[MDA III, XDA III, PDA2k, 9090 General] veletron:
I have had an XDA IIs for a week and the thing is *riddled* with bugs. A few that come to mind:

Add a new profile to connection manager and then add a 'modem' to that connection. Go and fiddle elsewhere for a while. Often when you come back to change the settings for that connection the 'modem' has dissapeared. (its still there, a soft reset will cause it to re-appear).

Take the unit out of range of your wifi while running an app that does nots of network activity, and you will have to do a soft reset in order to restore network connectivity. This occurs mainly with skype

WiFi Reception is **attrocious** my laptop will tell me that I have a full signal and the XDA IIs will barely register when at the same location. Even holding the damned thing 1 ft from the base station does not cause the signal indicator to head to maximum.

When you use bluetooth, for network access, all the stuff in connection manager gets reset.

Often, after setting connection manager to always use certain profiles, and then encountering a problem, you head into connection manager and find that your selections never stuck

VPN connections do not always stick when set, they dissapear from the menu.

I have tried for ages and failed to make a VPN connection over anything GPRS, WiFi etc. VPN was one of the reasons that I bought the device (access to home and work networks), but it just does not work. Additionally, the instructions with the unit offer no help about how to get it working.

The bundled O2 active stuff is very flaky. Take the end programs applet - it often crashes its self while trying to force an app that is 'not responding' to stop. The built in 'stop app' applet (which they burried in settings) seems to work but...

Getting an app in a not responding state is well easy - just use it normally! Messenger prog is the worst. Usually requires use of 'end now' option

IMAP support is very very bad. Its quite common for an IMAP server to not store mail folders in the root. In decent clients you can specify the root imap folder, not in pocket outlook, it ends up pulling the entire dir struct from your home dir!! I rebuilt the imap daemon on my linux box to compile in a default root folder. This solved the previous problem, but the imap support is not suitable for use away from wifi cause its so damned slow. It does not just look for new messages, and there is no way to tell it to do this. Also, when you send an item it ends up in the default sent items, not the imap sent items. Imho, the main reason to use imap is to keep your emails intact (be able to see what you sent from the mobile device from a desktop).

Outlook 2K3 on the desktop has the same issue btw, but at least that supports rules so you can put it right.

Billy wrote pocket outlook for connecting to an exchange server, which, I suspect only 50% of the devices purchaced will ever do. Pocket Oulook *always* starts pointing at the exchange folder structure, not your POP3/IMAP account, and there is no way to config this. Unessesary taps required. Why can I not DELETE the default exchange folders if I dont need them?

There are a load more issues as well... I currently do around 10 soft resets/day. My basis is that a wait of more than 10 secs means that the device has crashed. Perhaps if I was willing to wait 5 mins all the time for it to get its arse into gear then the number of soft resets could be reduced!

I shall have to create me a site with XDA IIs bugs on it. I suspect that most of these issues are also present on other devices using windows mobile 2003 so it aint just gonna be the XDA. MS will likely fix them, and then O2 will take years to make the fixes available to its customers.

To be honest, I wish I had stuck with a symbian based device.

Has *anyone* managed to get a IPSEC/PPTP VPN connection running either via wifi or GPRS???

Has anyone managed to get skype PPC working **reliably** Mine works OK if I sit next to the AP, but I might as well use the PC version if I have to do that. Moving further away causes skype to give up due to lack of bandwidth. WiFi also locks (no network access period) even though the PPC still indicates that it has a single from the AP. The only fix for this is yet another soft reset.

Some other stuff:

Refuses to connect to a network that is not broadcasting the SSID. In general, when you want to add a new box, you can set AP to broadcast SSID, it will then find the network, after it has connected, you can hide the SSID. For future connections from 'pre-registered' boxes, no SSID is required. Not so for the XDA IIs, refuses to connect to a base station that is not broadcasting an SSID, or in some cases, creates a new connection with the name "" (i.e nothing) (which again refuses to connect).

Right, now, if you have 2 wifi networks listed in PPC settings, it will sometimes sit there for ever failing to connect, do a soft reset and it connects.

Another one: you have two connections in the 'configure wireless networks' dialogue, one is 'connecting' other is 'unavailable'. The one that is connecting is obviously not gonna connect despite 100% correct settings, so I select 'remove' it does not dissapear!!!

If I had written this software, the user would see a dialogue box thus 'This network is connecting/connected, are you sure you wish to remove its settings?' Selecting yes, would either terminate the connection attempt, or terminate the connection and then remove the damned setting with no further agro!

In network settings, I often get some *stupid* status info. It sometimes says that my home network is 'available' when I am at work. Clearly it isn't, wifi does not travel 10 miles!

And some more:

Sometimes bluetooth fails to start complaining about insufficient driver space. I write windows KMD's all the time, I suspect its somet daft like a lack of available stack space, or stack recursion. Soft reset cures

Also, sometimes when I try to start bluetooth, I get a daft message saying that the licence for the bluetooth stack has expired!!! It then starts BT and all is OK.

All pretty in-excusable bugs for post beta software. This is MS's 4th attempt now at a mobile operating system and its still a bag of sh1te!

A PDA is supposed to be a productivity tool, not something that you have to put 4 hours into to save yourself an hour. When I pull the damned thing out I want it to do **exactly** what it says on the box.

Bugs in software are inevitable, but this just was not even tested - there are *obvious* bugs that should have been detected in QA and delayed the relrease date. I suspect most users will trip over these issues in the first few hours of use. The workaround for most is a soft reset - the blooming reset switch will be worn out in a week!

My advice: AVOID until they fix some of the bugs. Does O2/MS have a route for bug submissions? I'll write these up as formal bug reports with reproducers and send them off.

If it were not for the appeal of skype/skypeout (only with 10 metres of base station otherwise wifi dies, reset required!) then it would have gone back by now. Not of merchantisable quality imho.

I write C/CPP/Java software for a living, if I let something this bad out the door I'd loose my damned job!

And some more:

- If you reconfig your shortcuts (so you can find stuff!) Then the applets 'camera' and 'O2' always seem to copy themselves back out into the root of StartMenu-->Programs again.

Go into the find applet and get it to do a search that takes some time. Wait for it to get going and then click stop. PDA hangs. It does come back eventually (2-3 mins later), but remains sluggish until you do a soft reset. Trying to suspend while its hung just switches the backlight off!

Wish there was some kind of formal bug raising email address or somet.

Nigel