Just plant soybeans

I was digging through a basket last night looking for something else, when I found and pulled out my two old Palm PDAs, a Sony Clie UX50 (which I still regard as the best single PDA that will have ever been made) and the earlier TG50, which had a powerful infrared emitter on it that was useful for changing channels on the television at the bar.

I continue to be amazed at how fast and simple Palm OS was and is compared to that piece of shit that's in my phone/PDA, Windows Mobile 5.0. Windows actually takes less time to start up on my MacBook Pro than it takes to start on this little tiny phone! I mean, primarily, a phone should be a phone, right? You turn it on and you start talking.

Not this phone.

From a cold start, it takes Windows Mobile 5.0 nearly two full minutes to start up and come to a ready state where I could start using the phone. Worse, if it doesn't have enough battery power to start up, does it figure this out in advance, tell you, and shut down? No, it gets halfway through, the screen freezes at full brightness, and it ignores attempts to power it off using the power switch, essentially ensuring that what's left in the battery will vanish quickly. You have to physically pop the battery out and remove it.

I don't blame the maker of the phone, HTC (sold here by T-Mobile). I do blame Windows Mobile, which is an incredibly bloated piece of shit that should never be put in a phone. PDAs, maybe, but not a phone. It's an enormous whale of fat-ass coding and bratty resource demands that frequently decides it has more important "background" things to do than to actually obey my keypresses and make a fucking call.

I so wish that HTC had put Palm, or Symbian, or Linux, or practically anything else on this otherwise-cool piece of hardware. Too bad Sony was too fucked-up to realize what great hardware they were making, and rather than build phones with PDA functions in them, put their pretty-good phone hardware onto their excellent PDA hardware. They could have kicked ass. Instead, they're selling exploding batteries and trying to convince people to buy yet another weird Sony-only pseudo-standard in the form of Blu-Ray HD DVDs.

They do in fact deserve to go out of business. I just hope some of their amazing engineers form new startups from the ashes and avoid Sony's dumbass mistakes.

Not Microsoft, of course. I want them to go bankrupt, but I also want anyone who had anything to do with building Windows to never work again. Just bulldoze the whole place and plant soybeans there.

Then at least we could use Microsoft as a raw material for biodiesel.