Jul 1

Written by: Mike Temporale
Tuesday, July 1, 2008 8:30am

I’ve heard a lot of incorrect information about this service since it was first introduced back in Windows Mobile 5. The first thing that always got me was the part where it says that this will not cost me any extra on my monthly bill from the carrier; How could they be so sure about that? The other common thing I hear is that it will slow your device down to a crawl when you enable it. If that’s true, it would be a pretty useless feature as nobody would ever use it.

The Error Reporting tool in Windows Mobile is very similar to the Quality Improvement tool that Microsoft is loading into a number of their applications - like MSN Messenger (or is it called Live Messenger now?). Basically, it gathers information about how you use the device and any errors you may receive during use and then reports them back to Microsoft for analysis and, hopefully, improvement in a future release. And who doesn’t want that?

You’ve agreed that you want to anonymously help Microsoft make a better product, and enabled this feature.  So what do you do now? Simple, nothing different than your everyday use of the device. This task will run in the background as a low priority task and log details about how long you spend on a given screen, or how you navigate the menu’s in Pocket Outlook, and other various usage stats. Not to worry, there’s a threshold on how much it will capture so you don’t have to worry about this logging growing so large as to fill your devices memory and causing it to crash.  The maximum number of days to keep history is something like 7, and after that the oldest day is dropped off. I’m pretty sure I was told there is also a file size limit, but I can’t recall what it was.  I’m trying to find that out and when I have an answer, I will update this article with that information.

We’ve got a running log of crash and usage data, how do we get this back into Microsoft’s hands so that it doesn’t cost the user of the device anything?  Does Microsoft know if you have an unlimited data connection? Perhaps they have worked out something with the carriers to allow their data to be sent home at no cost to the user? Nope, the answer is much simpler than that.  The data is only sent back to Microsoft when the device is ActiveSync’ed to a computer with Internet access. When an ActiveSync connection is started on the device, it kicks off the upload process and sends the collected data back to Microsoft.

So, what’s all this mean? If you never ActiveSync with a desktop, then don’t waste your time with Error Reporting as it will never get sent back to Microsoft.  If you still want to help, then try to ActiveSync after any weird or odd issues that you experience. I personally recommend that you turn the featuer on and try to help Microsoft build a better mobile operating system and a better user experience.

 

Comments

Peter Temporale on July 2nd, 2008 at 3:13 pm clintonfitchdotcom on July 3rd, 2008 at 8:11 am

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