The Rough Edges
Not been posting since Barcelona, as you’ll have seen, due to pressure of projects. I have the good luck to be generally pushing at the rough edges of device capability. We were doing that back in 2004 with just getting fast updates of complex data working reliably. Now it’s a different set of features, but just as flaky. I’ve not seen so many device resets, blank screens and generally weirdness in a long time.
I’m always in two minds about why app environments handsets are so unreliable. The first is sloppy QA to get devices out to market quickly, but that would suggest that there was ever a plan to test and fix the edges of capabilities. The second view is simply that advanced application development has still to make it into the conciousness of manufacturers and marketers. Essentially coming from the hardware end of the business, they tend to regard software with suspicion if they think about it at all.

