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< Esato Forum Index > Sony Ericsson / Sony > Symbian phones > Who is the main bug culprit when it comes to bugs? Bookmark topic

There's a lot of talking about bugs in here. Mainly because it's the bugs that gets into our aiming scope because they make our day to day using the phone inconsistent.
But nowadays we have to major "factions" in the Sony Ericsson model of Symbian phones (and the other models too if I'm not mistaken); SE themselves and UIQ.

Now, because when we buy a new SE phone it says "Sony Ericsson" on the shell of it and basically everywhere else when you navigate through it, making the UIQ part a beast in the shadows.
The criticism is in 90% always directed at SE, and I think it's because of the reason stated above. Granted, you did buy an SE phone and therefore SE should be helt responsible as such, but I'm more into thinking that UIQ has a bigger part in this bug-making than might be thought of.

Is there a way of getting to know who is actually responsible for what error (apart from the all ominous SE)? If the Message-application fails somewhere is this because of bad implementation of code in the UI (making it lean towards UIQ) or could it be that the hwr is acting up because of some erroneous hardware (making it lean towards SE), can I actually try and figure this out?
That way the right errors could get to the right department. I'm sure SE considers most if not all error reports and shoveles them in their right direction but I'd like to get to know my phone down to the base of how it was built.

I'm not all into this circuitry and electronics business, seeing as I'm taking a degree in Software Engineering but I'm interested in the how, what and where of the phone in a bit more extensive way than perhaps most people are.
But instead of trying to go through 1000+ pages of whitepapers and definitions and engineering material, I'm more positive of getting answers from the user base of the device I'm using, because they've *used* the thing. As opposed to the miles and miles of documentation that always assume you either don't know anything or you know everything, which means you're not going to need the documentation in the first place.

Well then, thanks for your time! I'll stick around for quite a while and I'm glad to start getting to know about the forum and what you guru's all can conjure up!
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Posted: 2008-01-10 15:54:29
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...er, I'm not a guru, but usually it's easy to identify where the bugs come from. Since UIQ provides the framework, SE takes care of the UI customisation choices on the last stage, software development limitations, and some integration of certain modules - and the rest of the inbuilt stuff is 3rd party. The messager- app for example.

Not that this really matters, since technically all support questions would go through SE (..which we're all really happy about).

Of course, one qualified guess here would be that most bugs are there because of bad specification and sorry quality testing on the part of SE (on either software developers and the software). ..The messager app, for example.

But then again - 'lots of bugs'.. I don't know - it bears to be mentioned now and again that most(90%?) of the documented bugs so far (reproduceable or not) are tied to certain programs and particular program logic. They're not mysterious bugs showing up at random, say, a couple of times a day after programs 'just start to run more slowly than usual', and things of that sort.

And that's a good feat, really, on every part of the chain. Not that some of the bugs aren't irritating, and that the 'silent treatment' from SE isn't a serious problem - but it's useful to have some perspective on what the problem is, I guess?

And, I mean, that also suggests that if people did a more thorough job of their complaining, we might actually get some useful bug- reports in the end to beat SE over the head with. But let's skip that part of the tale for today..

The service- providers should probably be mentioned as well. It's not nearly as bad as on WM(likely because so few providers have decided to go with the UIQ units), where the bundled versions of the firmware from some providers can run with serious lag - and the same unit can run without lag at all on non- branded software. But it's still a point that some branded p1 firmwares, at least, seem to have some strange behaviour noone else has. For example on the phone- tools. Some of the battery issues also only turn up on branded phones, it seems. Which makes sense, since adding certain hooks for roaming services for example might typically only be available on branded phones, depending on what sort of solution the provider will choose (..platform specific or not, etc).

Anyway - so to conclude: the largest source of bugs are 1. the messenger app, and 2. the SE PC suite. Largely on program errors on specific situations. Which ultimately should make people complain to SE about non- functioning software SE have - if not created completely on their lab - the responsibility for. (At least unless we suddenly find out that UIQ actually didn't document any of the APIs for anything, and SE is basically just guessing whenever they're implementing something - hey, I'm open to alternative theories)..
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Posted: 2008-01-11 01:54:03
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