devices that we take a personal shine to, and quickly place anything that we do not take an immediate liking to in the proverbial corner.

This is one of the reasons why I try to post my initial impressions of a device, a one or two month revisit, a mid-cycle assessment, and a long-term report. In fact, I basically never stop reporting on my evaluation of a device as long as I continue to use it. It is a device's performance over its life-cycle that determines its value.

I can only believe that the writer's depth of experience with smartphones is limited by some factor. Yes, I see the beach-ball on my WinMo phone periodically, but not every time, and I have never seen the beach-ball take so long that an alert popped up indicating that the phone was seeking more resources. This is clearly an instance event of a poorly configured phone, or a problem specific to the Samsung Saga.

And in my experience, every smartphone freezes or crashes from time to time. My company Blackberry froze and crashed so frequently that I went back to my using my personal cell for work; and it's a WinMo phone. And by the way, The iPhone does not give you a beach ball when it is having issues; it just freezes and the screen goes unresponsive.

His slander of Windows Mobile being responsible for the Saga's poor battery life has some truth to it, but it is a prevalent problem amongst all smartphones. In my experience, only Blackberry's have battery lives that resemble consumer-level phones. The iPhone (at least the first generation version) and the Pre all suffer from what I would typify as poor battery life. And the Pre also leaves every app running unless you close it, and will suck even more battery if left in this condition. Granted, the Pre's method of closing an app (the upward swipe) is more intuitive. And I consider the fact that the iPhone closes every app when you navigate away from tghat app's screen one of its chief weaknesses.

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