Sunday, November 8, 2009

Companies And The Love of Proprietary Formats

I mentioned in an old post how to extract SMS messages from a Nokia .NBU backup file. Today I had to suffer, and sacrifice 2 bunnies and a goat, to get 1 SMS messages that was saved in the Drafts directory in one of the backup files I had of my, piece of crap, Nokia 9500.

The reason I couldn't use the same software in my old post is that it couldn't see the Drafts directory, and since Nokia had decided to create its own format for backup files and NOT provide ANY extraction functionality, I had to look for programs to do that for me.

How long has it been for companies like Nokia in the market so far? Or for any mobile phone maker company for that matter? For the sake of simplicity, let's say 5 years.
In those 5 years, I'm yet to see a company that makes mobile phones, and provide software that properly backups, restores and is able to extract data from those bloody backup files!

I could never understand why such companies decided to lock up OUR data in a weird format. To make it worse, they won't even provide decent functionality in their crippled softwares!

Apart from Nokia's mindless lack of extraction features, Sony has decided that SMS is not important and as such, it will not be backed up for you. Oh, guess what, you won't notice until after you've formatted your mobile and in the process of restoring what you think is a backup.

My sister had lost all her SMS messages because of such idiocy. Luckily, she didn't have messages with critical information. Learning from that lesson, I searched for FREE software that did a proper & decent full backup when the time came to backup my mom's mobile. (My mother would've slaughtered me and grilled me if any of her messages disappeared)

I seriously don't understand the mentality of the monkeys that take decisions on locking the data format. You'd think they might sell other software that provides the lacking features, but they'll be happy to prove you wrong and tell you that you can't get your data unless you restore it. If you are able to.

In the end of this rant, I'd like to say to both Nokia and Sony: Burn in hell you idiots. I'll never buy a phone from you ever again.

P.S.: I used a program called NBUExplorer to extract an SMS from the Drafts directory, which was in another proprietary format (.VMG). I double-clicked that .VMG file and it opened with Nokia's PC Suite and I copid the text to a normal text file. NBUExplorer is free & open source.

1 comment:

Haider said...

It's disgusting how companies like Nokia assess features based on their own needs and requirements, with total disregard for the needs of their customers.

Monkeys indeed.