December 3rd, 2007

Kodak responds to commentary on outrageous 4 cent per photo shipping charge

Posted by David Berlind @ 9:26 am

Categories: Entertainment, General, Personal Technology, Technology Shakedown, Web technology

Tags: Coupon, Eastman Kodak Co., Photograph, David Berlind

Last Monday, I did one of my video Tech Shakedowns of Kodak’s online Photo Gallery for what I thought to be outrageous shipping charges for 4×6 prints (a flat rate of 4 cents per photo) as well as a poor user experience (a free shipping option is available on a one-time per customer basis for orders of certain sizes, but only if you know a coupon exists and manually redeem it).

Kodak spokesperson Liz Scanlon has responded to that post. As a sidenote, prior to last week’s shakedown, I reached-out to the same public relations person that handled my previous shakedown of Kodak’s Web site but never heard back. Via e-mail, Scanlon wrote:

Hi David,

I’m writing about your recent blog post about Kodak Gallery. We value every customer’s feedback and always want to hear about how we can make the user experience better, so thanks for the input.

The average order size for hardcopy prints is typically much smaller than 2,055, so this is not a common problem we have addressed before. We are evaluating how shipping charges are calculated in high-volume situations and are determining how we can make that better for our users.

One option available today is to select in-store pick-up through one of our retail partners such as CVS, Ritz Camera or Target. This would greatly reduce the shipping and handling fee. Check out a complete list of our retail partners on www.KodakGallery.com.

We always notify our opted in members about shipping and merchandise coupon codes via email. We also post those special offer codes on the site so that our 60 million members who are not opted in can also see them. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to automatically apply shipping and merchandise discount codes in the shopping cart, but it’s something we are looking at fixing.

We have corrected the compatibility issue with Vista and members should have a seamless user experience.

Please let us know if you have any further questions about Kodak Gallery. I’ll be sure to update you when we make adjustments to our shopping cart.

Best,

Liz Scanlon
Kodak Gallery

I’m glad Kodak finally responded. However, I don’t know that I’m fully satisfied with the response. I replied to Scanlon with some of my thoughts. Here are the bullet points:

• Typical orders don’t involve 2055 prints - That really doesn’t address the 4 cent shipping fee per 4×6 print. Yes, I agree: 2055 prints is an extraordinary number of photos to order for delivery. And, no doubt, up to a certain number of prints (perhaps a small handful), 4 cents per photo probably makes sense. But that break-even point is nowhere near 2055. To be sure that I wasn’t crazy, I did an analysis that, admittedly, is a bit unscientific. But I think it’s relevant. I called Staples and asked how much their largest package of 4×6 photo paper weighed. Answer? A 100 sheet package weights 1.15 pounds. An extrapolation of that weight for 2055 photos comes to 20.55 pounds. Assuming some extra weight is involved for a box, I then went to four shippers (US Postal Service, UPS, FedEx, and DHL) to find out how much it costs to send a 25 lb. box across the country. My assumption was that a 12 inch x 12 inch x 12 inch box could do the trick. For the same 3-10 business day shipping period that Kodak charges $83.55 for, the USPS charges $27.11 (or $38.15 for two-day delivery), FedEx charges $26.12, UPS charges $30.21, and DHL charges $23.02. Conservatively thinking, taking the most expensive of the bunch (UPS), $30.21 would get you 755 photos at Kodak’s 4 cent per photo charge. That’s not a break-even point, but it gives you some idea of how many more pictures (1300 to be exact) Kodak could ship at no additional cost for the same price as it’s charging for 755 photos. Going back to Scanlon’s comment about how Kodak is evaluating shipping charges in high volume situations, my question is how come no one ever thought of this before? Especially given that someone inside the company knows what the cost of shipping photos really is.
• In store pickup I agree that this is a good option for people who want to save on shipping charges. But not only does it fly in the face of the benefits of “shopping” online, it’s also an option that doesn’t work in certain situations. For example, when you’re shipping photos to someone else. Can you imagine the conversation now? “Hi Susan. I got something for you as surprise. But to get it, you need to drive down to your local drugstore to pick it up.” It sort of kills the element of giving and surprise. So, while I agree this is a good option in some cases, it still doesn’t make me feel better about the outrageous profit that Kodak is generating off of shipping.
• Opt-in notifications and Web site coupon redemption Here, Scanlon is addressing my comment that people may not know about the free shipping option. I’m not sure when the notification was sent. But I’ll bet a lot of those “notifications” are in the same place that I put a lot of the notifications my wife gets from the merchants she does business with: the Trash folder. Me? I opt out from that stuff anyway. At first I don’t. I want to see if the merchants I’m doing business with have some killer deals or it’s just standard fare. Most of the time, it’s nothing killer so I eventually end-up opting-out to keep my inbox clear. Additionally, forgetting for a minute that if any site (Kodak or otherwise) is going to offer free shipping for certain orders that the free shipping should be applied automatically (after all, the entire point of automation is to take the friction out, not unnecessarily put it back in), the idea that it’s coupon based makes you feel as though the offer is only available at certain times. Sure enough, based on several visits to Kodak’s site, there are times when you may not even know that the coupon is available because of how the only place it turns up is on a special offer page that customers must deliberately visit. In other words, in some of my test visits, the coupon never once turned up in the course of normal site usage (up to and including ordering prints for shipping). Scanlon’s response also doesn’t address the restriction on Kodak’s site that the coupon can only be used once per customers. That stinks too.

I’m glad that Kodak addressed the Vista issue that I originally reported in one of my earlier Tech Shakedowns. I haven’t tested it yet. If and when I do, I’ll report my findings here.

In the meantime, one of the bigger issues here has to do with what happens after you load thousands of photos into some online photo site like Kodak’s. At some point, they really have you by the you-know-what because, if you ever become dissatisfied with the service (either by way of functionality or price), the pain of moving those photos to another service is often too painful. So you end up putting up with it.

Perhaps that’s a great business idea. Start-up an online Web site that’s the official photo-exchanging Web site: one that for a fee can suck all of your pictures out of one site and load them into another of your choice or export them all to your hard drive (or maybe they send you an external hard drive that you just plug into your PC). Hmmmmm.

November 26th, 2007

Tech Shakedown: Kodak's Web site charging outrageous per-photo shipping fees

Posted by David Berlind @ 10:02 am

Categories: General, Personal Technology, Technology Shakedown, Video, Web technology

Tags: Coupon, Online Photo, Eastman Kodak Co., Problem, Site, Photograph, Qoop, David Berlind

Proving that the devil is in the details when it comes to shopping online (and how shipping fees can easily wipe out any potential savings), Kodak’s online photo gallery is charging an outrageous 4 cents per photo when someone orders 4×6 prints for delivery. The issue was brought to my attention by my wife who, in the course of ordering 2055 4×6 prints for delivery, discovered the shipping fee was going to be a whopping $83.55 for the site’s slowest form of delivery: 3-5 days (continued below……)

…continued from above

As can been see from both the graphic above as well as the attached video, the charges for faster forms of delivery are even higher ($113 for 2 business days and $139 for 1 business day).

This gets to one of the big problems with online photo services. Once you start using one extensively as we have, switching to another is difficult if not impossible because of the work that would be involved in moving your pictures to a new service. In other words, now that we are dissatisfied with Kodak, how might we switch to another service with so many of our photos trapped in Kodak’s Web site? The problem is identical to the one where you become reliant on proprietary software to the point that converting your data would be so prohibitively expensive and/or time consuming, that you just suck up whatever costs the software provider decides to hit you with down the line.

As you can see from the video, there is a way to get free shipping on orders of $50 or more. But here again, Kodak gets bad marks because, instead of simply applying the special offer to qualifying orders as it should do, in order to take advantage of the free shipping, the customer must (1) know that that offer exists, and (2) enter a special coupon code (FREE2SHIP) during the transaction process in order to take advantage of the special offer. Today for example, when I visited kodakgallery.com, the coupon was not listed prominently on any screen that a user might typically encounter in the course of ordering prints for delivery. It is however listed under a link on left-hand side of the home page that says “View Current Deals” (which leads you to this page). In other words, this is a deal that’s currently available to site users, but perhaps not always. Additionally, the fine print on Kodak’s Web site makes it clear that once you use a coupon, you won’t be able to re-use it in the future. The coupon’s restrictions proviso says “One coupon redemption per customer.”

Before taking Kodak to task over these fees, I paid a visit to Qoop.com, one of the partners to Yahoo’s Flickr.com photosharing Web site. Qoop is a service that will drop ship prints of your Flickr photos for you. The site has an interactive shipping calculator into which I plugged the number 2055 for the number of prints and it offered the following results:

• DHL Ground: $19.18
• DHL 2 Day: $48.13
• DHL Next Day: $35.19
• USPS Standard Mail: $39.04

In other words, for less than half of what Kodak charges for it’s slowest form of delivery, I can get next day delivery from Qoop! (excluding special promotions or memberships, both sites charge the same standard per-print fee to make the actual 4×6 prints: 15 cents).

I’ve already done one Tech Shakedown of Kodak (regarding Vista incompatibilities that so far, to the best of my knowledge, have yet to be resolved). But this was another that I couldn’t let slip. The fees are ridiculous.

Update: Kodak has issued a response to this Tech Shakedown

October 26th, 2007

Folo up: HP admits to problems with Pavilion notebooks and tries to help. But is it enough?

Posted by David Berlind @ 1:28 pm

Categories: General, Hardware Infrastructure, Mobile, Personal Technology, Technology Shakedown, Vista, Wired & Wireless

Tags: Notebook, Hewlett-Packard Co., Problem, Statement, Issue, HP Pavilion, BIOS Update, Anna, BIOS, Wireless

Earlier this week, I published my 11th video Tech Shakedown. This one was a critique of HP; not just the failures that buyers of its HP 6000 and 9000 series Pavilion notebook computers are experiencing with their built-in WiFi components, but also for the company’s failure to make an appearance in an online forum on its own Web site where its customers are expressing extreme displeasure with HP’s handling of the issue.

In response to that Shakedown, an HP spokesperson said that HP was “working on a resolution” and would be posting “further guidance directly on the user forum.”

That same day, as can be seen from the forum in question, someone named Anna who claims to be with HP, began posting entries under the forum ID “HP Total Care.” Clicking through to the actual ID-level page for Anna’s ID reveals that the ID was created on Oct 22 which by itself seems rather unfortunate. After all, shouldn’t HP have pre-established IDs so that its techs can proactively go into the forums on its own Web site and help customers out? As I reported earlier this week and as evidenced by the thread, the customers who take the time to log in to HP’s Web site in search of help have ended up relying on each other instead of seeing some presence from HP’s tech support. If you read the thread top to bottom, you can really feel the pain of these Pavilion owners.

Even worse however is that Anna responded with the same initial answer that has, for the most part, proven not to be a solution for the people experiencing problems. Wrote HP’s Anna:

Hi, it’s Anna from HP Total Care,

I’€™m sorry some of you are having trouble with your wireless WLAN not detecting your wireless network and not displaying in your device manager. The issue appears to be affecting AMD based Dv6000, v6000 and Dv9000 notebooks running Microsoft Windows Vista. We’€™ve got a BIOS update and some instructions on getting this resolved. If the BIOS update does not resolve the issue, please contact HP support and we will help facilitate a repair.

Please do not try replacing your wireless card or inserting a third party wireless modules as some have suggested here on this forum. This will not resolve the issue and is in violation of FCC regulations.

So, the company is admitting there’s a problem with certain HP 6000 and 9000 series Pavilion notebooks. But, yikes! The forum also shows several users trying out their own fixes through a variety of solutions including external USB-based WiFi adapters. But, Anna says that trying to fix a notebook on your own with a third party module could violate FCC regulations? Is HP for real?

Additionally, there’s the question as whether HP really researched the thread or not. Also, is someone back at HP’s headquarters connecting the dots? For example, with so many complaints on its own Web site and so many of those complaints finally ending up with replaced computers (where BIOS updates simply didn’t work) or motherboards, is the entire issue slipping through the cracks at HP? Perhaps so give the words of HP’s own customers. On October 23rd at 4:59 GMT, forum user Nate Nygren wrote:

Guys, “Anna from HP Total Care” didn’t bother reading jack in this thread, otherwise she’d have known that many of the reported problems are on XP machines as well. AS WE ALL KNOW ALREADY, this is not a BIOS issue as no updates have ever solved it for any of us, not a driver issue as fresh installs OS don’t resolve it. It’s not a wifi card issue either because nobody who’s had it replaced reports that it worked.

As Nygren implies, most of the users who have finally gotten their problem solved were able to reach a resolution not through a BIOS update, but rather, a motherboard replacement or a new system altogether. Anna responded that her suggested HP BIOS update is a new one that specificially addresses this problem leading me to wonder (regardless of whether it works or not) what took HP so long to address this specific problem. Wrote Anna in a subsequent post:

Hi, it’s Anna from HP Total Care once again, You may have tried a different BIOS updates in the past, but we highly recommend that you give BIOS version F.3A (SP36551) a try as it was created specifically to address these issues and has resolved them in many cases.

Unfortunately, shortly after that post appeared, so to did responses from Pavilion owners indicating that Anna may be misinformed about the BIOS update in question. Wrote ne_moose:

That BIOS is from July. I tried that BIOS to no avail. Also, the description does not mention anything about wireless cards problems. The only statement is Updates the code to support AMD Sempron 3000+ Processors. …I appreciate the help, but I request that you raise this issue to your management. This is a very serious problem that is going unaddressed.

Sure enough, there are other HP customers in the forum saying that the BIOS update isn’t working for them either. So something else is up — something that apparently requires a motherboard replacement or a new computer. Yet despite knowing this, HP is still pushing users down the BIOS path. In fairness, HP is saying to try the BIOS fix and then saying that the next step is repair if that doesn’t work. But here’s the rub. According to the thread, there are users whose systems are out of warranty and for whom the fix apparently is not free. For example, Boris Dzyubenko cc:ed the forum on a response he received from HP:

Boris,from our short conversation I understand that the notebook is not detecting wireless card.

I also understand that you have tried by updating the BIOS.

I have checked the warranty status and found that the warranty has been expired.

It seems that the problem is related to the hardware malfunction of the wireless card or the slot in which the wireless card will be installed.

In this regard I recommend you to contact nearest HP service centre.

This to me seems unfair since (1) not only is there obviously a pretty serious defect in the system (given how many systems are having a problem and given Anna’s initial response), but also (2) HP is aware of the problem given the volume of posts on the issue. Instead of being proactive with customers and helping them out before their warranties expire, HP is letting existing warranties on Pavilion notebooks expire knowing that the owners of their notebooks may be soon have WiFi issues.

October 22nd, 2007

Tech Shakedown: HP Pavilion notebook owners flood HP's site with WiFi problem complaints

Posted by David Berlind @ 9:59 am

Categories: General, Hardware Infrastructure, Mobile, Personal Technology, Technology Shakedown, Wired & Wireless

Tags: Notebook, Hewlett-Packard Co., HP Pavilion, Notebooks, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, David Berlind

If you’ve watched any of my Tech Shakedown videos here on ZDNet, you’d know that I’ve been asking viewers to let me know if they know of a breakdown that needs to be the subject of a Tech Shakedown. In cases where suggestions like these come from ZDNet’s audience members (and I have been getting them, thank you!), I do have to check them out. Well, this one definitely checked out.

A couple of weeks ago, Andrés, an engineer that reads ZDNet wrote the following to me via e-mail:

Lately HP brought on the market a series of pavilion notebooks that where on high demand because of their all in one features.

But it seems that there’s been a cover-up on the reliability of their performance. A lot of costumers who bought their notebooks are currently experiencing the same problem two major problems with their systems.

How does Andres know about these other customers? Well, since June 2007, they’ve been flooding HP’s Web site with complaints about how their Pavilion notebook computers are randomly losing any sense of the fact that they have wireless adapters in them (which in turn causes a loss of productivity). The thread is so flooded with messages that the only way I can get Web browser to view the entire thing without seizing is to close most of my other applications.

The issues affect both the HP Pavilion 6000 and 9000 series of notebooks and the real issue is that, for such a huge thread which seems to be the identical problem, HP is nowhere to be seen in terms of responding to its customers. Instead, message after message reflects how getting action from HP’s technical support group has been like pulling teeth. The result is that the customers have been left to help each other out — telling their own stories (multiple times) of how they’ve managed to get their motherboards replaced by HP.

Clearly, if you read every message as I have, the initial fixes that HP is still suggesting to this day (upgrading the BIOS, replacing the network adapter) are not working. This leads you to wonder why HP is still suggesting remediation that’s not working. At the very least, based on the stories being told in the forum, it doesn’t seem as though HP is telling customers “We’re aware of the problem… just try these two things and if it doesn’t work, we’ll fix your motherboard.” From the contents of the forum, you get the sense that the customers have to know that a new motherboard is the fix and then ask for it. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Need more evidence of how HP is slow to respond? I contacted HP last week (Thursday) about the problem. I showed them the thread and said this doesn’t look good. I was told I’d be hearing back from them but, after a scan of my inbox, my spam folder, and my voice mail, I still have yet to hear back from the contact who said he’d get back to me. When they do get back to me, I’ll get the official response into this blog. In the meantime, check out the video.

Update: HP has responded to this Tech Shakedown, but that response appears to be less than adequate. Here’s the update.

October 10th, 2007

Tech Shakedown #10: Windows Media Player's error dialog road to nowhere

Posted by David Berlind @ 3:30 pm

Categories: General, Personal Technology, Software Infrastructure, Technology Shakedown, Video

Tags: Microsoft Windows Media Player, Audio, Windows Media, Media Player, Digital Music, Digital Media, Microsoft Windows, Media Players, Personal Technology, Consumer Electronics

Today, I would have posted one of my video “reviewcasts” for you, but we ran into a production snafu. Here at ZDNet, our process for posting those involves me reviewing the audio before we finish off the post production. Sometimes, there’s material that’s worth cutting in the interests of your time (we don’t want to keep you longer than need be). But today, when I attempted to open the audio file of the nearly finished reviewcast (a WAV file that was on a USB key), I got a really strange error message from Windows Media Player that I can’t imagine anybody ever making sense of.

Thankfully, these are the days of the Internet and software developers like Microsoft can contextually link these error dialogs to their Web sites so as to provide end users some idea of how to overcome whatever problem faces them. But, as you’ll see in this technology shakedown, even though the dialog had one of those links, it didn’t get me very far.

October 5th, 2007

Technology Shakedown #9: Why AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are to blame for spam

Posted by David Berlind @ 9:33 am

Categories: General, Google Apps To-Do List, IT Management, Office 2.0, Personal Technology, Software Infrastructure, Technology Shakedown, Video, Web technology

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, America Online Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Problem, Video, Microsoft Corp., E-mail, Cyberthreats, Spam

Yesterday was the last straw for me when it comes to the way spam is impacting my work. First, before purging the junk mail folder in my Outlook, I did a quick scan only to notice that almost every other e-mail that was classified as spam was actually a legitimate e-mail that should have flowed into my inbox. Why was it in my junk mail folder? I have no idea. That’s part of the problem. In many cases (not all), you can’t look at the e-mail, see what the offending issue was, and notify the sender of why their e-mails are getting classified as spam.

But that wasn’t all that happened yesterday. For the events company (Mass Events Labs) that Doug Gold and I co-own to produce Mashup Camp, Startup Camp, and other events, we use a masseventslabs.com-specific context of Google Apps for e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, etc. In other words, when Doug and I send e-mail to each other through the masseventslabs.com domain, both he and I are sending and receiving from and to a Google Apps-based version of Google’s GMail. Yet somehow (as you can see in the attached video), yesterday, when he replied from his Google Apps account to an important e-mail that I sent to him via my Google Apps account, GMail redirected his reply to my spam folder. How can this be? That’s the equivalent of users of the same, behind-the-firewall copy of Microsoft’s Exchange Server not being able to send e-mail to each other because it’s getting classified as spam. Surely, an e-mail server has some idea of when the source of e-mail is itself.

So, what’s the problem and whose to blame for “friendly fire” and other SNAFUs in the battle against spam? The problem is that the major e-mail technology providers won’t work together to come up with some standard approaches to stopping spam. And when I say major, I mean AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. If those four companies simply got together and said it’s time to fix the problem and here’s how we’re going to fix it, the rest of the world would have no choice but to follow. Don’t agree with me? Watch the video. From my interview the other day with Matt Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise, I extracted the part where he unequivocally agreed that that’s all it would take.

Yet, here we are, more than five years after the major e-mail tech providers said that they’d find a way to curb the problem, and the situation is markedly worse. Markedly. Compounding the problem is that there is some cooperation going on between pockets of vendors and Web sites here and there. But the end game there will be separate Internets. If Yahoo! and eBay get together as they’ve just done to address phishers going after users of eBay and PayPal and Google does something different with GMail to address phishers going after users of Google Checkout, pretty soon, you end up in a situation where you have to enter completely different multi-site contexts (walled Internet silos) to get anything done. That was not the idea behind the Internet.

So, are you outraged enough to join me in taking action? How can we (you and I) solve the problem. We have to put the pressure on AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. I’ve recorded a video Technology Shakedown (see above) and I’ve licensed it under a Creative Commons license that allows you to re-use it anywhere you want. It’s not easy to grab our videos from ZDNet (I’ll work on that). So, if you want a copy of the video to paste into your blog or Web site, feel free to grab the YouTube version. Maybe together, we can all send a clear message to these four technology providers that its time to stop dilly-dallying and to lead the Internet to a standard “stack” of anti-spam solutions that will have most spammers and phishers looking for a new line of work.

September 28th, 2007

ZDNet reader says he's returning his new Moto Q9m due to lock-ups

Posted by David Berlind @ 6:19 am

Categories: General, Mobile, Motorola Q Review, Personal Technology, Technology Shakedown, Wired & Wireless

Tags: Smart Phone, Smart Phones, Cellular Phones, Handhelds, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Hardware, David Berlind

In response to my latest Tech Shakedown where I complained about how my Motorola Q and other smartphones might be too PC-like in that they often crash so badly that the only way to restart them is to remove and reinsert the battery, one ZDNet reader wrote in to say the situation isn’t much better with Motorola’s newest smartphone, the Q9m. Joe McLean of McLean/Clark LLC wrote the following note to me (and with his permission, I reprinting it here):

Very interesting piece on the Q. I’m a long-time smartphone user who travels and really uses the functionality of the units, including editing document and spreadsheets on the fly.

I just moved from a Palm 700p to the new Q9m. In about a week, it has frozen up several times. I really like the form factor and bright screen, but for overall usability and reliability, the Palm software is still much superior to the Windows Mobile platform. I also miss the convenience of the touch screen.

I’m probably going to take advantage of Verizon’s 30-day “no questions” return policy and go back to the old reliable 700p.

Thanks for the opportunity to comment. Love c-net.

Joe McLean

Thanks Joe. We love you too for sharing your thoughts with us here at ZDNet (a CNET Networks Property).

I guess the good news is that, as smartphones go, he had better luck with his old Treo (although I’ve people tell me about those crashing too).  But his note really speaks to the difficulties that smartphone makers have in a building a device that has so much going on inside of that tiny little place while also connecting to a pretty complicated network.

September 25th, 2007

Tech Shakedown #8: Maybe system freezes & cold reboots make smartphones too PC-like

Posted by David Berlind @ 4:48 pm

Categories: Apple, General, Mobile, Motorola Q Review, Personal Technology, Technology Shakedown, Video, Wired & Wireless

Tags: Phone, Cold Calling, PC, Smart Phone, Smart Phones, Telecom & Utilities, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, David Berlind

When you ask people what their top peeves are when it comes to their PCs, somewhere high on the list is how they sometimes lock up at the least opportune times. Regardless of their shipping status, all applications are fallible and, in many cases, we depend on the operating system to gracefully restore the system’s delicate harmony that some misbehaving application (or attempted combination of applications) so rudely interrupted. Desktop operating systems have come a long long way when it comes to serving as that last line of defense that stands between system failure and resurrection.

There was a time not so long ago where Linux users boasted of “uptimes” that dwarfed those of Windows by orders of magnitude (this was often a “server” measure too). These days, instead of rebooting my Windows PC daily (as I once did… starting with a fresh boot in the morning that was imperative to making it through the day), I go weeks at a time without a reboot (in many cases, involving a string of contiguous “up-days” that includes several mode changes between stand-by and fully awakened states).

I wish I could say the same for the smartphone I’m still lugging around with me: a Windows Mobile 5-based Motorola Q connected to Verizon Wireless’ service. As can be seen in the video above, it seems to require a reboot once if not twice daily and always, it seems (like with the PC), at the least opportune time. But is there ever really an opportune time? And it wouldn’t be fair to single out the Q or the Windows Mobile operating system as the source of this woe. Every smartphone OS I’ve used in the past (eg: Palm, BlackBerry, etc.) and every one I know who has a smarthphone, regardless of the OS, reports that reboots are sometimes necessary and that it’s one of the things they’d like to change if they could. Even some iPhone users get to enjoy this perk.

Having to reboot a phone, as I point out in the above video, wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the amount of time that sometimes passes before you can successfully dial a number. I’ve been in far too many situations — thankfully none of them emergencies — where I’ve needed to tap out a number right away, only to find out that my phone isn’t in the mood at that point and won’t be for at least another minute. A small portion of that minute is often spent removing and reinserting the battery because that’s that fastest way to unfreeze the user interface and get the phone rebooted without losing any data.

Sometimes, another way to unfreeze a frozen phone and get it back to an operational state faster is to call it from another phone. For some reason, an inbound call is enough to dislodge whatever bit of code has caused the user interface to become unresponsive. But, not only does this solution vary in effectiveness from phone to phone and from lockup to lockup, ready access to another phone isn’t always a given (or maybe we should all carry an extra phone as a tool for unlocking the first phone when it seizes up on us).

Have we been spoiled by the more reliable phones that we owned prior to our smartphones — the ones that have us expecting that our phones will never go down on us unless every drop of power has been drained from their batteries? Are we wrong to expect the same thing from a smartphone? Or, because it’s technically a computer, should we cut it the same slack that we barely offered to early PCs? One major difference between our PCs and our phones is that hardly anyone ever reaches for their PC in the case of an emergency. The phone? If you haven’t yet been in emergency situation that required a functioning phone, knock on wood and pray that if that time ever comes (hopefully it won’t), that the closest handset doesn’t need a reboot before you can dial 911.

I don’t know what the solution is (perhaps smartphones can have a phone-only fast reboot button). But in my video shakedown above, I make it clear that cell phone manufacturers and carriers need to take these factors into consideration when putting smartphones on the market. It’s bad enough that I have to reboot my phone. It’s even worse when it seems like forever until I can use it.