(New) About Microsoft Smartphone testing (hardware and software)
In fact, the actual hardware received very little integration testing with
the software before going out the door - it just didn't exist during our
development cycle. We did the majority of our testing on PCs (with an
x86-compiled Smartphone build) and in-house-built reference platforms
(SA1100-based devices).
Most of the performance pain you're seeing with the existing 2002 hardware
stems from the flash filesystem and the filesystem algorithms that use it.
Since we were testing on RAM-based systems for the majority of the time, we
didn't spot (in time) some of the features (like contacts filtering in the
dialer, for example) that we probably should have provided an option for
disabling.
That's not intended to be an excuse, but hopefully it's something of an
explanation. Having a persistent store was definitely a trade-off, and our
team made the gamble that not needing a backup battery or losing data due to
complete battery drain was going to be worth the performance hit.
Since then, both the hardware and the software has improved, and persistent
storage is more the norm for mobile devices than it used to be.
Unfortunately, especially in the phone space, it takes a long time for these
improvements to make their way to the end-user.
