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Microsoft Looking Into Windows Phone 7's 'Excessive' Data Use
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."
Seriously, does no one do field testing anymore?
It's the normal tracking mechanisms of any cell phone: maps, GPS, app updates.
Windows 7 Phone just sends it in powerpoint format.
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?"
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.
That Windows Genuine Advantage isn't going to validate itself....
It's called Windows Phone 7 because it uses 7GB of data per month in standby mode.
- midtoad
Umwelt schützen, Fahrrad benützen
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"
I noticed the line at the end of the BBC article and couldn't believe what I was reading - does WP7 actually lack copy-n-paste capabilities? Apple took some justified shit for waiting years to include that capability in iPhoneOS. If that's for real, then WP7 deserves its unpopularity.
I had a chance to play with a WP7 device at a big box tech retailer on NYE (oddly, mere moments before getting an iPhone after a spontaneous discussion with my partner about my former piece-o-junk phone[0]). The interface was snappy, but it was pretty obvious why - solid colours, simple text. I have to wonder how well a WP7 device would operate under load with some third-party software installed.
[0] An LG Neon TE365F. Go ahead and laugh, I deserve it for purchasing such a turd.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
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.
Wow, that actually makes sense.
My experience with Windows started at 3.1. I was an NT early adopter but had to support Windows 95/98/ME. About the time I noticed that the Plus! pack for Windows XP was bigger than the entire OS and Plus! distribution for 98, I realized that every release was bigger, in some cases a LOT bigger, and slower. In some cases, a LOT slower.
It seemed like Microsoft was betting HEAVILY that computer speed and storage prices would continue to keep up with the bloat. It's possible that when Vista came out and initially had poor performance on the hardware at the time, the issue wasn't really that Vista was too slow but that the hardware that users had on their desk did not progress as much as Microsoft had been betting it would. Eventually the hardware did catch up and Vista runs fine now.
I had similar experiences (although not for as long a time) with Windows Mobile. I had a Windows Mobile 5 phone and it was a pig. I had to reboot it regularly and doing any operation beyond initiating or answering calls was an exercise in patience.
When Mobile 6 became available, I jumped on it.
And it was *worse*. I now realize that this is probably because I had not jumped the gap to the next generation hardware.
And so, I'm not surprised at all that the design process for Mobile 7 probably included the assumption that we would have significantly faster hardware, on networks of significantly higher capacity *and* speed (which are two different things) and that they may have been a little too optimistic in that regard.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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?
There are a few of us here, though none from Windows Phone team that I know of. Still, if you want to throw tomatoes, this way is okay.
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?