We had a lot of Windows Mobile news over the past couple days! But, that’s not going to be the focus of today’s column. Today, let’s concentrate on what to do to prevent a catastrophic loss of data. Why are we shifting focus to something so seemingly unrelated to WinMo? Well, because catastrophic failures, leading to data loss, can happen to anyone, at any time – including yours truely. Sure, I had all my email stored on off-site servers. I was monitoring my S.M.A.R.T-enabled hard drive with a toolbar application. I was on a relatively new hard drive. None of that mattered. Read on…
As luck would have it, whilst working on a database and a page for this site, I was experiencing some lagging and freezing. A quick check of my SMART monitoring program (the sole purpose of which is to warn of impending drive failure) indicated that all was fine. The occasional freezes and lags were minor nuisances and my MacBook eventually recovered after every freeze – so I kept working, not the least bit suspicious as to why my super-stable OS X was repeatedly freezing. Then it happened. Everything just stopped, frozen in the middle of saving my latest work. This time, there was no recovery. I sat, watching the little “color wheel” indicating that my MacBook was in the middle of saving. Seconds turned to minutes and I started to really worry. A hard-restart confirmed my worst fear – the hard drive had just up and quit on me (damn Hitachi!).
There was no warning, other than the freezing. My “SMART” hard drive turned out to be pretty stupid. And now I have 120GB’s of unusable hard drive, filled with all my precious data – movies, music, documents, bookmarks, passwords, ongoing projects…all gone with a click of the (damn Hitachi) hard drive’s read head. And guess what? It could happen to you too! Let’s all learn from my unfortunate experience and get that important data backed up, now! Movies and music may not be essential but documents, bookmarks, passwords, and work-related stuff (especially) are back-up worthy, for sure. Back up NOW – here’s how.
And now, for some WinMo news.
Orange got some Windows Mobile love with the launch of Samsung’s i600 BlackJack smartphone. The super-thin smartphone still has its WiFi disabled, but that didn’t stop eager UK subscribers from snatching up all of Orange’s BlackJack stock.
Apple’s got it’s iPhone poised to do some serious market share damage. Analysts, balking at Ballmer’s iPhone rip, are predicting that the iPhone will grab a 6% market share within a year of it’s launch! Windows Mobile fans are going to take some more flak if these predictions pan out. Still, WinMo sure has some staying power – as we saw O2 launch a brand new device, based on an old device, running an old WinMo 5.0 OS. With the projected 20 Million licenses that Microsoft plans to issue for their Windows Mobile OS, we can only hope that Apple doesn’t steal too much of Microsoft’s WinMo market share.
And, Motorola seems to be favoring Italy’s Vodafone to be the launch-host for the new Motorola Q 9h – successor to the Motorola Q. But, at least US ATTingular 8525 users will get an update to enable PTT, and US T-mobile Dash users are getting pre-release access to the leaked Windows Mobile 6.0 upgrade!
Don’t forget to check out that patent application that Microsoft filed for a network of computers, Xbox 360’s, Pocket PC’s and their Zune. That’s a crazy idea if I ever heard one, I’m crossing my fingers on that one!
Hey Dusan, I’m a little too tired to put Symbian on blast today. I gotta get my life back in order 😐