Two weeks down and I’m still happy with my new toy, but for two things. One in particular is shocking – alarms. How, when Windows Mobile has been around for years and is the OS of choice for a significant proportion of PDAs, can alarms not always work? It’s appalling, it really is. It turns out that if you set an alarm (say, to wake you up for that inconvenience known as work) and you turn the device into standby (shock, horror!) after clicking the various okay dialogues then your alarm may not actually be recorded. No, you must leave the device to go into standby of it’s own accord, and then it’ll probably work.
So yes, a PDA with dodgy alarms. Ouch. I thought I was going mad until I found all the other people running into the same problem.
My other bitch is Outlook Mobile. Two major reasons: firstly, the error messages are bollocks and misleading; secondly, it deletes my messages without warning. Oh, and it has no junk mail support and configuration options (such as port numbers) are AWOL.
Example the first: I had an e-mail to send. Wrote it up, sent it, error message pops up: “Mail could not be downloaded. Please check your settings.” The message is of no use and relates to the wrong action. Horrid. And as my settings look fine, how am I to know just what’s wrong?
Example the second: I had a couple of e-mails I had retrieved the bodies for earlier. I (heaven forbid) checked for new e-mail. The previously retrieved e-mails disappeared. Again, I thought I was cracking up until I managed to repeat this later. Again, horrid. Had those e-mails not been a forwarded copy I’d now be rather deep in the excrement.
So summary: hardware is great, love it to pieces. Software is disappointingly buggy, especially given its age and reputed maturity. But at least I now know just how Palm OS Garnet manages to compete in a market of much more sophisticated offerings – all it required was reliable alarms.
