Today was fun. Really! No kidding ...
My XDA's radio stack corrupted again. For the nth time. That might be okay, except it happened well away from my PC or a handy SD card, and as a result I couldn't back up my data. As per previous iterations of this problem, the PDA functionality still worked (considerably slower), but the only way to rectify the radio stack is a hard reset. Inexplicably, the device performed its own hard reset within a couple of hours of the radio stack corruption, wiping all data that I hadn't previously synchronised to my PC.
It's just lucky that this amounted to just a couple of appointments and my last few Vehicle Manager entries for mileage and fuel. These can reasonably easily be extrapolated from other sources (such as receipts and emails), but it could have been much, much worse given that I can sometimes enter many mileage entries and appointments within a single day.
This, on top of my XDA inexplicably turning itself off periodically over the last few weeks, has really brought home to me just how important a reliable device is.
Those who are familiar with my XDA problems from previous articles will know that I'm running the Windows Mobile 2003 v4.00.11 and the latest Radio Stack in an attempt to rectify these problems. In other words, this problem existed even before I started using the "unofficial" Windows Mobile 2003 ROMs generated by the XDA-Developers.COM "ROM Kitchen". This is a device with serious problems that no firmware update has yet fixed (it happened before I even patched the ROM ...). Up until now, I thought this combination really was working without a problem, and I was willing to put the power off issue down to my failure to charge the XDA regularly...
This time around, I don't know if I'll go to all the effort to synchronise my device and install all the software again. I was already thinking of selling it to cover the cost of the XDA II, and so long as the buyer is aware of the problems and is prepared for the occasional hiccup (which perhaps will be resolved someday), I have no ethical problem with this.
Given that the radio stack is the main problem, and the QTek 7070 has so far had no issues whatsoever (even after the patch to a different ROM version), I'm reasonably confident that this part of the XDA issues will be resolved in the new XDA II (since it's reasonable to infer from the QTek 7070 that HTC have learnt more about radio stacks since the XDA). Nonetheless, all my other problems have been brought to mind, and I'll be examining the XDA II for these problems quite early on (so far as is possible).
The advantage of having these problems and running a website like MTekk means that I can get the message out to people. We've been a little slack on our "XDA and QTek 7070" page (recently renamed to "Microsoft PDA Phones"), and it seems that this is a frequently read page. I'm going to rework the page so that it's categorised in a way similar to the "Editorials", "Reviews", "MTekk Technotes", and "MTekk Buglog", except that it will be categorised by device instead of month. I will also set it so that you can search our site via for pages related to each device.
Hopefully this will help in making it easier to find content on these devices on our site, and in this way we can ensure that we let people know of the problems before purchase (or if not, then to at least let them know that they aren't alone).
Stay tuned ... If all goes well, Tuesday is the day that we really start looking at the XDA II and XPhone. Now that my XDA's radio stack has corrupted, I'm eager to make this the last time, and (hopefully) start using a device that really is reliable!