I upgraded my Samsung Fascinate to the Android 2.2/”Froyo” release – and, as I kind of expected, trouble ensued. The fix was easy, but ultimately a serious pain. The “PC in your pocket” mentality is costing us time and money. Can the industry do better?
I was at Interop all last week; sorry about not writing, but it really was, as I expected, an 18-hours-a-day affair. Anyway, just before leaving for Las Vegas, my Samsung Fascinate (Verizon) notified me that, at long last, the Android 2.2 (Froyo) update was available, this after being in any-minute-now status since I purchased the handset last October. Anyway, I have a policy of making no configurational changes to critical systems while on the road (or about to depart for the road), so I did the update last Saturday morning. And, don’t you know it, the result on rebooting was an error box continually popping up despite being repeatedly dismissed notifying me that “Android.process.acore has stopped unexpectedly”. OK, I’ll admit it, prior to this, I didn’t know what Android.process.acore was, although subsequent research seems to indicate that it has something to do with syncing contacts and such. Anyway, the phone was useless at that point.
A little more research clearly indicated that the only fix was that Universal Elixir of the Android World, a factory reset. This is a simple enough process, except that one loses all settings, apps, local data, etc., as a consequence. Nonetheless, a quick conversation with a helpful rep at my local Verizon store indicated that such was my only option here. A few minutes later all was well, except having to reload everything, which I am in the process of doing now. No data was lost as I never keep critical data on a handset, this by both security policy and good practice.
Why good practice? Because it appears that Microsoft has dispatched programmers to help transfer all of the valuable techniques they’ve developed over the years, you know, with respect to usability, simplicity, and reliability, to mobile OS vendors like Android. As you know, I have serious reservations about turning the handset into a little PC. This is simply the wrong approach for mission-critical corporate/enterprise computing, and maybe for consumers as well, but let’s leave them out of it for the moment. As we discussed at Interop, the cloud is the place for enterprise IT, not local apps with local data on handsets. OK, a few limited local viewers and such make sense, and a hybrid cloud/local model will most certainly prevail, but turning the handset into a PC does not. After all, how much productivity have I lost on this one misadventure alone? And I wonder how much Verizon spends on fixing nonsense like this. Can’t we do better? And shouldn’t so doing be a major priority for handset vendors?
