Bad News on the No Reboot Challenge

Back on August 19th I kicked off the “No Reboot Challenge” by inviting others to join me in not rebooting or forcefully stopping any applications on their Windows Mobile devices. There’s been a number of sites that joined in and took the challenge to their readers. Sadly, after 51 days my BlackJack II decided it wasn’t going to respond to any key presses on the keyboard any longer. I’m not sure what went wrong - I was using the phone one minute, and then tossed it into my pocket and headed out to the car. Once in the car, I went to switch profiles and noticed that the device wasn’t responding.  At first, I thought that somehow I had accidentally shutdown the phone.  However, a quick tap on the power button saw the screen light up. I still couldn’t use any of the keys, but at least I knew the phone was still working.

I did a number of different things over the next couple hours in hopes that it would break out of this state, but I had no luck.  The device responded to the power button, but nothing else. I even called the phone in hopes that it would kick the device out of this state. The phone did update the screen to show the incoming call, but it didn’t respond to me pressing the answer or hang up buttons. After 51 days, I had to pull the battery out if I hoped to continue to use my phone.

I’m happy that I managed to last 51 days, but at the same time, I know that it could have been better. I have no idea what went wrong to cause this. I haven’t changed or added any software to the device.  I haven’t been browsing any new sites - It’s the same standard sites that I read on a regular basis.

I want to try this again, but before I do, I want to update my phone to the official Windows Mobile 6.1 ROM from AT&T and Samsung. I’ll try and do that over the next day or so. I’ll post again and let you know when I’m  ready to start again.

Update #4 On The No Reboot Challenge - Crisis Adverted

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted on my status in the No Reboot Challenge. First off, I want to welcome another site - Mobi - gas - mic, to the challenge. As I’ve said before, it’s great to see such a wide reception for the challenge within the community.

I had a close call on rebooting last week, the worst part is, it wasn’t intentional. I was slipping the phone into my pocket and I wasn’t paying too much attention to what I was doing. I ended up missing my pocket and the phone fell towards the ceramic tile floor. Luckily, it bounced off my shoe and came to rest gently, or somewhat gently, on the floor. When I picked it up, the battery door had slipped pen, but not enough to fall off and allow the battery to escape. Needless to say, I have been much more careful about the handling of my device since this event.

My recent trip to New York also presented a little problem (besides the thumb issue). Typically I would swap SIMs from my Canadian Fido SIM to my US AT&T SIM. For obvious reasons, this just wasn’t an option. So instead, I just dropped my AT&T SIM into a spare phone and used that instead. I put my regular phone into flight mode and locked the keypad until I returned to Canada. Disaster adverted.

I started this challenge over a month ago (August 19th) and to-date I haven’t had a single issue with the memory management of my Windows Mobile 6.1 device. No reboots, no crashes, no odd behaviour. It’s pretty clear to me that Windows Mobile is and can be a stable OS. 1 Month down, and many more to go.

Update #3 On The No Reboot Challenge

The No Reboot Challenge is growing in popularity! I would like to welcome Bambi from Windows Mobile Cool to the challenge. So we know have Chris Spera, Dieter Bohn, Bambi, myself, and all the readers from each site that have joined in which is simply amazing. I also want to thank Tariq from My Today Screen for posting about it on the site - I wonder what it’s going to take to get Tariq to join in on the challenge? And let’s not stop there, I would love to see others joining in as well.

Now down to the details; It’s been 15 days since I started this challenge (August 19th) and so far things have been smooth sailing. Cellular reception has been top notch, there’s been no weird missed calls, and no abnormal behaviour from any applications - aside from IE Mobile using 25MB. Thankfully it’s down to a reasonable 5.6MB. Windows Mobile has actually done very well at closing applications that are left open in memory.  I regularly use the Task Manager to switch between applications and I have noticed that Windows Mobile will shutdown applications that haven’t been used in a while if it starts to get concerned about memory usage. 

The phone was put into flight mode over the long weekend. My wife and I took the kids to the cottage and there’s no cell reception unless I put my feet into the lake and hold the phone just so. Instead of leaving the phone radio on and hunting for signal, I simply dropped it into flight mode and left it on the kitchen table. When we left the cottage I turned the radio back on and it picked up a signal pretty quickly and everything returned to normal. As a quick aside, when I did this a couple years back with a 2003 SE device, it didn’t come out of flight mode as easily. Something has changed over the years, and for the better too!

With everything running so smoothly, I think the only thing that could knock me off course is Samsung releasing Windows Mobile 6.1 for the BlackJack II. Oh, and lookie here - they just did. D’OH! Must resist…

Update #2 on the No Reboot Challenge

First off, I want to welcome Dieter Bohn from WMExperts to the No Reboot Challenge. It’s great to see others giving it a go and seeing how long they can run without having to reboot. For me, it’s been 7 days and things are going very well. I did see some weirdness this morning when I awoke, I noticed that I didn’t have the standard SPAM in my inbox, so I figured there was something going on. When I attempted to do a sync it failed. I then attempted to pull up a couple web sites and they failed too. This is either a problem with the device or the carrier. Next step was to disable the data network and then reestablish a connection and the pages still failed to load. So, if felt to me like a carrier problem. I put the phone down and started my regular morning routine. When I picked up the phone 30 minutes later the internet was up and running again. So it doesn’t look like it was anything to do with my device. Just my carrier playing games with me. Isn’t that nice of them?

And for those keeping count; my first update was made to the original post. From now on I think I will just make a new post on the site. It makes it easier for everyone to follow along in their RSS clients.

Developers View on the No Reboot Challenge

Marc over at Ilium Software made a great post commenting on the “No Reboot Challenge” that I’ve been running. There are so many factors involved in doing this challenge that I can’t possibly rule them all out and create a truly controlled environment for this test.

Ultimately, it would be best if the OS protected us from unsafe and instable applications. But the truth is that we are dealing with a mobile OS and there just isn’t the resources to handle this correctly. Heck, the full blown desktop OS still doesn’t do an amazing job at this. Although, it’s getting better but there’s a long way to go.

And just to be clear, I didn’t mean to imply that all 3rd party applications are bad. In fact, the reason I selected a few apps to install is because I wanted to show that there are good developers and that you can find good products that won’t compromise the stability of your device. IMHO, Ilium is one of those companies that I know I can trust to build a solid app.

Head over the Ilium’s blog and read what Marc has to say. Be sure to come back and share your comments here with us!

Internet Explorer Mobile Is Using 24MB - WHY?

I was just posting an update to my progress in the “No Reboot Challenge” when I noticed something interesting; Internet Explorer Mobile is using almost 24MB on my device. What could be the reason for this? It’s not like the page I have open is huge or anything. In fact, it’s just the mobile home page of Twitter. Considering that the non-mobile version of the page is just 61,253 bytes, I can’t imagine the mobile version is somehow 22.9MB larger!

I wonder if this is some sort of error in reporting how memory is actually being used by IE Mobile, perhaps it should be 2.35MB? I’m pretty sure that it’s not showing the total downloaded via IE Mobile for that season. I might do a fair amount of Twitter, Netvibes, and Mobile Olympics coverage, but I can’t see it being 24MB in the last 24 or so hours since I hard reset the device.

At the Windows Mobile 6.1 announcement, Microsoft promised to release IE 6 on Windows Mobile 6.1.  If this is any indication of what we can expect, then I’m happy without seeing the functionality of IE 6 making its way to my device!

Anyone have any idea’s what might be the cause of this weird memory usage might be?

Taking the No Reboot Challenge with Windows Mobile

In my recent post about stability, I talked about Windows Mobile and how it is a stable platform. The source of all that instability is poorly written 3rd party applications. To help prove my point, I’m taking on the “No Reboot Challenge”. The idea is simple, no more reboots of my phone for any reason and let’s see how long I can go before it starts acting funny or crashing. Furthermore, I won’t be killing or stopping any process’s. I’ll leave that up to Windows Mobile and Microsoft to see if they truly know best when it comes to managing memory on the device. The only applications that I will close are ones that have an Exit option in the menu.

To get the ball started on the right foot, I’m going to hard reset my device so I can be sure that there’s nothing weird hanging around in there. I’m doing this on a Samsung BlackJack II with a near final build of Windows Mobile 6.1. From what I’ve been told, this is what will be shipped on upcoming BlackJack II’s from AT&T. If you’re following along and taking the challenge with me, it doesn’t really matter what version of Windows Mobile you have on your device. I just ask that it’s the production ROM and not something that’s been cooked up and downloaded from the internet. The changes added into those illegal ROMs could easily be a source of instability.

After hard resetting the device, I need to ActiveSync it with my laptop to get all my Contacts, calendar, etc.. synced to it. Also, there are a couple applications that I can’t do without. So I’ve installed the following: Ilium’s eWallet, Sling Media’s SlingPlayer Mobile, Modaco’s Smartphone GPS Utility, and Microsoft’s Live Search. I use these applications on an almost daily basis and can’t imagine being without those. I also need to add my the data settings for my network so I can actually use data on the device. The last thing to do is configure email on the device. I’ve added 2 email accounts and both are set to pull email from the last 3 days and will do that every 60 minutes.

That’s it - that’s all the changes / additions I’ve made to the default configuration of this device. From now on I won’t reboot the device or close programs. I’ll be making updates to this post on a regular basis over the coming weeks reporting on how things are going. The success of my mobility is in the hands of Microsoft.

UPDATE (August 20 @ 10:10pm) - Everything has been going very well so far.  I always forget how much there is to setup and configure on a freshly reset device.  I went to use my JawBone Bluetooth headset only to learn that it hasn’t been paired with the phone since it was reset.  Not a big deal, but it does make it a little hard to use. ;) I also noticed that my mobile favorites had not synced back to the device. If I recall, this is a bug with the Windows Mobile Device Center. Annoying, but again, not the end of the world.

I’ve included a screen shot of the task manager so you can see what applications are running on the device.  The items that are below the fold are Ilium’s Screen Capture tool and the Task Manager itself.