I've got an LG Optimus 7, running Win phone 7 Mango - it reboots daily, especially while in the "messages" (ie, SMS) app.
Then again I've read that's common on the LG Optimus specifically.
I'm using the standard apps, plus Exchange mail integration only.

When it's not rebooting, as a basic phone + email reader, it's not bad. My old Nokia "dumb" phone also worked fine as a basic phone with twice the standby time.

I don't think I'll "upgrade" to Windows 8 phone, though

heh, mine is "woof woof woof"

Rather than using the Phone to do the monitoring and polling, I'd consider using a service on the network at work and then make your phone a client of this service.
An example would be to use Nagios to do the monitoring and then use one of the countless Nagios Clients available to read the monitoring state from the service. You'll get the added bonus of knowing what happens if your Network coverage goes away to fill in the blanks after the event and be able to escalate to someone else if you're not available.

Why is this interesting / amusing ?
Technically using Linux or some other unix as a supernode is fine, probably a better solution than Windows server - but this is Microsoft, the dominant operating system provider; very much the competitor to Linux. they *could* use a competitor's solution but traditionally Microsoft reinvents the wheel rather than do this (see Silverlight, XPS, .NET, Office Open document format, Sync framework for examples)

Choosing Linux rather than their own OS product for this task seems like bad PR especailly after publicly criticising Linux as an insecure, slow, potentially IP-violating OS platform.
You may recall they were "caught" using FreeBSD for hotmail after acquiring that service - and eventually migrated it to Windows.

I'm guessing there will soon be a "WinMin" or Windows server core based platform that hosts this instead of Linux.

over 3 months uptime....So no Windows Updates then?

yep, that's great.
How do you turn the TV on?

Can the plex server do it, or does your TV detect the presence of a video signal and turn itself on automatically?
Can you turn on the TV (and set the AV channel) without picking up the TV remote or a third party remote?

Besides the screen + AV input, and maybe the amp/speakers in the TV, do you use any other TV features? do you use the onboard tuner at all?

That's my point. Make the TV/Amp/media players work together properly first, before duplicating other stuff other devices already do.

We have a Tivo, Wii and LG Blu-Ray all plugged into a Yamaha AV amp, which is connected to a Metz TV.
As a result i need:
Two remotes to watch TV (tivo for channel and amp volume, and the TV remote to turn it on/change the AV channel)

two or three remotes to watch a DVD -
Blu-ray + Amp remote + TV remote

trying to explain this to my mother-in-law is painful to say the least.

It's 2012 and all these devices still can't talk to each other, unless they're all from the same manufacturer. They all have their own, incompatible remote control technologies.

Please, TV and home entertainment equipment manufacturers, thrash out a common control communications standard and go with it - eg XML/SOAP over bluetooth or zigBee, or even HDMI, so I can control ALL my AV gear from one remote interface. I don't really care if it's a logitech-style remote or an android app; just give us something that works across manufacturers so i can have one remote to control them all.

The computing power is readily available and cheap, the frameworks all exist to do it - just choose a standard and implement it.

1080p 100Hz TV is good enough, I don't need or want craptastic 3D or a smart TV interface i'll never use. Just focus on the user experience. Make it easy for normal humans to use AV gear.

Makes wired magazine ($19 per issue) look cheap in comparison, here in Australia

I think CPU speed is less of an issue these days; eg Core2 onwards processors are generally "fast enough" for most users.
Compare the change in noticeable speed between a 386 and 486, or even Pentium vs Pentium 2 or 3, to today's Core2/Athlon vs Core i5/Phenom.
Most people don't notice the jump in CPU performance on modern processors.

The other traditional bottlenecks are rapidly disappearing too, eg a midrange Directx10 graphics card is good enough to play all but the most demanding games these days, and memory and disk speed and capacity are generally outpacing most people's demand.

People will still overclock for the challenge of it, but I think there's no tangible day-to-day benefit anymore.

As someone above mentioned, the real performance battle has moved to portable devices, eg how much performance can you get from a tablet or phone, given a fixed battery capacity?

Hopefully they're building this over a smallish castle + mad scientist lab with convenient skylights, along with the worlds largest knife switch

for what its worth, solve it from the command line in bash with the following.
wget -qO - http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/jsp/forms/generateCaptcha.jsp |grep "</b></span></td>" |sed -e s/\<b\>//g |sed s/\</" "/g |awk '{print $1}'
(Yes its a bit messy but what do you want for 5 mins work.)

Anyone else want to have a go? (in perl maybe?)

When it comes to "for profit" companies: If you're not paying for anything then chances are, you're whats for sale.

Yeah, That sounds like the one. About 12 months ago a bunch of PDP-8 machines still in original packaging came up for auction around the place that were perfect for hobbyists and collectors.
I think I remember reading that Steve Gibson of GRC purchase a handful or so.

Wasn't this like a system they used before GPS that was still in minimal use until recently?
I vaguely remember they still had PDP-8's still in storage as replacement parts