2 posts tagged “bug”

Amazon.com's iPhone app has an interesting feature called "Amazon Remembers" where you can take a photo or something, wait a while, and then it magically tells you what the product is and what the best price they could find for it was. The idea, obviously, is you can go to the store, take a photo of something you're interested in buying, and see if there might be a better deal on the same product online somewhere. And for this, it works pretty well. But what happens if you abuse it? Amazon has at least to an extent anticipated the kind of misuse I'm thinking of here, as you're forced to take a photo, rather than take one from your existing library -- meaning you can't just put some silly photos in the library and pump them to Amazon to see how it handles them. On the other hand, taking a photo of a computer monitor works just fine. Yay analog hole. Just to see if Amazon loves a good scam as much as I do, I decided to "buy a bridge". I took a photo of Wikipedia's entry on the Brooklyn Bridge. Sure enough, Amazon identified it as the Brooklyn Bridge, and helpfully found a book called "Brooklyn Bridge" that could be bought for just $12. Not bad! Tried the Golden Gate Bridge next, which produced a photo of the bridge, along with a link to a poster of it. Two for two! Well, kind of, it's not selling me the actual bridge, but just products that mention it. Still, pending someone putting up the actual bridges for sale online somewhere, this will have to do for now. Trying more famous bridges, I try Scotland's Firth of Forth bridge next. This one responded with a poster of the New Hope-Lambertville Bridge in Pennsylvania. A fine bridge, to be sure, but not the landmark I was shopping for. Then I tried the Charles Bridge in Prague. Amazon responded with a rather dull poster of a bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So now Amazon is down to 2 for 4 success rate on selling me bridges. Not even that, it's 2 for 4 on representations of the bridges, and 0 for 4 on the actual bridges themselves. Disappointing, I'd hoped for better from them.

While trying to make a call, the phone locked up, then the Phone application crashed a minute or two later when the screen went black.

To get the phone to respond, I had to hold down the home button for several seconds to do the iPhone equivalent of force-quit on the Mac, or ctrl-alt-del on a PC.

When the Phone app came back, the contact database had deleted itself in its entirety.

On the bright side, the Favorites tab still had numbers saved, but they were no longer associated with names. I don't know about you, but I stopped memorizing phone numbers a long time ago, now that cell phones can remember this for me.

"No problem," I think. "If I just turn .Mac push back on, everything will just come back from The Cloud. Except that 45 minutes later, no dice.

So by the time I got home, the database was still empty, so I tried to sync to iTunes. No dice, iTunes keeps locking up when trying to sync the phone.

AWESOME.

Eventually I got it to sync far enough to put the contacts back, but this is a royal pain in the butt. The iPhone 1.0 software never did anything like this, and until now, even on the v2 software, none of the core, bundled apps had crashed on me, even if the third party ones do regularly.

But now I can't trust the built in apps either. Including, most vitally of all, the Phone application.

What is the point of having an phone to begin with, if not to reliably make calls? Argggh.

Man I love the iPhone 2.0 software, let me tell ya.

* * * *

On the bright side, since starting this rant, iTunes is telling me that 2.0.1 just became available. Man this thing better have a truckload of bug fixes. Hoo boy.