Why PocketPCs still suck

This week I experienced that all too common PocketPC catastrophy known as "sudden information death". If happened because I plopped my device in the cradle but forgot that the cradle power supply was not connected. This resulted in the almost dead battery dying completely and a complete loss of all information on the device. By the time I discovered the problem it was dead as a door nail and when recharged acted as if it was FOB (Fresh Out of the Box). To recover all my contacts I was able to resynchronize with my desktop but guess what, every piece of software I'd installed on the device, every setting I'd set, every non-synchronized file was lost.

As Homer Simpson would say, "Doh!"

Naturally this is the expected behaviour, this is what PocketPCs do when the battery runs out, and this is the advertised functionality of sync.

But why?

Why after all this time should a consumer targeted device behave so stupidly? My trusty Psion organizer that was first launched in the early 90's had much better powerfail behaviour: it used industry standard AA batteries (insert rechargeables if you wanted), and included a backup battery for memory if the main batteries died so the memory was kept alive and you keep your data for up to a year.

Yes its true my PocketPC inludes a complete backup feature. But guess what, if you don't have an extra flash card to backup to then it takes a very long time. We're talking 10 minutes or more. That's too long. People often drop their devices in a cradle and take it out very quickly, hardly anyone has time to do a backup every time they sync the device. Plus, the last time I tried to recover from a backup it didn't even work so I still lost everything.

"Doh!"

Why does backup take so long? Because PocketPCs are still using USB 1.0 technology. Wake up guys! USB 2.0 can easily acheive 20MBytes/s throughput and has been around for two years now, its about time that you (and digital camera vendors) made it standard. Not to mention I can buy a 32Mb SD flash memory card for under $20 so manufacturers could easily include 32Mb of persistent backup memory in this $300 device for much less. Think of how much better for the consumer this would be if every time I plonked the device in the cradle it backed up its volatile storage to the internal flash memory? I'd never have to think of backup again and never have to worry about data loss again.

Finally, why the heck does my cradle need an external power wart anyway? Isn't it about time people figured out how to charge devices from USB power if there is no external power? And isn't it about time computer manufacturers specifying things like USB recognized that having decent amount of power available to peripherals across the bus is a good thing. There's absolutely no excuse for requiring external power converters when my computer already has a 400W state of the art AC to +-5 and +-12V DC power converter.