Software development is, of course, an entirely different discipline to hardware design and manufacture, so I can forgive some manufacturers of good hardware if they are a little short in the programmer department, but for some there is no excuse.
Take my brand new Treo 650, as capable a smartphone as you could ever want: a fast processor, PalmOS 5.4, a big and bright screen, excellent expansion capabilities and a nice miniature qwerty keyboard. But good as it is, the Treo does not even come close to its true capabilities out of the box because the bundled software leaves a lot to be desired, to put it very politely.
For instance, the built-in dial pad looks primitive next to some third-party apps that I have tried. So does the ringtone manager. The volume control is useless, because it does not support changing the different device settings independently, despite the fact that the hardware and OS can do this.
There is no built-in way to turn off the top LED which is very bright - bright enough to flash a giant green pattern on my bedroom ceiling at night. There is no usable voice recorder. The supplied e-book reader is crippled and confusing. Word and Excel are useless on such a small screen, and fonts are limited without a third party hack.
Graffiti, Palm's marvellous handwriting recognition system for handhelds, is actually included on the Treo. You just cannot get to it. It is in the ROM, but switched off. Who decided that this was a good idea?
The miniature qwerty keyboard designer? Now the little keyboard is really nice, and makes a good way to surprise your friends with the speed and clarity of your text messages, but Graffiti is just so handy for all sorts of things. So it is off to find yet another third party app which will enable it.
Perhaps the most brain-dead thing of all is that Graffiti-style shortcuts are included on every menu item, fooling you into thinking that making quick strokes with your stylus will actually do something useful.
I seriously want to see some of the minutes of the meetings where these decisions were made. The 650 is an outstanding piece of hardware, and it irks me that I have to spend hundreds - yes hundreds - of dollars on third party applications if I want to use it properly.
In some ways this is worse than graphics and network card manufacturers providing poor drivers (yes ATi and 3Com, I am looking at you). The 650 is not a single-purpose peripheral but an entire computer platform, complete with RAM, OS, CPU, storage, clock, graphics chip and everything else that you would find in any desktop PC. To cripple it so much is entirely incomprehensible to me.
Perhaps we are just living in a world where the mediocre is the enemy of the good. Still I cannot deny the size of the market for third-party applications. Now if I could just find some easy way to develop my own apps for PalmOS, I would have it made.
Mail me if you have seen this phenomenon somewhere before...
(Charl Bergkamp is an overworked, underpaid systems support engineer in the Lambda Bureau, the ICT department of the Ministry of Boards, Committees and Working Groups. He would love to hear from kindred spirits in the ICT corporate world. Send tip-offs, hints and blatant accusations to charl.bergkamp@gmail.com).