I realized today once again that cell phones are not nearly as stable as they should be. I have not been receiving any text messages for about a week now, and didn’t think much of it because I really didn’t have any spare time to figure out what was going on. Voice calls were still working fine, which is another reason I didn’t look into the problem any further. The problem got worse today though when my friend IM’d me asking if I was there because he tried to call me twice. He said the first time a message came on saying that my phone had been disconnected, and then the second time it went to my voicemail. After hearing this I looked at my phone. The only message printed on the screen of my phone was “SIM card rejected”. So I turned off the phone, took out the SIM card, and reinserted it. Then I turned the phone back on and everything worked fine. The main question is why I had to do this in the first place?

Phones in my mind are pretty much embedded devices that should have rock solid stability. I don’t expect to have to reboot my phone evey other day like I would a Windows computer. If this was the expectation I would think it to be unacceptable. Apparently phones still need quite a bit of work though before they meet my expectations. Unfortunately this situation only seems to be getting worse. It seems that the first cell phone I had many years ago was much more stable than my current one (I don’t remember ever rebooting my first cell phone). Hopefully someday this stability will be normal and expected; though I fear this situation will only continue to get worse before it gets better. This is probably mainly because of the rush to add every new media feature under the sun to the latest phones without very extensive testing of these features.