Earlier today, I decided to play around with Windows Mobile 6.5. I’ve been itching to re-flash my Tilt (a la HTC Kaiser). How bad can it be, right? Errr… wrong.
After a couple of hours of reading, I got all the parts together… or so I thought. Another 30 minutes later, I replaced the bootloader with HardSPL. It was fairly straight forward. Another hour later after quite a few hard resets and more reading, I realized I downloaded the wrong ROM. It was WM 6.1 instead of 6.5. Another hour later, I got the WM 6.5 ROM loaded. As the phone hard reset, I found myself stuck on the alignment screen where you configure the screen using the stylus to poke various spots on the screen. It was in an endless loop and wouldn’t let me out. Suggestions on the net abound and I tried them all. What didn’t work: the Remote Alignment tool from Code Factory, removing Welcome.lnk from Windows Startup, adding Welcome.Not to everywhere. Some people even go so far to open the whole thing up to re-seat the screen.
So I spent an hour opening the phone, re-seating all the parts. No help from that… except I did impress my wife with knowing what a Torx wrench is *AND* having a set … After 3 hours struggling with the alignment screen, the final solution was to pretend the screen was 1 inch square just to get through the process and then change the calibration via a remote registry editor (CERegEdit).
Then I spent the next 2 hours figuring out how to use WM 6.5, hooking it back up to AT&T, re-establishing the data connection, setting email, calendar, Activesync, yadda yadda yadda. It has be without a doubt the most painful thing I’ve done in the past 12 months.
As I work through all the problems in my head, I came to one conclusion. All these problems are caused by choices. Choices always complicate things. When choices interact, the cascade effect can change the scenario into a mind boggling web of loops with as many dead ends as there are desirable exits. From half a dozen bootloaders, to a dozen Wm 6.5 ROMs each with another 5 or 6 versions from different people, to dozens of utilities, to countless message threads in hundreds of forums. My mind has melted over the past 10 hours. All because of choices.
This lead me to one revelation: In technology, choices are for those who tinkers. Normal people do not value the shear volume of choices because 1) choices simply add to confusion (think about the last time someone tries to pick out a cell phone), and 2) the web of dead ends is paralyzingly unproductive. On the other hand, those who value choices are not really looking for the result. Instead, it is the tinkerers who enjoy navigating the confusion, escaping pitfalls, and come out alive. To them, it is the process that was valuable.
Tinkerbell does not use a Mac because there is nothing she can tinker with. Tinkerbell uses unix.
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