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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!
I have not faced a single, tiny issue with Windows Phone 8. I have not used it for the past 1 month. Actually I have not used it for the past 1 year or even more.
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.
They're getting all the Microsoft shills to post in defense of this knowing they're the only ones that would claim to own a Windows 8 phone.
I've had a Windows Phone (7 and then 7.5) and I think I can count the total number of reboots during that time on one hand. It's extremely stable, more so than any other smartphone or even feature phone I've ever owned. I'm excited to get a Windows Phone 8 (probably the 920) but it's a huge rewrite so I would expect a few quirks here and there at first.
Not since last decade.
All you needed was this keyboard
hilarious
Gee, I've had two friends in the last week also report their iphone 5s locking up and freezing. Guess this is âoenewsâ as well. And oh, here's an Apple forum with ooo a whole 25 replies on it about the iphone 5 freezing.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4396519?start=0&tstart=0
So how bout some real comparisons here instead of cherrypicking? How bout a satisfaction survey of 920 owners? Maybe some real journalistic work perhaps? How bout numerically compare the satisfaction of 920 owners to the rest of the field? Too defensible? Too much work?
http://www.amazon.com/Nokia-Lumia-920-Windows-Phone/product-reviews/B00A2V7FCS/ref=sr_1_2_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
Btw, one SKU of the Lumia is currently #3 across all carriers on Amazon and moving up every day despite limited production. Whereâ(TM)s the story on that?
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Cell-Phones-Accessories-Service-Plans/zgbs/wireless/2407747011/ref=zg_bs_nav_cps_1_cps
Jokes aside, Microsoft had to make the "perfect" phone to fight against iOS and Android. Perfect in a way that that kind of problem (freeze, reboot) doesn't happen - the interface itself is another story. These flaws demonstrate (again) how thick is MS management problem. Ballmer should never have tolerated a phone that buggy to be publicly sold.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Please don't confuse a bump in a major version number with a "huge rewrite". It's marketing for "we added more features," no "we've rewritten this for the seventh time."
Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 still had GDI-related vulnerabilities in WMF/EMF handling left over from the Windows 3.0 days... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms08-021
Windows Phone 7 was based on the WinCE kernel, Windows Phone 8 is based on the WinNT kernel. if that's not a "huge rewrite", I don't know what is.
I've got an LG Optimus 7, running Win phone 7 Mango - it reboots daily, especially while in the "messages" (ie, SMS) app.
Then again I've read that's common on the LG Optimus specifically.
I'm using the standard apps, plus Exchange mail integration only.
When it's not rebooting, as a basic phone + email reader, it's not bad. My old Nokia "dumb" phone also worked fine as a basic phone with twice the standby time.
I don't think I'll "upgrade" to Windows 8 phone, though
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.
so you stopped using windows since last decade then?
he tripped over the hole where the start menu used to be
To be fair, not many use it on the desktop.
Oh that; it's just the liberal-industrial War on Christmas. Nothing to see, please move along.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Hello,
It would be interesting to know the scope of the problem(s), and how to exercise the(se) bug(s).
I have had a Nokia Lumia 920 for just under a week now (replacing my year old Nokia Lumia 900) and have not noted any performance or battery-life related issues with it. Admittedly, I have not done that much with it yet, as I am still reloading applications onto it (an area which is keen for improvement), but I have to say it has worked consistently without problem.
I wonder if the problems are due to a specific application or manufacturer-applied configuration.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
It's less a rewrite and more a port. I imagine they could run Windows Phone on x86, they run Windows 8 on ARM (Windows RT) after all.
The funny thing is that vulnerabilities affecting Windows 8 may also affect Windows RT and Windows Phone 8. And if it's one they can trace back like the WMF/EMF bug the GP cited...
I stopped worrying about battery life when I finally made the mental leap from "it's a phone with lots of features" to "it's cool little computer that also makes phone calls."
Considering all that I use it for, sixteen to twenty hours on a charge is pretty damned good for a computer that fits in my pocket.
FWIW - Nexus S Android GB, ICS, JB: No really crashes or serious problems. CM9 on the same phone - lots of wierdness.
Three Squirrels
As if your bias wasn't already apparent now your admitting to being a Microsoft shill. God you shills are stupid.
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..
Seven doesn't really crash at all. Same for SP3 crashes very rarely if ever. Hence "last decade".
I know I took it to a habit to hibernate my windows machine about four years ago because it doesn't really crash anymore. No need to reboot for any other reason then windows update requiring system restart to apply some updates.
Looks like you confuse some things here... from Wikipedia: Windows CE is a distinct operating system and kernel, rather than a trimmed-down version of desktop Windows.[6] It is not to be confused with Windows Embedded Standard which is an NT-based componentized version of desktop Microsoft Windows.
Trolling is a art!
The way microsoft is doing things, maybe 2013 will be the year of linux on the desktop..
Well we already know 2013 is not going to be Windows on the Phone
Sigh.
The guts of a phone is ridicously complex. I worked for Symbian for ten years and we threw incredible amounts of resources and effort into testing and we still didn't catch all bugs.
Nobody wants to release a device with aggravating bugs. Be it Apple, Nokia or Samsung, they all really do want the best customer experience. Only an idiot would think otherwise. However, they have to release at some point, otherwise the market window is gone on a model they've typically worked on for a year.
There is no conspiracy to screw over customers by giving them crap.
as much as i hate to admit (must... bag.... microshaft....) i use windows 7 at work and most problems are to do with applications that run on it, not the os itself.
viruses are still a major problem though (and virus scanners for that matter)
2012 is already the year of Linux on the desktop. And the desktop is in your pocket. Android/Linux moved more devices last quarter than Windows devices by a ratio of 3:2. Christmas is coming and by then it will be a clean sweep. By the final reports in February we will know that 2012 was the year that Linux came into its own.
If some want to cry "Waah! That's not fair! Mobile is not PC." Well suck it up sunshine. If you are a developer this is all that matters: these are the people who will buy your apps. If you make devices this is all that matters: these are the devices that move units. If you sell devices at retail this is all that matters: this is the stuff that doesn't grow dust on the shelf. People buy the devices with Android on over the devices with Windows on by a ratio of 3:2, and the first thing they do after they turn it on is buy apps and content. The only entity in all the world who cares to split this linguistic hair is Microsoft because they want to maintain the illusion that they are still king of this particular hill. But they are not. They don't own the word "PC" either, or it would be PC(R). There were PCs before Microsoft tried to take ownership of this word, and there will be PCs after we have forgotten their long sordid story. These devices are personal, and they compute. They are personal computers. Heck, some of them are more powerful than an early Cray supercomputer - in your pocket.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Thanks to the joy of distance selling regulations, my wife has had her Lumia 920 returned. It, after a day, decided to freeze approximately 30 minutes after every power cycle. Not only that, the wireless charging doesn't work properly and the operating system is slightly clunky in places (moreso than windows phone 7.5 which tbh wasn't all that bad). It would be a good device if it wasn't for these issues. Oh and the music app is basically a large advertising platform. I've just dumped my Lumia 710 for a Nexus 4, which so far seems reasonable but not anything overly special. She has gone back to her Galaxy ace.
I'm kind of curious how you got Microsoft Office to boot.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
In case you're wondering, yes: This submission was all about identifying the Microsoft shill accounts, not providing interesting meat for discussion.
/submitter. You have been /. trolled. Please burn this account and make another.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
1998 called, they want their Windows complaints back, oddly enough when that stuff was true of Windows OSX still had the problem of apps locking up the whole system, damn that beachball!
Hey, OS X has improved tremendously of late. Now it doesn't need apps to lock the system up - the OS can do it all by itself.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
hhgfhghgfhgf
Try rebooting to see if you get your keyboard back. Then tell us which smartphone you're using.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As a matter of fact, the WP7 "emulator" in the built tools is really just an x86-compiled version of the OS running in a VM. I believe the same of the WP8 "emulator" as well. However, aside from the handful of pieces of assembly and other instruction-set-specific code in the kernels, there's nothing very special about being able to do that. In fact, both CE and NT already had x86 ports, so there's not much special about it at all.
On the other hand, CE and NT are very, very different at higher levels. Although both of them theoretically implement the Win32 API, you'll probably do better porting an app targeting Linux to OpenBSD, or possibly even something more exotic. Yes, they both use POSIX (the same way NT and CE both use Win32) but there's a ton of difference in the details. It may help that NT is close to a superset of CE (porting the reverse direction would be harder) but there's still going to be a fair bit of re-writing involved. CE doesn't really have a concept of user accounts, while they're integral to NT (WP7 had a sort of hacked-together permissions system bolted onto CE, but it bore no resemblance to the NT user account model). WinCE uses a modified FAT filesystem that I'm not even sure there's an NT driver for (it has file modes such as "INROM" which is an indelible read-only attribute, but you can "shadow" the file with a writable one...) while all recent WinNT-based systems use NTFS. CE has a single-rooted filesystem (at least, at the user level) with no drive letters; NTFS has a single-rooted filesystem at the device level, and a DOS-style multi-rooted filesystem at the user level. CE has a bunch of APIs for dealing with things like "CEDB" (CE database) files and mobile functionality, while such things have never been part of NT and would have to either be implemented for it, or the WP7 code that relied on them would have to be re-written. NT drivers and services work differently from CE ones.
I'm sure a lot of code was re-written. Probably nowhere near all of it, but definitely a lot.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
You and I understand the subtle nuances of your post, the tradeoffs between this potential use and that other use, the tug and pull between the developer and the environment provider. You Microsoft ACs have grown quite good at sparring with me. But the end user doesn't have a micro givashit. He just wants to enjoy being empowered by the device to do stuff he couldn't do yesterday. And the stuff he cares about is first: to connect to his loved ones and his lesser loved ones. Second: to share his life with the aforementioned loved ones and any who might be interested. He could give a fuck less about APIs.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I had a Motorola Milestone (international version of the original Droid) for a while, now running a Lumia 800. The Milestone would die at least once a day, and the battery would last maybe 10 hours if I left it completely alone. Even though the Milestone was a flagship Android phone at one point, I could write a giant TL;DR post about the problems I had with that phone.
My Lumia gets over 30 hours of battery on a single charge and has yet to crash or even do anything unexpected in the 6 months I've owned it. The difference in the quality of the phones is so night and day I can't imagine that a WP8 phone would be any worse than an Android.
So, you are comparing an old smartphone with the latest one, and you don't see a problem in that?
Amusing.
Would you like to compare the reliability of your phone with my Nokia 3210?
I've had a Windows Phone 7 phone, including the upgrade of the OS, it's required maybe that many restarts in the past 1.5 years - this is about the same over a given duration as my use of the iPhone4s while over seas, and as some of my friends with good Androids. A lot better than the two crap androids I've had.
Note: I'd actually recommend most people get a good Android phone over a Windows phone, but if you are going to criticize the phone, criticize it on it's flaws, it's got enough of them, don't try to invent shit.
You should mention *which* version of the phone you've had.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).