Two more things that annoy the heck outta me about my Crapjack that I forgot to put in previous entries:
The first item is general flakyness of the device itself. When I delete meetings in Outlook, sometimes they don’t get deleted on the phone. The end result is that my phone beeps/alerts me for a meeting that no longer exists. I haven’t been able to figure out the pattern of when the phone doesn’t delete an item; it’s nothing obvious like deleting an appointment within (poll_refresh_time) minutes of the appointment occurring, etc.
For the second item, I have long since acknolwedged that I have zero short term memory. As such, I accept electronic help for this: I live and die by my Exchange to-do items. I’ll file to-do items for things I need to do tomorrow. I’ll file recurring to-do items for things I need to do every week. I’ll file to-do items for things months in advance. Because these items have such a huge impact on my life:
- I love that they’re available on my computer and on my phone.
- I hate that Entourage doesn’t support them (gaaahh!!); I have to use Outlook (via Parallels) to see them.
I have discovered (painfully) that if I mark a recurring to-do item complete on the Crapjack, it cancels the whole series, not just the one item that was due today. I usually don’t notice this until (T+someone_else_noticing) after the next time I’m supposed to have done the item. For example, I mark “reserve more OFED teleconference bridges” done on my phone. Two weeks+2 hours later, I get an angry email, “What’s the OFED teleconference dialin information? Did you forget to schedule them?” Gaaaahhhh!!
Granted, both of these problems are likely really the fault of Good Messaging (the Exchange software that runs on the the device), not the Crapjack itself. But I’m taking a staunch user-based stance here: I don’t care exactly what it is in the platform that is broken, the overall product causes me pain and suffering when it is supposed to be a labor-saving device. Granted, no device is perfect, but this device is [significantly] more broken than not — its quirks and annoyances are significantly highlighted and painful because other devices have significantly fewer quirks and annoyances and do the same job much better.
I wish I knew when in February I was going to get the green light to refresh my phone; all I know is that it is sometime in February.
T-[16,44] days…