Friday, March 3, 2006
Missing Parts and Bad Communication: The AKU 2 / A2DP Situation
Posted by Jon Westfall in "THOUGHT" @ 06:00 AM
About 3 weeks ago, a strange rumor came up while I was browsing happily away. The news, that I first saw on an HTC Wizard Blog came from this piece published by Pocketinfo.nl. The rumor I found so disturbing was that the upcoming ROM releases we had so anxiously been waiting for would be missing an important piece - the A2DP profile that many of us longed for. Sure, Push Email was still there (our main desire), but for those of us who have owned bluetooth stereo headsets for quite some time without support to pair them directly with our Pocket PCs, this was almost as anticipated as instant email. At the time, we (the editorial team) debated posting on it, but came to the consensus that it was a rumor we didn't put much faith in. After all, a leaked QTek ROM had already been released with A2DP, and A2DP was released by Microsoft in AKU 2 late last year. So we took a pass on it, however I vowed that if the ROM was missing parts, I would unleash a rant of biblical proportions onto our homepage. So here we go…
Releasing a ROM image without A2DP to a user community anxious to get that feature without communication regarding the delay and eventual release time-frame is in extremely poor taste on the part of the OEM. OEMs, by engaging in this activity, risk alienating power users, the very users that rush to buy each new release and actively support the devices in forums and application development.
So what should OEMs have done? Read on…
There were many factors contributing to the whole AKU 2 confusion and subsequent delays. Rumors of memory leaks, insufficient testing time, and other factors flew around the internet and still do concerning manufacturers that do not have a clear AKU 2 upgrade policy or statement. Let’s deal with a few issues:
1. OEMs maintain that AKU 2’s code ran poorly on their devices and required updating by Microsoft to fill memory leaks
If this is true, it wouldn’t surprise me. Microsoft probably does not have the time to thoroughly test code on every possible device with every OEM-specific piece of software. As we’ve seen, many OEMs prefer to bundle applications they license or create with their ROM images, and expecting Microsoft to have access to all of those pieces of software is unreasonable. However, in this circumstance, where power users were tipped off by Microsoft itself about the shipping of AKU 2 through Jason Langridge’s Weblog and the presence of at least one device we knew that AKU 2 was nearing release. If OEMs were concerned about the way their value-added software ran on an AKU 2 ROM, perhaps they should have asked themselves this question: Do our users want push email or do they want this application? . A quick look around the forums would have quickly answered it, and it would have confirmed that users were definitely interested moreso in Push Email than an antivirus client, and were almost just as interested in A2DP!
For what its worth, it has also been reported by many users of the leaked QTek ROM that their version of AKU 2, which includes A2DP, is not any buggier than any other ROM image – in fact, some report it to be more stable and efficient. While using leaked images is never a good idea in a production environment (not to mention that it is illegal), it does make us wonder: how much of a memory leak is there if power users using this software since early February aren’t noticing it – Wouldn’t they be the first to find the leaks due to their nature?
2. A2DP wasn’t ready yet – it was still too buggy to be used .
I get this argument – it makes good business sense to leave out pieces you are not confident in. The last thing OEMs want is to answer tech support emails / calls / posts regarding a feature they themselves don’t believe was ready for release. However, when dealing with power users, I believe there can be a best of both worlds: Simply disable the feature and let them enable it at their own risk. If OEMs would trust that their power users are smart enough about their devices to understand the concept of ‘beta’ software, they could even utilize that base of customers for testing purposes. While the power users of normal cell phones might not be interested in playing around with ‘nearly-ready’ features, we can easily infer that power users of Pocket PCs are. After all, this group is made up of dedicated hackers (used in the positive sense of the word) that try to get the most out of a device – not a bunch of kids eager to get new ringtones or MMS message junkies. If OEMs had allowed us to play with A2DP through a quick tweak or hidden setting, we could give feedback and real-world usage reports. By taking it out completely, they make more work for themselves in testing, and give us more delays.
Releasing a ROM image without A2DP to a user community anxious to get that feature without communication regarding the delay and eventual release time-frame is in extremely poor taste on the part of the OEM. OEMs, by engaging in this activity, risk alienating power users, the very users that rush to buy each new release and actively support the devices in forums and application development.
So what should OEMs have done? Read on…
There were many factors contributing to the whole AKU 2 confusion and subsequent delays. Rumors of memory leaks, insufficient testing time, and other factors flew around the internet and still do concerning manufacturers that do not have a clear AKU 2 upgrade policy or statement. Let’s deal with a few issues:
1. OEMs maintain that AKU 2’s code ran poorly on their devices and required updating by Microsoft to fill memory leaks
If this is true, it wouldn’t surprise me. Microsoft probably does not have the time to thoroughly test code on every possible device with every OEM-specific piece of software. As we’ve seen, many OEMs prefer to bundle applications they license or create with their ROM images, and expecting Microsoft to have access to all of those pieces of software is unreasonable. However, in this circumstance, where power users were tipped off by Microsoft itself about the shipping of AKU 2 through Jason Langridge’s Weblog and the presence of at least one device we knew that AKU 2 was nearing release. If OEMs were concerned about the way their value-added software ran on an AKU 2 ROM, perhaps they should have asked themselves this question: Do our users want push email or do they want this application? . A quick look around the forums would have quickly answered it, and it would have confirmed that users were definitely interested moreso in Push Email than an antivirus client, and were almost just as interested in A2DP!
For what its worth, it has also been reported by many users of the leaked QTek ROM that their version of AKU 2, which includes A2DP, is not any buggier than any other ROM image – in fact, some report it to be more stable and efficient. While using leaked images is never a good idea in a production environment (not to mention that it is illegal), it does make us wonder: how much of a memory leak is there if power users using this software since early February aren’t noticing it – Wouldn’t they be the first to find the leaks due to their nature?
2. A2DP wasn’t ready yet – it was still too buggy to be used .
I get this argument – it makes good business sense to leave out pieces you are not confident in. The last thing OEMs want is to answer tech support emails / calls / posts regarding a feature they themselves don’t believe was ready for release. However, when dealing with power users, I believe there can be a best of both worlds: Simply disable the feature and let them enable it at their own risk. If OEMs would trust that their power users are smart enough about their devices to understand the concept of ‘beta’ software, they could even utilize that base of customers for testing purposes. While the power users of normal cell phones might not be interested in playing around with ‘nearly-ready’ features, we can easily infer that power users of Pocket PCs are. After all, this group is made up of dedicated hackers (used in the positive sense of the word) that try to get the most out of a device – not a bunch of kids eager to get new ringtones or MMS message junkies. If OEMs had allowed us to play with A2DP through a quick tweak or hidden setting, we could give feedback and real-world usage reports. By taking it out completely, they make more work for themselves in testing, and give us more delays.
