Windows Phone Thoughts: The Way Phone Upgrades Should Be Done

"Never mind the cut and paste. Never mind the picture messaging, or all the other stuff that should have been in iPhone 1.0. Never mind the new payment methods that will shake up the mobile shopping marketplace. The most radical thing Apple said at the iPhone 3.0 software release was: "The upgrade will be available for free, this summer, to all iPhone owners." Why can't any other smart phone vendors do this?"

My fellow Mobius alumni Sascha Segan nails Microsoft and RIM to the wall in his article, and he's 100% right. There are many reasons why I prefer Windows Mobile to the iPhone, but I'll give credit where credit is due: Apple's ability to easily upgrade the phones of its users is exactly the way things should work, and it makes the rest of the industry, especially Microsoft, look ridiculous in comparison.

Everyone has been harping on Microsoft to improve this since the very first Pocket PC operating system patch came out. Even if you were lucky enough as a user to be "blessed" with the official operating system upgrade, or even an AKU (think service pack), it would wipe out your device, forcing you to re-configure everything from scratch. Compound that problem with the complete lack of intelligent sync of settings - things like pushing down email account settings from Outlook - and you'd end up with an upgraded phone that would take a good hour or more to get back up to functioning status.

That problem is one of the main reasons why I hardly use any third party applications on my devices any more - it's just too frustrating and time consuming to get it back to the way it was before the upgrade. I often use the example when talking to Windows Mobile team members of desktop Windows: "What would you think if, when a Windows Service Pack came out, you had to re-format your hard drive to install it?". No one ever had a good answer for me because that would be sheer insanity to require that in the desktop world - yet in the mobile world, Microsoft deems it perfectly acceptable.

The upgrade story, in this era of software-focused smartphones, is perhaps the single worst thing about Windows Mobile. There are signs on the horizon that this is going to change, but I've been fed the Microsoft party line of "We're working on that..." so many times I refuse to believe it's going to get any better until it actually happens.