Gonna stream TiVo to my Blackberry, let me catch up on the shows I never get a chance to see (pretty much everything.)

As noted above, pretty much same device/new packaging. The new Dash (let's call it Dash-b) comes with WM 6.1, which is also freely downloadable for the prior Dash (Dash-a) iteration.

No, the Dash isn't an *exciting* phone, but it is a solid performer popular with a lot of fans. Many businesses have standardized upon the Dash and from their good experiences with it continue to specify Dash to their employees. Just-folks appreciate the full keyboard, battery life, and PDA features. Some use it as a texter's phone with email & web added in, others use their Dash as a portable extension of their desktop-based address book & calendar.

The thin body, full keyboard, vertical orientation, candybar design are a good comparison on the Windows Mobile shelf to it's bulkier Blackberry Curve counterpart and helps sell both phones. Overall Shadow / Dash / Wing make a good range of Windows Mobile devices, if not exactly cutting (bleeding?) edge.

By the way, this'll be the second refresh for the Dash-a; it also saw a firmware update about six months ago. The first one fixed some memory-leak issues (MS's fault), this one is a revision point release and highly recommended. As Scott K. helpfully posted it's freely downloadable at .

As above, one reason is server load & bandwidth.

It’s a lot easier (& cheaper) to send out 10,000 updates a day for a few weeks then 250,000 in one mass update.

The second reason is support calls.

Every time an update is sent out some small percentage of machines will fail. It’s almost never the ‘fault’ of the update but some irreproducible combination of new file / bad spot on the hard drive / cosmic radiation / geese enroute somewhere. So spreading out the updates helps keep the support lines from being hammered.

And yes, the third reason is any minimizing any bad rollouts.

TiVo’s worst nightmare has to be sending out an update that bricks some (or all) of their products–badly enough they can’t be fixed automagically/remotely. Even for just 1% of their customers would be huge problem.

Heck, not even bricking 1% of their customers–somehow substantially making things worse in some way for even 1% of their customers would be a PR disaster.

So going slow, in combination with the other reasons given above, is their only sane strategy.