I replaced my Samsung Focus at AT&T today. I would have loved to have not entered the store again, but the mishandling of the microSD card issue on Windows Phone 7 left me no choice after I had essentially broken my phone beyond a full resuscitation. Leading up to the Windows Phone 7 launch, I kept myself well abreast of the firestorm that was bound to hit on launch day. Paul Thurrott had done an excellent job getting the word out on his blog and on Windows Weekly that the SD card issue was complex and that AT&T and Samsung were probably not giving consumers proper information.
Leading up to the launch, there were ads for the Samsung Focus toting its user-replacable microSD card. Potentially legitimate emails and tweets from AT&T and Samsung seemed to invite replacing the card, and AT&T was clearly ready to sell additional SD cards in their stores at launch. All along Microsoft had said very little about this issue, but did make it clear to many insiders who cover the company that they had not intended to add microSD card support in the new platform. They only relented at the behest of manufacturers who wanted a quick way to upgrade their devices in the future. This willingness to compromise only doomed the launch because it was clear that nobody knew how to get the message out that the phones were not meant to be user-upgradable.
As Thurrott noted last month and others picked up, adding storage to a Windows Phone requires a hard reset of the phone where an assimilation of the storage would combine internal and SD storage into one cohesive unit that couldn't be separated. There would be no hot swapping of cards, no way to remove the card and put in another and use the device as normal. This situation would have been bearable by itself, but the real issue came when it was revealed that the reason Microsoft opposed this practice in the first place was because they could not verify what cards would perform well on the phone. Slow performance and crash issues could result from similar class ratings and similar company microSD cards. Microsoft managed to get AT&T to spread the word at the last second on launch day, but at that point plenty of people were already waiting to drop in an SD card to try and see if it would work. Besides, there were still stickers on the Focus warning users not to remove the card after adding it, rather than warning them not to do it at all.
As many publications and users soon found out, performance issues were only part of the concern. Engadget editors were dismayed that they had no warning that their card could not even be read by other devices if they chose to remove it from the Focus. Currently, the only known way to flash or wipe a card that's been integrated into a Windows Phone is to put it in a device running Symbian and reset it, hardly a solution for cards that can cost around 80-100 dollars. This is a complete mess that has yet to be sorted out.
As I discovered, though, the problems can run even deeper. After I got my Focus, I dropped in a 32 GB Sandisk class 2 microSD card and hoped for the best. Upon resetting the phone, everything seemed to work brilliantly. I counted myself as lucky and moved on, happy that I had 40 GB to use for all the Zune content I was downloading. That is, until my phone started randomly rebooting after a few days. At first, it did it once every couple days, then every day, then a couple times, and day, and finally it just chose to reboot almost every hour. What was bizarre was the state it rebooted to. It looked like a fresh, wiped state with no apps or any content installed. I would have to reboot the device manually and everything came back as normal. Even weirder, when I dove into Settings in that state, it revealed a meager 16 MB (that's megabytes, not gigabytes) of total storage, with 15+ MB already used.
It was this seemingly arbitrary storage number that made me think that the microSD card I had added had created the problems. I decided that I would try and restore the phone to its original 8 GB state before I worried too much and had to contact AT&T. I removed the SD card, reset the phone, and had a new blank slate to work with. Expecting to see 8 GB of storage, I went into settings only to be mortified at seeing the same 16 MB number listed. This didn't make any sense after resetting the phone without the card, causing me to realize that this phone might be incapable to fully returning to its original state. To even further mortification (which by all rights should mean I'm dead by now), when I stuck the 32 GB SD card back in, the phone started up as normal with all of my apps and personal information as if I had done absolutely nothing in resetting the phone. I reset the phone with the SD card in, removed it, rest it again and was left with the same meaningless 16 MB number.
At that point, I was clearly done and had no choice but to return it to AT&T in exchange for another focus. While I recognize that I created this problem willingly, I have to imagine other people have found themselves unwittingly in the same predicament. Further complicating the issue, I had searched online for others having the same issue of the device rebooting. Many of them had fiddled with adding an SD card like me, but other claimed they hadn't. To me, this only amplifies the microSD card issue because I had no way of knowing if my issues were self-inflicted or a manufacturing defect. AT&T, Samsung, and Microsoft probably could not have handled this in a more confusing way for consumers.
None of this will be a long-term problem in the grand scheme of things for this new platform, but its an issue that has yet to be settled, as evidenced by the fact that I, like others, will be waiting to see if Microsoft and Samsung release a list of 100% approved cards for these phones. For now, I'm stuck with 8 GB of storage and will jump at the chance to bend the rules and try upgrading again. It's no wonder that Microsoft wanted to avoid these problems in the first place, but they deserve every bit of blame for caving and opening the door for manufacturers to derail their plans. A more courageous stance would have avoided this issue that is clouding an otherwise successful launch.