Lest you think I'm being overly critical of Nokia's design, let me point out that my other multi-purpose handheld unit, namely my WinCE-based GPS, does things quite differently and much better.

The GPS unit has all the basic WinCE firmware code to get the unit up and running in ROM. On a cold boot or hardware reset, it reloads the flash memory from the ROM, guaranteeing a good set of boot code no matter what havoc may have resulted from software gone bad. It then checks the SD card slot to see if there's an Autostart program in the root directory of the SD card, and if so it executes that program. Normal practice is for people to set up a full restore with all their custom apps on the SD card, triggered by the Autostart program, which gets you up and running again in the field in the event of a software disaster when you aren't near a computer.