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Microsoft Bug Cellphones Handhelds Windows

Windows Phone 8 Users Hit Some Snags 391

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.
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Windows Phone 8 Users Hit Some Snags

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19, 2012 @12:17AM (#42024313)

    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!

    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19, 2012 @02:26AM (#42024777)

      Windows has detected an incoming call and must restart for the changes to take effect. Windows will restart in 1 minute.

      Windows has detected that you've moved to a new location and must restart for the changes to take effect. Windows will restart in 1 minute.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Of course it's defective!

        Which part of "Microsoft Product" did you not understand?

      • by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19, 2012 @04:24AM (#42025195)

        Android will just freeze and be a laggy piece of shit. No warnings though, just a kernel pani-

      • by ByOhTek ( 1181381 ) on Monday November 19, 2012 @06:51AM (#42025677) Journal

        Cute, but I doubt that bad.

        I've had an iPhone4S, a couple of Androids (Samsuck, HTC) and a Windows Mobile 7 phone (HTC).

        Outside of the Samsungs, they've all been exceptionally stable. Apple has the best ecosystem, but IMO is the least user friendly. Android is probably the most user friendly, but tries to be too similar to a desktop system, and feels slightly clunkly. Windows Mobile 7 has a horribly poor selection of apps, almost as user friendly as Android and has a fairly smooth design for mobile setups. Playing with Windows 8 on a desktop, I doubt much has changed, but given the ravamp of the OS, I wouldn't consider buying a phone with it for at least a few months to a year yet, at minimum. Stick with Android.

        The only system I've had anywhere similar a reboot experience as you described was on the Samsung Androids (one was a Transform, the other was the replacement model for a Transform).

        • You know... those phones are re-usable. You don't NEED to get a different one for every call!
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19, 2012 @12:17AM (#42024317)

    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.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    ...on Windows. Isn't that normal?

    • by elabs ( 2539572 ) on Monday November 19, 2012 @12:34AM (#42024373)
      Not since last decade.
      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by crutchy ( 1949900 )
        so you stopped using windows since last decade then?
        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Monday November 19, 2012 @02:16AM (#42024729)

          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.

          • by crutchy ( 1949900 ) on Monday November 19, 2012 @02:33AM (#42024805)
            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)
            • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

              As I pointed above, XP SP3 is pretty much in the same boat. It almost never crashes and only needs to be restarted when updates require it to.

              No idea on mobile windows though, never really used it long enough to form an opinion. Longest time I got to play with WP7/8 was an hour or so messing around with a friend's phone to notice that had less features important to me than my positively ancient nokia 5230.

  • Why are people complaining?

    They told them they where going to give them windows on a phone. They bought windows on a phone. Random reboots, completely unstable, uses up all resources including battery, the only solution is to wipe it out and start over, and even then you end up with a broken device. Sounds like they managed to port the whole windows experience, I don't get the complains. Maybe it's the lack of a blue screen of dead that's bothering them?

    • by elabs ( 2539572 ) on Monday November 19, 2012 @12:33AM (#42024369)
      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.
      • 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 [microsoft.com]

        • by hawguy ( 1600213 ) on Monday November 19, 2012 @12:55AM (#42024461)

          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 [microsoft.com]

          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.

          • by Microlith ( 54737 ) on Monday November 19, 2012 @01:45AM (#42024625)

            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...

            • by cbhacking ( 979169 ) <been_out_cruisin ... AT yahoo DOT com> on Monday November 19, 2012 @05:22AM (#42025393) Homepage Journal

              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.

              • by 21mhz ( 443080 )

                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.

                I used to develop a codebase that worked on both Windows Mobile and the desktop. If you targeted the common subset of Win32, MFC, or ATL/WTL, didn't assume your file paths start with "C:" (which is a bad assumption anyway), and optionalized the platform-exclusive stuff, it was quite OK. There were some annoying quirks on CE, for example, no two DLLs in your process could have the same file name. Maybe the right way was to start on CE or both, then making it work everywhere wasn't that difficult.

        • While there could be the same internals with new sandboxing, the lack of backwards compatibility for old apps along with new development models suggests to me a LOT of rewrite.

      • by dan_barrett ( 259964 ) on Monday November 19, 2012 @12:56AM (#42024465)

        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

      • by symbolset ( 646467 ) * on Monday November 19, 2012 @03:54AM (#42025071) Journal

        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.

    • Perhaps they're just upset that they don't have the cool, new, hip calendar that Google invented, which doesn't include the month of December: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=39692 [google.com]

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      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.
      • by adolf ( 21054 ) <flodadolf@gmail.com> on Monday November 19, 2012 @01:54AM (#42024659) Journal

        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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by crutchy ( 1949900 )

        Ballmer should never be tolerated

        ftfy

  • thanks for asking (Score:4, Interesting)

    by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Monday November 19, 2012 @12:25AM (#42024341)
    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.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The Character, being part of the R-series of low-end CDMA devices destined for carriers such as MetroPCS and US Cellular runs Qualcomm's BREW operating system with TouchWiz Lite as the overlay. Samsung and Nokia never officially ported Symbian to CDMA, Samsung were never allowed to outside of Korea, per the terms of their previous deal with Nokia/Symbian Ltd and Nokia's hostile attitude towards Qualcomm on CDMA patent licensing prevented CDMA Symbian devices from being actively developed for the US.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19, 2012 @12:33AM (#42024367)

    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.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19, 2012 @12:48AM (#42024421)

    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 [apple.com]

    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 [amazon.com]

    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 [amazon.com]

  • by DeathFromSomewhere ( 940915 ) on Monday November 19, 2012 @01:04AM (#42024491)
    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.
    • by _merlin ( 160982 )

      You're comparing Motorola to Nokia. That's always going to come out favouring Nokia, as they've always been better at building phones. A Nokia Android phone would make a Motorola Windows phone look bad, too (if such things existed). Flagship means nothing - it was just the most expensive phone made by Motorola for a while. Motorola can easily make a shit phone expensive.

      • That's always going to come out favouring Nokia, as they've always been better at building phones

        The days of Nokia having a meme associated with their quality of build are gone with their factories to china in part of Elops [continuing] cost cutting exercise.

        • by _merlin ( 160982 )

          The days of Nokia having a meme associated with their quality of build are gone with their factories to china in part of Elops [continuing] cost cutting exercise.

          Oh I'm under no illusion that the legendary Nokia quality of the '90s and early '00s will ever be back, but they've always been. I just said they're better than Motorola. I know that's not saying much, considering how bad Motorola phones have been at least as far back as the v2088.

          • I know that's not saying much, considering how bad Motorola phones have been at least as far back as the v2088.

            I'd be very surprised if it what you are saying is true. The only phone I have ever seen break is my original iPhone which snapped at the dock. Even the cheapest phones are pretty study today [I think even the cheap materials have got better], and generally suffer either "design problems" like iPhones antenna/camera problems or OS problems like Windows has here, Android on the whole has seemed pretty immune, even Apple seem to clear their release problems up pretty quickly although its hard to tell they are

    • by X.25 ( 255792 ) on Monday November 19, 2012 @06:32AM (#42025601)

      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?

  • edge cases? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Aryeh Goretsky ( 129230 ) on Monday November 19, 2012 @01:39AM (#42024601) Homepage

    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

    • by 21mhz ( 443080 )

      I've read reports where people have narrowed at least some battery churn to a buggy IMAP implementation when working with Google Mail. Maybe it's the GMail server doing something unexpected, but that's still a client bug.
      Others point at NFC. I haven't used WP8 yet to check.

  • by rueger ( 210566 ) * on Monday November 19, 2012 @01:51AM (#42024645) Homepage
    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.
  • by thestudio_bob ( 894258 ) on Monday November 19, 2012 @02:06AM (#42024695)

    Every phone and every OS has its problems, and happy users probably aren't as vocal

    Fuck that! Take your beatings like iPhone and Android. Jeezo, Microsoft (and your shills) you're a frick'n baby.

  • they left us with a December [arstechnica.com].

    It sounds as if you can't expect much robustness from smartphones these days, can you?

  • by pointyhat ( 2649443 ) on Monday November 19, 2012 @03:29AM (#42024975)
    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.

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