The Woes of Cross Compatibility
My aunt is a really funny lady; she has a wonderful personality and a great sense of humor. She’s also smart enough to know when she’s doing something wrong vs. when something just isn’t working. She sent me an email and invited me to post it here.
I am currently trying out the Instinct by Samsung with Sprint! Was told it was Mac-compatible by the sales lady – so not true!! But I’m trying to find my way around the inability to hard-sync with my desktop. The phone is so new that Sprint tech support takes as much time as driving to New York City would! Then they say “I’ll have to call you back” … yeah, right! They just don’t know. So, here’s some issues that might work for you on your blog site: with the given being that I have a Mac and am unable to [transfer from] the enclosed CD software … there’s a “microSD card” that has a little docking card – I put that in my SanDisk gizmo, transfer a file folder of jpg’s onto it, transfer the card back into the phone – says the saved file is “empty” on “My Photos” and that there is “no media file” in that location. I double-check the microSD, and the file is there and easily opened. Now, they advertise the Instinct as being very flexible as to how it receives and sends data – hence the docking card. But there isn’t a way on the phone itself to select the card memory over the phone memory. I’m told it should do that automatically, but … it’s obviously not. There’s one lone soul at Sprint who is still working on this (and has actually been calling me back), but one of the reasons I wanted this phone was to be able to show people pics of my listings!
Another issue that they haven’t even been able to get to is … okay, so I get an email, and it has an attachment. I’m supposed to be able to open attachments (within a reasonable size). I get a 1-page xls attachment, try to open it, it downloads it onto my phone first (like the blackberry does), I try to open it … nothing. No message that the file is too big, can’t be read, just nothing. So, I figure it can’t open it and try to delete it. There’s no little trash-can icon in this screen to delete it! So, I delete the email, but the download is still there, still unable to be deleted. Now, would the software that I can’t [install onto] a Mac take care of this? No idea!
And here’s another thing people who are converting from any PDA to the Instinct need to be aware of regarding their emails (and this is not written in the manual!) … it acts as another computer, not a PDA, so when you delete your email on your phone, it is deleted from your email account permanently. And unlike a PDA where you can choose to have this feature (turn it on or off), it’s not a choice with the Instinct – it deletes it and that’s it. I was told by Tech Support that deleting it on your phone moves it to the “Deleted” file and you can still access it and select another folder. Well, you have to be fast! Because it only stays in the phone’s “deleted” file until another email comes in, and it does NOT transfer phone-deleted email into your email account’s “deleted” folder! Also, I haven’t been able to figure out how to create different email folders on my phone – that might be another feature that is accessible only from a PC and then synced.
One good feature is that I can upload my contacts into Sprint.com, and then do a wireless sync to make changes. So that information is able to be backed up! Whew!! Have only played with the SprintTV a little – not a whole lot of options on it, and it really uses your batteries up – but they have a back-up battery that can be charged and carried with you.
Anyway, the jury is still out as to whether I, as a mac-user, can make the Instinct function well enough to be able to really use it for my business.
Now, she might have been inviting me to post this here because she thought it’d be a good fit for the blog. Part of me can’t help but wonder if she suggested it because I was the one who suggested the Instinct to her in the first place. Oops.
This isn’t the first time companies have advertised cross platform compatibility and forgotten to actually test it on said systems. I will freely admit it happens far more often from the PC side going to Mac than it does in reverse. I personally believe it’s because Mac users (and programmers) just assume it WON’T work on the PC and so don’t advertise it as such.
The ONE TIME I had the issue with Apple was when I was upgrading to OS X 10.5. For those who are unaware of the process; when you install Bootcamp onto your system and use it to install Windows onto an Apple computer, it used to offer to let you burn a disc of drivers to fully enable all your hardware under Windows (there’s a lot of weird little integrated devices that Windows won’t recognize otherwise). With the 10.5 upgrade, they just put the drivers right on the OSX disc, so you use the same disc in both OSX and Windows.
Only Windows can’t read a disc formatted for Apple OSX . . . so the drivers were stuck where they are. Thankfully I was able to find them online from someone else who was more adept with file extraction in OSX than I was.
My point is this: if you are going to advertise your “something” as being compatible with “something else” shouldn’t you at least TEST IT first? Did you think no one will notice if you don’t?