Is WM really worth the effort?

[Guest chucky.egg]

I've taken responsibility for mobiles at work, and the first job is to review networks, tariffs and devices.

I need some help getting this clear in my head...

Now my first thought was "give everyone MS Smartphones", but as I'll also be supporting these devices I quickly re-thought that... of 10 C500s in my immediate office 8 have had significant faults (all 10 have had Quality Control faults).

But some staff need mobile email etc, so then I thought "OK, PPCPE for those people who need extra functions".

I persuaded the boss that £500 for a Prophet was a good investment as a potentially "perfect" Standard Device.

But now, as much as I love the Prophet's built-in WiFi etc etc it just feels like another partially unstable and not fully thought through HTC/MS project.

For example last night, whilst waiting for a call about a family member not likely to be with us long, the thing sat there untouched and repeatedly Soft Reset itself.

Every now and then it forgets about the SD card, and when it does the WiFi can't be enabled either.

And so on, you get the idea

This time yesterday I spent an hour rebuilding this thing by hand to get a "clean" Sprite backup. Now I don't even know if that's stable.

I AM NOT INTERESTED IN GETTING THESE FAULTS FIXED IN THIS THREAD. Please don't post "try this..." comments here

Added to that is the fact that this is one of the few places you can get intelligent help. This place is great but its community led, so there's no guarantee you'll get an answer let alone a solution.

I need convincing that Windows Mobile is reliable enough for a business user.

I can't/wont recommend an unstable device. So if a relatively simple setup can't hack it then I'll have to come up with a better idea.

Symbian (even with its virus issues) is looking more appealing.

Or maybe Nokias with BT and non-phone PDAs.

I'm open to anything so any suggestions or arguments for/against MS/Symbian are welcome (other than "Symbian sucks")

[Guest Monolithix [MVP]]

From experience (and i have a lot!) Symbian is no better or worse than Windows Mobile. For every dodgy C500 theres a dodgy 6680 (you have to love its habbit of refusing to accept calls after switching from a 3G to a 2G cell and back again).

I have several WM5 PPCPE devices that dont soft reset themselves repeatedly, and deep down i'm sure you appriceate that your Prophet is the minority of dodgy devices rather than the majority.

The WM email client is orders of magnitude better than Symbians offering.

Personally, i'd give everyone that needs only calls and texts Nokia 6230i's or SE K750's. Simple to use and suffer no more faults than any other mobiles in that range. Those that need mobile email, give C600's. I got mine yesterday and its fantastic, so many tweaks and improvements that have bugged me for years. They handle calls and SMS perfectly and the email client is absolutely fine for on-the-move access. If they need anything more feature rich than WM5 for SP's offering i'm sure they have laptops. Coupled with a BT GPRS modem over a VPN they should have all bases covered.

[Guest Tech]

ive not had any faults with my handsets including my imate sp5m

at work - everyone has an SPV (ok - 98% of employees do) - sure its an enterprise company but we do have them.

I would suggest you have an orange rep at your company to deal with handset faults etc.... as they will be better at responding and fixing since you will be on their "gold" partner scheme or whatever.