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Microsoft Looking Into Windows Phone 7's 'Excessive' Data Use

Posted by Soulskill on from the time-to-rethink-the-refresh-internet-button dept.

phands writes "A few users are complaining that Windows Phone 7 is eating data plans alive. One user estimates idle data usage at 3-5 Mb per hour. Not good for a phone which seems to be struggling against Android and iPhone."

18 of 401 comments (clear)

  1. Can't believe they released this shit by whong09 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously, does no one do field testing anymore?

    1. Re:Can't believe they released this shit by hobo+sapiens · · Score: 2, Insightful

      as a software developer, I could see how Apple might have missed that. Mind you, it was a boneheaded move and even more boneheaded was to deny it once it became obvious. I guess the Reality Distortion Field really exists at Apple.

      But this, these guys at MSFT aren't even trying. It's sad that companies like MSFT are rewarded with success when it's clear then are just completely phoning it in (pun intended). Though, I do think the Windows 7 Series Millenium Extra Plus CallsForSure Super 7 Series Phone (or whatever they are calling it now) is doomed to fail. For the record, I'll state it here. It will be about as successful as the Zune. Remember those? The Windows phone will have a few rabid followers, and the rest of us who snicker when we hear reports of it being pwned by Ukrainian botnets.

      If a Reality Distortion Field exists in Cupertino, then an alternate reality machine exists at Redmond, one where mediocrity is excellence and complete failure is good enough.

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      blah blah blah
    2. Re:Can't believe they released this shit by Kitkoan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If a Reality Distortion Field exists in Cupertino, then an alternate reality machine exists at Redmond, one where mediocrity is excellence and complete failure is good enough.

      That's pretty much true in any business though. It's part of moral boosting, to make people think and act like they are building a great product during the fact. When it happens, they will still pat themselves on the back, helps their workers keep trying because if you don't you'll either be left with mopey, useless workers or people who quit. Neither one is good for the business and it's a big part of a managers job to prevent it from happening. Businesses that don't do this tend to fail and close up pretty fast.

      --
      Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
    3. Re:Can't believe they released this shit by tyme · · Score: 3, Insightful

      jeffgeno wrote:

      Your experiences and DO NOT BUY recommendation for the old OS are irrelevant.

      Really? Really?!? In what corrupt and twisted world do you live in where previous products and services from a company are irrelevant to evaluating whether or not to buy current products or services from that company?

      What are they teaching the kids these days?

      --
      just a ghost in the machine.
    4. Re:Can't believe they released this shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
      So a guy is a web site reality distortion field is commenting about the redmond reality distortion field.

      Do /. a favor. Never link to this site again. There are enough intelligent people who choose not to attack others through web sit design that we do not need to patronize those who do.

    5. Re:Can't believe they released this shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I did the same for many years. I know *WHY* they did it on sims. The hardware was not up to the task of actually running that POS os. Never mind activesync is the biggest POS software.

      I also met over the years many of the guys working on the low level stuff. I would goto the classes thinking 'I must be missing something'. The same people would be in those classes asking fundamental C/make problems. I would ask 'what do you do?' 'oh I write the device driver for xyz'. When I would get back home I would instruct my test teams to crawl thru driver XYZ and fix it or file as many bugs as you find. It was a seriously broken system ground up. The software to debug sucked. The drivers sucked. The build system sucked. It sucked all around. The API was not quite Win32. The hardware was 'okayish' but not up to the task of CE. There is a reason linux/iOS/FreeBSD is eating MS's lunch in that market. The tools are better to use, and the APIs are actually 99% the same. There is a reason MS is in a dominate position on the desktop. The visual studio tools are way better than what everyone else has. In the mobile market the tools blow ass.

      Balmer may scream 'developers' but they make some dreadful mobile dev tools. Its like they actually want to punish us to use their software. It may be better now. But a couple of years ago it was pretty pitiful.

    6. Re:Can't believe they released this shit by h4rr4r · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is total bullshit. You put the fucking thing in a Faraday cage that has a tiny little antenna in it that you can control the power too.

      You don't test devices like this by just walking around with them.

    7. Re:Can't believe they released this shit by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think that a lot of the problems that Microsoft (and Apple) have has to do with management rather than incompetent employees. Everyone I've talked to who works at both MS and Apple know what they are doing, but rather management wants them to do it a different way. Just look at the Apple III, it wasn't a huge commercial failure because Apple's engineers didn't know that they needed a way to dissipate heat from the computer, but it was a huge commercial failure because Steve Jobs forbid them from using the most reliable way to dissipate heat in hopes of making a "silent" computer. Its things like that, those upper-level or mid-level management decisions that force logic-driven people to act illogically.

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    8. Re:Can't believe they released this shit by DJRumpy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Either that or end users have installed apps that are sending data without their knowledge. It's not an uncommon problem, even with regular PC apps.

    9. Re:Can't believe they released this shit by exomondo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The general public rejects 7, if for no other reason, it is different.

      But the public hasn't rejected 7. And the public won't reject something just because it is different, look at smartphones. People embrace change, that's how we have progress.

      I can guarantee you that if, given the choice between two machines of identical specs the only difference being one is running XP and the other is running 7, the vast majority of the general public would choose the XP machine

      No you can't guarantee it, you have no possible way of guaranteeing it. Not only that but your only reasoning for it is that people don't like things that are different, which is obviously bullshit.

    10. Re:Can't believe they released this shit by PsychoSlashDot · · Score: 4, Insightful

      About how hard it was for Apple to the their iPhone 4 through normal use case scenarios for things like antenna reception. Sometimes random things are missed, mixed with what was the testing area like? Might have caused unforeseen fixes (a la iPhone 4 was tested near a cell tower if I remember right, why they missed the antenna reception issue.). Also, it seems most of the complaints are from US users, not global users so it could be something up with how the US carriers are handling the phones, which wouldn't come up in a normal use scenario. Maybe US carriers are trying to ping the phones and the pings are accidentally sending more information then they should?

      I call bullshit.

      If you test your device in best-case-scenarios, you're incompetent. In the case of a cell phone, whose main purpose is to transmit and receive data (be it voice or other), it's inherently obvious that due-diligence requires you to test it extensively in marginal and poor-reception areas. You also test it extensively in high temperature and low temperature environments as well as any other common but extreme circumstances that historic evidence shows impacts battery life. You test it with all radios (Bluetooth, Wifi, 3G) enabled and stepped up to maximum power due to range issues. You extensively test its operation at extremes such as when the memory is almost entirely full due to someone having taken photos without a memory card, or voice memos. You extensively test when bandwidth is limited due to network saturation. You extensively test in crappy markets where more sand is likely to get in your phone than RF signal. You monitor all the important metrics of your phone (battery life, reliability and speed of link, efficiency of data transmission, use of storage memory and so on) in all the miserable hellish, abusive, real-life scenarios that your (hopefully) millions of units shipped will experience day-to-day.

      Once you've tested in all those cases, then you can do whatever you want next door to a cell tower, in climate-controlled circumstances, with empty RAM and plugged into a nuclear power plant for unlimited power and in the single country of your choice.

      Note: yes, I realize proof-of-concept and lab testing comes first. I refer to product-quality and suitability-for-sale testing. The stuff that Apple (and possibly MS) got wrong. -- Hey, those are both the companies that decided it was more important to ship "now, now, now!" than include Cut & Paste in their 1.0 products. They're not cutting corners at all.

      --
      "Oh no... he found the .sig setting."
    11. Re:Can't believe they released this shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      iphone is already there but has zero freedom associated with it.

      It's not really fair to say "zero freedom." Don't compare Apple's policies to what you think they should be; compare them instead to what the carrier Nazis used to enforce.

      Things are moving in the right direction overall, and faster than I would've expected, frankly.

    12. Re:Can't believe they released this shit by QuoteMstr · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The Microsoft of today is nothing like what it was 10, 15 years ago when it became fashionable to hate. If MS is an evil empire today, it's the empire of Brezhnev, not of Stalin. It's generally pretty reasonable and a decent citizen of our software community. It's perfectly legitimate to expect consistency from people, but companies are composed of people, and to a large extent, the people at Microsoft are different these days.

      Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft. I hack on Windows.

  2. Easy method to HELP vs. this bandwidth issue...apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Try applying a variation of purpose for an idea I have already implemented on ANDROID:

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1930156&cid=34713952

    Except this time, on this MS product, instead.

    (That is, provided their IP stack is BSD derived, which it most likely is, & that dev. tools like ANDROID's ADB exist for the MS unit)...

    APK

    P.S.=> I mean, hey - First of all: It's YOUR MONEY & online speed + security, after all! Secondly/For example, & a single one only (because there's a lot more you can use this for)?

    Using HOSTS to block out adbanners & such alone would cut a huge hunk out of the bandwidth usage!

    (Let alone security ideas like the one I noted above that HOSTS files are also good for. THUS? Well - You can "Cut the Chatter" to ANYTHING YOU LIKE, using that technique!)... apk

  3. Re:Why does MS even try anymore? by Fulcrum+of+Evil · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't have control over which DVD drive goes in my xbox, so I'll keep blaming the company I bought it from TYVM.

    --
    "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
  4. Re:Dumb question by exomondo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So most smart phones have a 1ghz chip (just a guess) and windows XP ran well on a1ghz chip, why invent a new crappy W OS like 7?

    Captain Obvious says: Because no-one wants to run Windows XP on their phone.

  5. WHAT? by The+Hatchet · · Score: 1, Insightful

    3-5 mb idle use????? If it is using ANYTHING that isn't directed by the user, it is too much. What a worthless load of shit.

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    Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also, ...
  6. Re:Are there any MS people up here? by dhavleak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't know about consumer sites, but regarding slashdot let me paint you a picture:

    Consider if you will, Fox News. They have a clear tilt. Their viewership is skewed based on that tilt. To maintain their viewership they have to maintain or increase their tilt. It's a closed, positive feedback loop. Fox can't change its tilt. Substitute, say, Huffington Post in place of Fox and you get the same result.

    Slashdot works a little differently -- but it's the same result. More potent in fact, because the feedback loop is much more immediate and direct.

    Example of said tilt -- barely anyone in this thread has anything to say about the issue mentioned in TFA. Not one single piece of insight, or information. Nada. The only discussion is about how bad MS is, and how bad they've been, and how they will continue to be bad, etc. Why even have a topic if that's the case? Why not just have a weekly "discuss how MS sucks" thread? At least that would be honest.

    Another example of said tilt -- any thread involving DRM.

    Also -- any comment by Miguel De Icaza.

    Slashdot has chosen its sides a long time ago. There are voices of dissent or voices of reason from time to time, but they always get drowned out, and suppressed (modded down) by the groupthinkers/lemmings.

    So finally, coming back to your question:

    And they don't even bother with Slashdot or any consumer site that says their product is crap?

    Why would anyone who is disliked by slashdot bother to read it then? What insight can they gain from it? What will they come away with, other than the opinion that they cannot get any useful criticism from this site, and they cannot ever 'win' over this crowd, so why even try?