(Update apology – thought this was a Sony product originally – it isn’t)
This post could also have been subtitled – “Where’s QA?”. My son just bought a new phone to replace a piece of crap flip LG that never worked very well. The winner of my 13 year old’s ‘coolness factor’ evaluation would have been the iPhone but at $30/mo for a data plan he couldn’t foot the bill and I sure wasn’t going to cover it. So, the Sony-Ericson (Pantec?) Matrix was purchased. The form factor is nice, keyboard for texting and a dial keypad pops out in a different direction. It all seems quite usable/functional. Then he tried the music player and we got a surprise.
The AT&T sales guy at the store told us that you could put iTunes songs on the device. I thought this was odd but since AT&T exclusively markets the iPhone I thought maybe they’d cut a deal of some kind. Anyhow, of course, an .mp4 could be converted to .mp3 but my son just went ahead and dragged an iTunes library song to the 2Gb Sony custom Sandisk card and popped it into the phone. Then he fires up the music player and the phone reboots!! Yes, reboots – so we did the usual re-seat the card; cycle power dance and still, each time he starts up the music player the phone shuts down without warning and restarts. To cut to the chase, once the .mp4 was removed from the memory card an .wmv file played just fine.
Ya gotta wonder, how did this behavior ever make it out of the factory? What possible algorithm says, “Encounter unknown file type in music player; shut down and restart” – bizarre. I can imagine you wouldn’t want to execute an unknown file type but reboot? Good QA is apparently a lot harder to come by than I once imagined.
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