Does this scenario ring true for you? Out of the blue, your Calendar/Inbox/whatever crashes with an undecipherable error. Whoa, you say, (yes, just like Neo in The Matrix) and select the application again nervously. All your data's there and the rest of your smartphone is carrying on as normal, so you quickly forget the incident. A few weeks later you find yourself with a minute or two to spare and remember the oddity. Hmmm, you think, I wonder if something in the OS is confused - would a reset help? Just in case, you understand. After all, everything's still working fine. So you look for a reset hole. No sign of it. If you're a S60 device owner, you'll eventually decide that simply turning the thing off and then on again will do. For a Nokia 9300 or 9500, you can't even do this, as the device is always on and the OS is always running, 24 hours a day. So you have to wrestle with the back cover and prize out the battery.
This may not be an original observation, but the absence of a reset hole speaks volumes about the stability of Symbian OS and the confidence of the device manufacturers in it. I was on a train the other day and the guy next to me had an XDA IIs, running Windows Mobile. Curious to observe how he used it, I watched him for a few minutes. He started tapping away at the screen in frustration - and then poked his stylus into the handy 'reset' hole in the bottom. A few minutes later he did it again, before putting the device away.
Fast forward to yesterday and I found myself reviewing a 'cutting edge' Windows Mobile, the Orange M5000. Now maybe it's something Orange have done, but the unit wasn't at all stable. In four hours of solid use, I had to reset three times after it stopped responding. And anecdotes from long time Pocket PC owners do indicate that they've become pretty good friends with their reset holes over the years.
A couple of typical modern PDA carry cases. Note that resetting is so taken for granted as an almost daily operation that case makers even build in access to the reset hole. [Boggle]
Let's face it, any Operating System that has got to cope with real time telephony, Internet connections and modern file formats, is going to be mightily complex. So the software in any once device, from any manufacturer, is not going to be totally bug free. Especially once you consider all possible interactions between all possible applications. But I know how I want the OS in my smartphone to behave. If something crashes or freezes, I don't want it to take the rest of the device with it. For example, if my eBook reader decides that it doesn't like a particular file and decides to hang, I'd like to be able to keep editing the Word file I was working on, check my email, and so on. If restarting the miscreant application still doesn't work, I might consider restarting my smartphone.
But only when it's convenient to me. Having to start poking reset holes while in the middle of a train of thought would simply be an immense frustration. How often have you faced resets and restarts on your Symbian or non-Symbian devices? Discuss!