Larry’s Personal & Tech ramblings

I’ve had a vested interest in Windows Mobile devices since the very beginning because of my many years of Desktop Windows programming experience. It’s definitely a big advantage for Microsoft to allow developers to leverage their programming experience from the desktop onto mobile devices. Microsoft’s design philosophy seems to have been to bring as much of the desktop operating system as possible onto battery powered devices and put a new face on it which fits the PDA/Phone paradigm. The obvious advantage to this is being able to port code easily between the desktop and mobile devices. What I’ve been discovering more lately is that the one fatal flaw in this design is a non-issue for many (like me) and a deal breaker for others.

The problem I’m talking about is application and memory management on Windows Mobile. The current scheme allows the users to run as many simultaneous applications as they like. This is usually a good thing and allows mobile devices to multi-task just like the desktop version of Windows. The bad thing is that Microsoft discourages the “close button” and “exit option” from mobile applications. Instead they claim that the system will close applications automatically when resources get low. This is the fatal flaw.

Let’s suppose that your application is about to run on a phone that’s got a bunch of other applications running. Memory is running low, but there’s enough memory to run the EXE, but not enough to allocate space for the work that the app wants to do. The application is allowed to run and then gets a failing error code when it tries to allocate memory. The automatic memory management doesn’t appear to kick in because the app did succeed in getting loaded. The application tells the user that there’s not enough memory to do the work, so the user must go through many manual steps to shut down other programs to free up some memory.

This scenario probably occurs frequently with certain users of Windows Mobile products. Those users who run various software applications and don’t shut down their phones at the end of each day. As the days pass and they run different programs, the phone gets more and more cluttered with running programs and will get slower and more problematic as resources are used up. A friend of mine clued me into this situation recently and it dawned on me that this is probably a big issue for many users. My experience with Windows Mobile devices is that the operating system and applications work excellently and I am thoroughly satisfied with my phone/pda devices (I shut them down every day). I could see how many people would criticize Windows running on phones for the reason stated above. What’s the solution? My first idea would be to encourage application developers to include a real “Close” and “Exit” option on their mobile applications. The second idea would be to educate people to shut down their devices at the end of each day when they set them to charge. I don’t think there can really be any good automatic process inside of Windows which fixes this situation. Perhaps a sentinel application which pops up when resources are getting low and gives the user the choice of shutting down some applications. Anyone have an idea?