I am irritated with this phone right now.

When I got the K1 KRZR yesterday, one of my first tasks was to copy the Contact list off the Nokia, onto the K1. I didn’t want to simply copy my contacts onto the SIM, for a few reasons.

First, I have nearly 400 contacts in that phone. Customers, co-workers, work associates, friends, family, etc. Copying 250 at a time via the SIM, just doesn’t make sense, especially when you take into consideration that I would have to regroup the contacts, or suffer with 4 entries for each person. This was not an option.

The first thing that I did when I got home, was to reboot the laptop into windows. I plugged the data cable that was included with the phone into my lappy, and went to synch the phone with Outlook. Windows doesn’t get booted all that much around here, and my address book on the PC was several months old.

PC Suite, detected the phone with no problems, as it always does, how ever when I attempted to synch the phone and outlook, it gave me an incredibly cryptic error. I click the button to view the error report, but nothing happens. Well, not exactly nothing. PC Suite ate through a gig of ram, and the disk started to trash as the machine started swapping. I was unable to close the program, even through the Windows Task Manager.

I logged out of XP, logged back in and tried again, only to find that my address book in the phone had been wiped clean, and the phone would not even be detected by PC Suite at all. Thinking it was a Windows bug, I rebooted the machine, to give it a fresh slate. Didn’t work.

Now, I have had trouble with this phone doing this kind of thing in the past, and the solution was always the same. Update PC Suite to the newest version. No problem. I downloaded the new installer, installed away, and hoped for the best. Even upon a reboot of both the PC, as well as the phone, I was unable to even even get PC Suite to find the phone, over USB or Bluetooth.

Being the stubborn bitch that I am, I attempted to do a factory reset on the phone, only to find out that the default security code didn’t work. I don’t recall ever changing it, and nothing that I would have used work. So, I went about it the hard way. I flashed the phone.

Upon having the newest firmware flashed onto the phone, it is now working perfectly, it synch’d with Outlook the first time, with no problems at all, and the contact list was fully populated in no time at all.

This all got me to thinking:

I’m a fucking nerd. Card carrying, flag waving nerd. I embrace it, and I love playing around with this kind of stuff. A lot of people would even comment that I get off on it. I have the kind of mind, and wit, that is usually able to puzzle out these silly problems really quickly. This leads to me being the “go to” guy for a lot of people around here for all of their computer related problems.

What if, my personality didn’t allow me to help these people out? What if, just, what if, it was my sister, or god help me, my dad, who was trying to get his address book off of that Nokia? Someone who doesn’t have the patience, or the outright stubbornness to deal with this kind of nonsense. They would have thrown the fucking thing out the window, within 20 minutes of starting.

These companies need to learn to make software, and hardware, for that matter, that just works. I should not have to flash new firmware onto a phone in order to get my Contact list off of it. Ever.

And don’t even get me started on the nightmare that the Samsung PC-Studio is.