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.
Re:Freezing, rebooting... (Score:5, Insightful)
If all you need are anectodes (Score:5, Insightful)
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]
Re:I don't get it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is actually a Slashdot sting (Score:2, Insightful)
The idea that there are Microsoft fans or users on Slashdot is just tough to accept
yeah i know, those so invested in the beliefs of a reality long past do have significant difficulty accepting change, denial is just one of the stages.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Judging by your post history, you're also a blatant Microsoft shill, so nothing you say should ever be taken seriously.
and with you posting as AC, nothing you say should be taken seriously.
"Phones", in quotes (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This is actually a Slashdot sting (Score:1, Insightful)
That would be the only reason I would even consider returning to windows.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:2, Insightful)
You have to admit that they have a history of giving us some damn good reasons to hate them. I was a huge MS supporter from Windows 3.1 up to Windows Vista. After using Windows Mobile and Vista, I realized that Microsoft lost it completely and made the switch (which wasn't something I was looking forward to doing, but now I'm glad that I did). I just got sick of things being so shitty all the time.
And then there's Internet Explorer.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Ballmer should never be tolerated
ftfy
Re:Freezing, rebooting... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:This is actually a Slashdot sting (Score:2, Insightful)
The "you do too" arguments really should have been left behind when people were old enough that they couldn't easily fit in the sandpit to play with the other kindergarden children, which is why sleazy bastards in politics go for the premptive strike accusing their opponents of the flaws they demonstrate above. They know that any rational pointing out that the accuser is themselves guilty is going to look like a childish sandpit argument long before anyone considers whether it is actually true or not.
Re:Sounds just like Win mobile 6! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Freezing, rebooting... (Score:4, Insightful)
viruses are still a major problem though (and virus scanners for that matter)
Re:This is actually a Slashdot sting (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, can't you see a pattern here: somebody fresh on Slashdot starts posting and quickly exposes opinions that are insufficiently anti-Microsoft. He gets barked at by a few zealots who point out his high UID as something that makes him deficient (I mean six digits, must be a total bandwagon jumper), then he gets modded down regardless of the validity of his comment. The person shrugs and leaves it to the neckbeards.
If that's what the majority of people here actually wants, fine. But then the motto should be "News for Linux neckbeards. Other stuff doesn't matter."
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:This is actually a Slashdot sting (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm definitely not an MS fanboy, but my opinion on Linux usability changed a bit over the past couple of years as well. I work (as I disclosed in some posts earlier) for Nokia and might be biased for that reason, and therefore also feel targeted by your claims. Still, I'm running Linux on my desktop and laptop at home, I didn't recommend WP7(.5) as an alternative for Android or iPhone for Power-Users (even though I might have recommended the UI), because I stick to my own opinion and I don't want to burn my reputation, here or elsewhere, out of wrong sense of loyalty to my employer. But I also couldn't recommend Android or iPhone, because my enthusiasm for Open Source is driven by my enthusiasm for people to own their own data and devices.
Windows Phone 8 is the first system I do recommend usability- and feature-wise as an alternative to Android or iOS. Since I was able to use a Lumia 820 for test purpose for some time, I can also claim that the stability is OK (Since I test versions under development, my experience might not match the consumer experience, but should be expected to be rather more unstable. Still, while it was not perfect yet I admit, it is quite good. I have some friends using Android and saw more reboots on their devices).
From a privacy point of view I still think, MeeGo would have been better because an Open Source System can be reviewed to check which data is transmitted to whom, but the WP8 concepts are still an improvement compared to Android or iPhone. And while Android might be theoretically open source, this argument is moot for a locked phone with pre-compiled version and closed source drivers in kernel space.
Since in WP8 each contact is associated to an account, the different accounts are never merged. That's the reason WP is afaik the first mobile phone system capable to properly manage multiple active sync accounts. If I want contacts to be only on my phone, I just configure a fake account with invalid server name and associate contacts with this account => they will not be synchronized. Very simple, very straight-forward, but a hack; however, the new API should allow to implement a local phonebook which will be fully integrated in peoples hub without synchronizing it to any server. I'd expect such an app to be available soon, also I'm not particularly waiting for it. The better solution is to configure my own ActiveSync-Server. In my case it is Zarafa on Fedora17 and can be reached via dynamic dns name; if you can't have your computer online 24/7, setting it up at home and attaching it to a WLAN router is also a viable option.
Even though I do love the technical side of the N9 and was quite sad that the system was abandoned in favour of WP, I do understand the reasoning behind, and I also understand the decision to go for WP rather than Android, even though WP7 was not competitive enough and WP8 still a year away: It would have been quite difficult to establish Nokia Maps on Android in spite of the better map data and better feature sets, because Google is quite protective of their own services. (http://thisismynext.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit-motorola-samsung/)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Windows was feature complete at XP (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No issue with my Lumia 920 (Score:0, Insightful)
I don't understand all the praise to iPhone and iOS. I get a day out of a charge with limited use (no movies, most email and some web browsing), about an hour talk time. Also, I have apps crashing all the time. iOS however is quite stable, never need to reboot, but do have UI glitches. But what's to crash when nothing runs...
Re:Android is worse (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:No issue with my Lumia 920 (Score:3, Insightful)
Marketing and cognitive dissonance. Also, some people are using the well marketed (but crap) or cheap (and crap) android phones, and think that is the standard.
I'd personally take a Windows Mobile 7 phone over and Android or iOS, but wouldn't actually recommend it to others (works for my uses, but wouldn't work for most people's uses).
I'd recommend others get a *good* Android (more apps, more of what most people would want out of a smartphone).