Slashdot Mirror
Windows Phone 8 Users Hit Some Snags
symbolset writes "As reported on The Verge, many people are experiencing freezing, rebooting and battery problems on their new Windows Phone 8 devices. This WP8Central thread shows many of the issues. Affected devices include Lumia 920 and HTC 8X." Every phone and every OS has its problems, and happy users probably aren't as vocal; it would be good to know how Windows Phone users who are also iOS and Android users compare them for reliability.
So no vocal complaints from me. Love the phone, wish the app ecosystem were a bit better, especially having been on iOS for many years. I suppose I still have my iPad 3 for that!
My Samsung Character R640 running Symbian is working absolutely flawlessly and is getting battery life of approx 2 weeks. Thanks for asking about Symbian in that summary.
It's good that you're getting better battery life (the "one reboot" is a bit of a stretch), and "several weeks" seems funny since AT&T just started selling them on Nov. 11th. But glad you like your purchase. If you just come here to shill for Ballmer... well that's another story, isn't it? :)
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
But if they wait until it's perfect, then they lose even more mindshare to two very competitive rivals: The domestic US smartphone market is running out of fresh non-preferential users, while the existing user base seems to have binary polarization between Android and iOS in ways that earlier competition between Symbian/Palm/Nokia/Blackberry never produced.
It's a tough market to get into, just now, and the longer they wait the tougher it gets...
So I think that in order to succeed, MSFT has to balance timeliness (as above) vs. hardware (wait too long, and your hardware turns stale), vs. software perfection.
In other words, were MSFT to be perfect at any one of these at the detriment of the other, it would be a far stronger nail in the coffin than a balance of the three.
And to be very clear: Their competitor's products (iOS and Android) are also far from perfect.
The question then, as I see it, is this: Did they balance it correctly to capture enough marketshare to sustain further development?
I personally hope not, given the extraordinary oppressiveness and money-grabbing nature of the walled garden that is Windows 8 on non-x86 platforms (the nature of which was apparently tried-and-tested with the Xbox 360), but I guess we'll see.
Kid-proof tablet..
...and, the one-star comment from your link:
By stop hiring guns to artificially boost up your phone ratings at Amazon. Lumia 900 was a show case of robot reviews. When I am writing this, Lumia 920 has already received five reviews, all of them 5-star. All but one has written a review of another product other than Lumia 920.
DBLA (1 review in total) http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1S7GEDIIDVLKG/ref=cm_cr_dp_pdp
jthom (2 reviews) http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2A941MKMDREPG/ref=cm_cr_dp_pdp
Sup Karma (1 review) http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A4SUJVO0D8DM9/ref=cm_cr_dp_pdp
Ramiro Watson (4 reviews, ALL on different colors of Lumia 920 with different titles) http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1GU6PSZG155ND/ref=cm_cr_pr_pdp
joseasilvestre (1 review) http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3RR13YM1XGXNU/ref=cm_cr_pr_pdp
...the nokia/ms adulation in those reviews makes the apple/droid camps here appear subdued.
cheers,