I’ve found that’s a favourite message of the Sony Ericsson P990i that I now have. Sometimes it does it in the middle of the night, flooding our bedroom with light and playing a tune to celebrate. Sometimes it does it mid call. In any case, it’s really annoying and plainly complete nonsense. It’s exactly the sort of message that we developers like to put in somewhere to cover the bitter pile of failure with a sweet allure of it being for the users good, of failing that, someone else’s fault.

I also get a lot of kern exceptions and threads failing with other exceptions. How do I know? It pops up a nice little alert to tell me! I’ve had every single application built in to the phone (calls, messages, contacts, browser, wireless, connection manager, toolbar display come to mind) crash with some kind of error.

Lock ups and no-ops are common too. I spent a blissfully quiet afternoon last week with no incoming calls - because the radio side of the phone had crashed!

As for the user interface, well the Wait Cursor Fairy has not blessed it at all. In fact the Wait Cursor Fairy must have been on strike as most of the time there is no indication that the phone is doing anything, so you end up jabbing at it to see if it missed a click. Only to find that you’ve selected some random option as the application you requested several seconds ago has finally opened. Editing a contact, for example, takes about 2s to move to the edit screen, during which time the phone stares sullenly at you.
When it does work, however, it’s a really, really good device. Once they fix all the bugs it will be pretty much what I want.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.