Microsoft Looking Into Windows Phone 7's 'Excessive' Data Use 401
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."
Re:Can't believe they released this shit (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...
Thought there was no "idle" mode... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is by design (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.
Re:This is by design (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.
Re:Can't believe they released this shit (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Can't believe they released this shit (Score:4, Interesting)
If you reward failure you'll get more failure. If you want to maintain morale, tell the team you're sure the next project will go better and that failure is an essential element of later success. You do NOT tell them that was perfect and keep it up.
MS behind everyone else again? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:This is by design -- similar to their OS (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Disguise (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
Re:Are there any MS people up here? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Can't believe they released this shit (Score:3, Interesting)