Windows Phone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

Remember my little rant a few weeks ago? Well, if you know anyone on the Google side (Android), you can tell them that the lamentations they've been emitting can now be silenced. Google fixed the Marking Items Read issue. They write:

For those of you with Android phones, we've also fixed a particularly annoying bug that led to items not being marked as read correctly.

So that's nice, they fixed a problem and even blogged about it to let us know. This little blog post, though, did more than inform me about a bug fix - it further annoyed me at the current state of Windows Mobile. My gripe today boils down to one thing: speed. Not speed of the operating system, but speed of the platform development. Using release dates from Wikipedia, I did a little calculation. It's about 484 days on average between Windows Mobile releases. While this was plenty fast in the Pocket PC days, it seems painfully slow when you consider Apple keeps a roughly 365 day interval between releases of iPhone major OS versions. 4 months longer adds up over time!

There are many reasons MS can't release these things faster (feel free to discuss them below) but the point of this post isn't to ask why - it's simply to point out that people WANT their gadgets updated faster. They like new features, new looks, and new uses. I've been saying for awhile now that Microsoft needed the next version of Windows Mobile available yesterday - and now more than ever that seems true. For what it's worth, I wouldn't be so annoyed over this if I didn't feel that the glory days of Windows Mobile are ahead, not behind. I just think they need to get here a lot quicker than they seem to be arriving. Come on guys, if 100 reasons are keeping this a slow process, find 100 solutions to them, step up, and COMPETE!

Maybe it's because I am a geek that I just accept that things I want to work will not always do so. Maybe it's because I'm forgiving of this that I don't often rant about it. But here is one issue that I need to bring up to highlight why companies aren't flocking away from Windows Mobile to a platform such as Android.

One thing I really liked about my G1 when I got it was the fact I could use Google Reader to catch up on my headlines while on the go. The Webkit browser seemed to work much better than any other mobile browser I'd used, and I was happy with it. But recently, I've found that when I hit "Mark these items as read", they don't get marked. They just reload again when pulling the next 15 items (Which are just the same 15 items I've seen before). I thought this may just be me, until I found others reporting the same problem. Apparently big G changed something around mid-March that broke the web interface "mark all these items as read" button. The best I can tell, this issue has been around now for about 1 1/2 months, and Google's only response has been "We're working on it".

So a Google-driven OS is having problems with a Google product and the best users get is "We're working on it..." and effectively a mobile outage of what some would consider a mission critical application. This doesn't bode well for Google, cloud computing, or Android. And it's one reason people stay with Windows Mobile.

WinMo may not be the prettiest, but I'm having a really hard time remembering the last time it didn't work with a critical MS application because MS changed the application, but left the mobile users stranded.