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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."

5 of 401 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Can't believe they released this shit by Threni · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They released the Kin. Apparently they don't do market research either.

    It's probably just the phone sending periodic screenshots back to base so they can keep an eye on what you're downloading or something...

  2. Thought there was no "idle" mode... by Kenja · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wasn't the whole point of these new phones all the little windows constantly being updated with the latest Twitter, etc data?

    --

    "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
  3. This is by design by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    At the recent Microsoft TechEd, pretty much all of the Windows 7 talks and tutorials were about how cloudy Phone 7 was and how it just used Facebook and all that other stuff directly and so on and so forth.

    I asked a couple of different people whether this would mean it would chew a bunch of bandwidth, and the impression I got was that (to paraphrase) "Pretty much everyone is going to have decent data plans these days anyway, so we don't think it's a problem".

    The Windows 7 phone is chatty by design, I think they just expect data plans to catch up with it's usage until it's not a problem any more.

    1. Re:This is by design by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You're right. Windows Phone 7 is very cloud-focused -- so much that they didn't bother to expose the APIs for local databases. The data usage is definitely going to be higher than other less-connected devices. My best guess is that these people might have unrealistic expectations as to the amount of data these services use and are getting excessive push notifications, either from having too many live tiles or just ones that update too frequently. Next to that, a live tile might be crashing and perhaps the phone is sending debug information back home. The reports of using 3G even when wifi is available are interesting though, and suggest there might be another problem.

      That said, in my experience it still doesn't use a significant amount of data. I have a Windows Phone 7 device, and am using a lot of those cloud services. Instant email sync for two accounts (one fairly high-traffic), twitter, a few other live tiles, and the tracking service that occasionally wakes up GPS to ping MS with your location in case you lose your phone. When I'm at home it all goes over wifi like it's supposed to. I'm about 2/3rd of the way through my billing cycle and I'm still very very far under my bandwidth limit.

  4. Disguise by Kenshin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think Apple's antenna testing problems may be due to the fact that the iPhone 4 was always encased in a plastic disguise while outside the lab, so the tester's hand never actually came into contact with the antenna.

    It didn't come out of its disguise until it was in mass production, and actual users couldn't wrap their hands around it, triggering the antenna problem, until it was available.

    So, extreme secrecy is to blame for this. Maybe next time they'll find a way to test it naked outside the lab. :P

    --

    Does it make you happy you're so strange?