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Lemak Lemang

A walk down the Yellow Brick Road of Malaysia's Corridor of the future

by Jeff Ooi, Malaysia

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Christmas shopping list and a PC Suite

Nov 30, 2007 13:02

It's time again to finalize the Christmas shopping list... or at least a wishlist for window shopping.

I used to include hardware upgrades for the desktop once every two years in my shopping list. Just did once last year this time, so I am going to hold tight to the wallet for a while and perhaps look elsewhere.

Hardware upgrades almost come with tedious headache when one has to deal with data (read POP3 email archives, etc..--which I inherit for posterity's sake--and driver migration, though this has been greatly lessened over the last few years with much kaizen in this segment. But upgrades? We still itch on, especially seeing the year-end bonus vis-a-vis tax rebates untapped for the next Income Tax returns.

Ahmm, I am aware that there is pitch for 5-megapixel camera-phones in Malaysia right now. Sony Ericsson with K850, LG with Viewty KU990, and the not-too-soon Nokia N82. In my cellular lifecycle, I have migrated to LG Shine and Viewty and Nokia N95 since dumping SE's K600 and K700 for good. Has much water flowed under the bridge since then?

This Christmas, to be frank, I do have a serious wishlist item. The handset PC Suite.

It is quite a big nightmare in that manufacturers are so engrossed in dishing out their handset models, they have forgotten about helping their end-users manage the upgrade/migration experience. The address books, or database for contacts, and archived SMS are valuable personal assets for the mobile users. Let me tell you, if migration from an older model to a new one within the same make is painful, migration to rival brands is hell.

At the very least, the handset makers must start thinking of ways to ripoff their rivals by making data migration seamless. Now that would be incentive for brand migration in the first place.

I am totally insulated from Motorola and Samsung, so I can only qualify talking about my user experience with SE, Nokia and LG, specifically on their PC Suites. The interface to migrate my personal cellular data is by means of the storage-deficient SIMcard, external storage cards and, most importantly, the somewhat proprietary PC Suite tools that enable backup and transfer of those data.

Of the three brands I've used, I find Nokia to be the most user-friendly, albeit sometimes overly zealous. SE has a somewhat efficient PC Suite, but it has deliberately omitted the capabilities to backup and transfer multimedia messages onto the PC. LG, on the other hand, is still lame. Even the Viewty version of the LG PC Suite hangs on me.

When I tried to migrate old contacts from K700 and K600 to Nokia, I could only backup the addressbook entries onto an Outlook folder and have them recopied, rather seamlessly, onto the Nokia handset--a bulky, battery-hungry N95 with a sluggish OS when switched on multitasking mode. Alas, SE's PC Suite did not allow me to backup multimedia messages as spartan as SMS entries in the inbox. I hated Sony Erisson for once, but apart from that, SE is superb on its OS and user interface. I may go back to the brand one day.

Recently, I have switched my main phone from an N96 to Viewty for the latter's form factor and the manual focus features packed with the 5-megapixel camera. That, too, is a nightmare. N96 captures all my contacts--with overzealous double entries from SIMcard and handset memories to beat--and the archive of multimedia messages from handset to PC. The Nokia PC Suite is superb and top-of-the-class, I must say.

But LG's PC Suite is something else. The data sync from the Outlook database somehow didn't function the way it was intended. It took forever, and finally hung.

In the end, I had to spend days migrating a big chunk of phone contacts, some 500 entries on handset and an additional 250 on SIMcard, manually from N95 to LG's KU990.

Voila, I had a new Christmas nightmare! Want some?

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About Jeff Ooi

Jeff Ooi is an Internet and e-Business consultant based in Kuala Lumpur who's spent the last four years blogging internationally on the tech scene, on anything and nothing. Which doesn't really explain why most of his own technology is about three years out of date. He doesn't even own a PDA after his Palm V crashed. He's on 3G, though... Lemak Lemang refers to coconut-flavored sticky rice stuffed in a bamboo container.