Oh Sony Ericsson - the shame, the shame...

Anyone got a Sony Ericsson Xperia? Anyone? How about you at the back, come on, don't be shy, it'll be okay, we won't laugh. Much.

I sometimes wonder whether these guys are really trying to compete. We all know that Android is a lot cheaper (freeer?) than iOS and, in theory, does a lot of the same stuff. Maybe it does more, maybe it does the same things differently, maybe it doesn't do some of the stuff but makes up for it by doing different things. However, I think we can agree that, in the minds of the lovely people at Google and HTC and Samsung and (shudder) Sony Ericsson, it's not a second-rate substitute.

Well, how about actually putting that thought into the design? Unless you're going to start advertising it with the pithy tagline "Well, At Least It's Cheap", you're really going to have to pull your metaphorical (and perhaps literal) fingers out.

Last night, I upgraded the software in the phone.

(When I have done this using the hideous iTunes, it's slow and the poor computer creaks as the bloated load of rubbishware heaves the latest iOS onto the iPod but it does the job and leaves the shiny toy ready to go. Top marks for functionality.)

Sony Ericsson's laughable approach was to put up a warning that ALL my data would be lost and that I should get an app to back it all up before starting.

Pardon?

If I employed a decorator and he told me that, unless I put all my furniture in storage myself (with no help from him), he was going to remove and destroy it all, I don't think I would employ him.

Yet it's okay for Sony Ericsson to decide that anyone who wants to replace the horrific software that came with the phone with a better, newer version deserves to lose all their digital possessions?

Is this incompetence, getting what one pays for or just low-quality programming? Maybe it's all three. Please don't say, "Get an Apple" - that's fine if you want to throw many hundreds of pounds into solving the problem but I reckon that if Google are going to go to the trouble of writing an operating system at all, it's comparatively a doddle to write a tiny backup utility that fires up automatically just before upgrade and maybe even starts a tiny restore utility afterwards.

I am happy for Sony Ericsson to take this idea royalty-free as long as they don't charge anyone who benefits from it.

On the positive note, at least the upgrade utility didn't act like a demented butler. See my previous post about iTunes.