here.
I had a couple from a Q&A and signing of Quicksilver [wiki] he did tonight in London. I had a sound file of him answering a question I asked of him regarding “In the beginning was the command line”. I captured both the images and the sound on my phone.
Which has now just reformatted itself.
No-one reading this really needs a newsflash along the lines of “gosh, phones are complicated these days”, but still it seems unacceptable that your phone can crash. That your phone can wipe itself.
We are more forgiving of our PCs, as, while the data they hold or the tasks they enable may be crucial – in general they inhabit a far less intimate and personal place in our lives.
As our phones become not only repositories of contact details, but of images, sounds and memories (of, oh, meeting a favourite author perhaps); that position will only consolidate. And increase the burden of reliability placed upon them in turn.
That reliability need not just be measured in uptime or how robust the hardware is; it could be something as simple as improving the interface design around tasks such as capturing media. To not only ease the process of capture, but also ensure the safety of ones memories. Digital camera interfaces, while imperfect in many ways make sure that even novices know how many pictures can safely still be captured at any point on the device’s memory.
My P800 does not do even this*. Had it alerted me, I maybe would have deleted some drunken pictures of my mate’s shoes to capture a picture of one of my literary heroes. Now I have lost the lot. Drunken shoes, hero-author and pictures of where I proposed.
The irony of all this of course is my question to Stephenson was about the Eloi and the Morlocks as referenced in his “In the beginning was the command line” essay, and whether he thought the situation for the technologically-baffled Eloi of this world was worsening.
His answer was: yes, it’s getting worse.
This Eloi can only nod his head in between banging it on the keyboard.
##THUD##
OFVJAB
##THUD##
AVFQIW
##THUD##
ITHGTOU
Damn.
Petafloptimism 
Agree totally. If the P800 gets near capacity, it will sometimes ask you if you will let it clear some stuff out, otherwise, it will crash, and not turn on again until you leave it off for a few hours. And then it will reformat the phone.
I know one person for whom the backup software just deleted everything off their memory stick. And pretty much all sync software may either duplicate or (worse) delete contacts.
Now is the time to act. Do we choose to allow phones to act as haphazard mobile computers, or grow into something more robust? I of course cannot advise you to harass your network operator, but you should definitely moan at the handset manufacturer. If you just accept such things, they won’t be seen as problems.
More technology isn’t always the answer (tho’ network based backup will help).
Anyway, you’ll soon be stuck with a Nokia 😉 Showing some of their researchers a P800 was funny – they couldn’t believe, for example, that you could hotswap memory sticks. Hence MMCs and game carts stuck underneath the battery.
Similarly don’t even think about letting a Nokia 7650 get close to running out of memory, even if you have the firmware that says claims to have fixed this.
When mine died the time before last from this problem I happened to be drinking whisky in Helsinki with a load of people from Nokia R&D (sadly I can’t provide photographic evidence for obvious reasons). Unfortunately the best they could offer was “well, it’s a beta ‘phone”. Although it painfully clearly was a beta ‘phone to anyone technically savvy, that certainly wasn’t the claim attached to the 400 quid price tag when it launched and neither is it the claim that’s still attached to it when you find the same version of the firmware in the shops now.
It shows a deep lack of respect for customers to acknowledge this privately within the organisation yet not label your products as early access or beta. That’s always been the mindset in the computer software industry, but until recently this hasn’t been tolerated in mobile devices in the same way that it’s not tolerated in cash point machines, television remote controls, train timetable displays, digital watches, and everything else that whilst really being a computer running software manages to hide itself away so that the user isn’t consciously aware that they’re talking to a computer.
Testing should not be an optional extra. I know there are scale of complexity issues here, but surely this is a significant part of the problem for Elois and a solid reason why they often steer clear of using things that look like computers.
i told you to get nokia… 🙂
or at least wait for the p900
Mobile complexity strikes again
Ah, Matt texted me from Borders, just before this happened. Had I gone, I may have been able to provide a backup. Sigh. Sympathies. This is exactly what I was talking about in terms of my phone behaving like a