WarrantyElephant, in a nutshell, is a way to keep track of warranty information and receive alerts when your warranties are going to expire! I definitely recommend going to the website and checking it out. I am actually going to take out my file folder with warrantee cards and move them all to this site sometime later today.

I feel so ripped off! When they first released the iPhone I purchased one at the AT&T store. The price was steep, the phone was cool, and the fact that I had to sign up for more than a basic data plan was less than appealing. I ended up taking my iPhone back on principle – they did not have an open API to develop applications on it.

To have the hands down best phone on the market and restrict improvements from the world at large was something I wasn’t ready to stomach. That is the same mentality that has stopped me from buying anything from Apple for years and years. Sure, it is possible to jailbreak the iPhone and void the support contract and risk not getting updates, or worse turning the phone into a brick. But did I really want to do that when the innovators of the industry should know better?

Worst Exchange Ever

I returned my iPhone and bought a Blackjack II instead. I am still required to have the data plan, but I downgraded it right after the purchase. The OS is Windows Mobile 6 (meaning the development API is well documented) and I could install my own apps on it. I’m not very happy with the interface or some of the features, but all in all it isn’t a bad phone. Still, I see my friend with their iPhones and all the functionality I want, plus a rich API and a single repository for purchasing applications, and I wonder why I made the wrong choice.

The Applications Nightmare

Then the nightmare began. I started looking for VPN, SSH, and remote desktop applications for my Blackjack II. I haven’t found squat! What’s worse, every time I search for applications I end up at this horrible Microsoft site that reminds me of a forgotten orphan child. They have an application download section – that requires registration forfull access – with about 4 applications.

Wish List

All I really need is a VPN client that supports common VPN configurations and an SSH client. I remote manage some important servers for my job, and if I’m away from my desk I will have no way with this expensive “smart phone” to access these resources. I will continue my search and maybe if I get enough requests I’ll go ahead and code my own. If you think this is a good idea, let me know and I’ll start asking for feature requests and other developers.

But that is not the topic for this article. The keyboard, when functional, is absolutely wonderful, and I recommend it to anyone who does a lot of typing. The reason for this post is actually my 1 year old daughter, her effect on my oh so wonderful keyboard, and why I think Microsoft ultimately failed here.

She’s awesome! She runs around the house, smiles and laughs at everything I say (even if it isn’t funny), and generally makes my world great. But, she tends to be a bit clumsy, as most 1 year olds are, and today she showed me that Microsoft really sucks it up at designing fool proof hardware.

I set up my laptop in the living room when I work from home and watch her while my wife goes to school. The keyboard on my laptop is pretty terrible. It skips keys sometimes, the shift key get stuck, and these are known problems with this particular model laptop (HP Pavilion dv8315nr). So, I naturally bring my ergo keyboard and hook it up in the living room as well.

Well, today I was busy working on a project and I had a glass of water next to me (hey, programming is hard work and everyone needs to stay hydrate right?). My daughter came running up to me and started grabbing for the glass, and naturally I snatched it up before she could get to it. In doing so, I managed to drop a few drops of water into my keyboard (maybe 6 drops if you compared it to an eye dropper). No big deal I thought, and I took a paper towel and absorbed what I could see, and went about my work.

Everything went swell until around 5 PM. I worked out a bit, and came back to check my email, and noticed that I had trouble typing in www.gmail.com. It came out as www.gmail.om. I figured typo, and went to correct it. Then I noticed that nothing in the lower left hand side of the keyboard worked anymore. z,x,c,v, shift, and alt all failed to register.

“Oh hell” I said to myself. Knowing that water and computer parts don’t mix, I thought the worse, and immediately unplugged the keyboard from the rest of my computer. After popping a few keys off (x,c), I found some more water in the keyboard, but I also found something much more interesting.

Underneath the keys on that part of the keyboard, there is nothing in between the keys and the board that registers key presses. So essentially, the water had gone straight through the keys and directly onto the board, which I’m assuming is shorted out until it dries.

So back to the original point! Why is a big named company like Microsoft still designing hardware like it is supposed to be used in a museum? Here is a company with endless resources, great products, and absolutely failure to recognize that they are in fact the reason that computers are so prevelent in society. Keyboards are no longer just for big computer labs that hook up to the mainframe with signs on the doors that say “No food or drinks.”

Hardware vendors need to start realizing that computers are everywhere, they did this, and they need to design for it. A GREAT example of this being a reality is the IBM thinkpad. They have designed in water protection, drop cage, and other features that protect the computer from daily use and human fallibility.

So even though I’m a small blog in a big Internet, I’m going to propose a challenge to hardware vendors. Start designing your products for the average user who may on occasion drop water in the keyboard and might not want to cough up the money for a new keyboard (or be able to – those diapers, I tell you!). Design them for users who move a lot, work in dusty areas, greasy areas, whatever. You made these possibilities a reality, yet you choose to ignore them to cut costs in production.

I admire the Thinkpad for it’s inginuity and practical protections. I’m actually saving up money for a Thinkpad to replace this pile I have now. I could go with a cheaper computer that may have the same speed and disk space specs as the Thinkpad, but what I really like about the Thinkpad is that they are designed for use by me, faults and all.