White screen of death

27 Nov 2003

White screen of death

My mobile crashed today. I flipped it open to make a call only to be confronted with my mobile's equivalent of the blue screen of death, except it was white.

At first I suspected I had killed my screen but when I wasn't even able to get a dial tone, knew something else was throwing a wobbly. Reopening my mobile and switching it off and on several times didn't bring it back to life and it wasn't until I finally removed then reinserted the battery that all was well again.

Like all my development mobiles, it is exposed to somewhat ugly testing from time to time and I had been running a series of Flash tests earlier that day although these were nothing I would consider strenuous and hadn't run several times before. I repeated these tests along with the usual mobile activities but was unable to reproduce the crash.

Although I once came across a rather non-viral mobile virus, this is my first and hopefully last mobile crash. Mobile technology is certainly not perfect but crashing mobiles are extremely rare and while the majority of computer users accept 30 billion crashes a year, I don't think mobile users would or should be so forgiving.

Microsoft Smartphone anyone?