WP7 smokes Android and iOS phones in the dust

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BDS23

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 2, 2011
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If you've been checking around ''Ben the PC guy'', he (or was it MS?) made a publicity stunt where he bet $100 that his WP7 phone (should've used a Lumia, not a Titan) is faster than any phone you're holding.


The twist here is that they're measuring 'fast' based on the everyday stuff that you do. Not synthetic benchmarks, real-world things. What do you guys think of WP7 now?
 
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When WP7 is on a Verizon LTE phone and supports WiFi tethering, maybe I'll think about it. Until then...
 
kirbyrj said:
When WP7 is on a Verizon LTE phone and supports WiFi tethering, maybe I'll think about it. Until then...
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Wifi tethering is already supported, they added it in the Mango update.

Verizon LTE phones should be coming... Edit: If Verizon stops turning down great handsets

Edit 2: Looks like Verizon will be getting a CDMA version of the the Nokia Lumia 710 (the same one that's available on T-Mobile now), but Verizon wont be able to sell it until April because T-Mobile payed for exclusivity on the Lumia 710's launch.
 
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I think Nokia making handsets for WP7 is a step in the right direction.
 
I really like WP7.5, but Verizon seems to have little interest in promoting it. They carry only a single Windows phone, the underwhelming HTC Trophy.
 
^ and unfortunately the Lumia 710 is also a bit underwhelming :( at least, compared to the other offerings by HTC and Nokia.
 
Verizon turned down the Lumia 900 because they figured no one would want a high end WP7 phone. Oh well.
 
Badger said:
^ and unfortunately the Lumia 710 is also a bit underwhelming :( at least, compared to the other offerings by HTC and Nokia.
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How is the 710 underwhelming against HTC? And why are you comparing the 710 to a Nokia?
 
Verizon will start accepting W7 phones when they include LTE radios. This is a requirement for any phone being released on Verizon.
 
lodingi said:
Verizon will start accepting W7 phones when they include LTE radios. This is a requirement for any phone being released on Verizon.
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The rumor is that Nokia offered Verizon the Lumia 900 with LTE and they turned it down. :(

BDS23 said:
How is the 710 underwhelming against HTC? And why are you comparing the 710 to a Nokia?
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What? The 710 is made by Nokia, and compared to other current generation phones like the Nokia Lumia 900 or the HTC Titan 2, it's very underwhelming (8gb storage, no front facing camera, small screen, etc). Nokia itself describes the 710 as a starter model made for first-time smart phone buyers.

It's just weird that Verizon would turn down something like the 900, only to get the inferior 710 a few months later (if the rumors of the 710 coming to Verizon in April are true).
 
I didn't know that they turned down the 900! I was actually looking forward to getting a high-end WP7, I'm truly tired of Android and all it's shens. My iPhone is a good phone, I just want to try something different..
 
BDS23 said:
If you've been checking around ''Ben the PC guy'', he (or was it MS?) made a publicity stunt where he bet $100 that his WP7 phone (should've used a Lumia, not a Titan) is faster than any phone you're holding.


The twist here is that they're measuring 'fast' based on the everyday stuff that you do. Not synthetic benchmarks, real-world things. What do you guys think of WP7 now?
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If you've been reading WP7 benchmarks the new HTC phones are the fastest, and Nokia's are the slowest. Despite the nearly identical specs and software somehow they perform differently.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/03/nokia-lumia-800-review/
Surprisingly, though, the benchmarks gave the Titan a clearer lead than we might have predicted. WPBench gave the Lumia 800 an overall score of around 86, versus the Titan's 96. Part of this difference was in proportion to the slower CPU clock speed, but a bigger cause of the disparity was actually the Lumia 800's tardiness in shifting large chunks of data between its memory and storage. Likewise, the Sun Spider Javascript benchmark gave the Lumia 800 a score of 7200ms for surfing on the Web Kit browser, versus 6,500ms for the Titan.
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I've always liked the way MS is going with Windows Phone (competition is good), but I'll only give up Android when you pull it from my cold dead hands. :D
 
Psych2l said:
From the thread title I was expecting hard data, not anecdotal BS :rolleyes:
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I think the point of the competition is supposed to center more around the ease and speed of navigating the GUI, which isn't a completely objective measure when two humans are variables. I don't think anyone is arguing that WP7 is faster than iOS and Android phones in terms of raw throughput of the hardware (at least, I hope no one would argue that).

But, if the two were evenly matched, you'd expect to see "Android-accustomed-people" winning 50% of the time (more or less) on their Android phones against a "WP-accustomed-person" on their Windows Phone.

I think the final tally was something like 33 wins, 3 losses, and 1 draw in favor of Windows Phone, which--anecdotal or not--is pretty convincing that for what WP lacks in hardware, it makes up for in software (at least in this particular test).
 
There's also a difference between a guy who was ready to do all the tasks in the challenge and had the steps in mind already versus someone who's only familiar (as this was at the CES) but not practiced.

Still, the differences are in the seconds so while impressive, it's not gamebreaking either.
 
True, but it wasn't a very challenging task (take a photo and push it to Twitter or Facebook or something like that), and they did give the other people a few practice rounds. But I agree, whether it takes five seconds to upload a picture to Twitter or four, it's not a game changer.

Now if the Android/iOS users had challenged Microsoft to see who could Skype a friend the fastest, things might have gotten a little awkward.
 
I'm a big fan of Android but am actually incredibly impressed by WP7 - my Dad just upgraded to the HTC Radar from using a 9 year old RAZR (remember those?). He's a complete newbie to the smartphone world, so I thought the tile interface would work well for him. On what is supposed to be entry-level hardware, the Radar is a 100% smooth and reasonably quick device - very slick.

Not only does he love the phone but with the Galaxy Nexus still unavailable for GSM carriers (unless you buy off contract) and absolutely no other Android phone of interest, the completely different interface of WP7 looks very appealing.
 
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Did they compare browser speed? Everywhere I've seen, the Galaxy Nexus pretty much beats everything when loading pages, even when it has to load flash content and the competing device doesn't.
 
WP7 has a long ways to go before it "smokes" anything....and limiting one's self to single core cpu is not helping
 
ChronoReverse said:
There's also a difference between a guy who was ready to do all the tasks in the challenge and had the steps in mind already versus someone who's only familiar (as this was at the CES) but not practiced.

Still, the differences are in the seconds so while impressive, it's not gamebreaking either.
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So people that own their phones aren't practiced at using them?
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
WP7 has a long ways to go before it "smokes" anything....and limiting one's self to single core cpu is not helping
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I think that PC folks that remember the days before multi-core CPUs on PCs understand that they aren't a magic bullet for performance, considering that most applications are, even on PC's are single threaded. Windows Phone code is generally very tight for a phone, you just can't do willy nilly things on Windows Phone which does help a great deal with performance at least from a perception standpoint.
 
Randle2I said:
So people that own their phones aren't practiced at using them?
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Aren't _as_ practiced with every single task yes.

For instance, I know that I can take a picture from inside the Facebook app to make the task quicker but this might not be common knowledge nor was it even available in the earliest builds of the Facebook app.
 
ChronoReverse said:
Aren't _as_ practiced with every single task yes.

For instance, I know that I can take a picture from inside the Facebook app to make the task quicker but this might not be common knowledge nor was it even available in the earliest builds of the Facebook app.
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Are you talking about Windows Phone? If so how is using the app faster?
 
No I'm referring to the Android workflow (and presumably iOS too).

Most people would take the picture and then upload it from the gallery but if you do it directly from the app instead it would be quicker.


Kudos to WP7 of course for having a better workflow built in for this.
 
ChronoReverse said:
Kudos to WP7 of course for having a better workflow built in for this.
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And kudos for you for getting Windows Phone. The point of Windows Phone isn't number of cores or resolution or any of that. It's about trying to do things simply and quickly and naturally and in that regard there's little people can say that's negative. Not perfect but yeah, a phone camera should post to FB these days if that's what you want.
 
ChronoReverse said:
No I'm referring to the Android workflow (and presumably iOS too).

Most people would take the picture and then upload it from the gallery but if you do it directly from the app instead it would be quicker.


Kudos to WP7 of course for having a better workflow built in for this.
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I thought every platform allowed you to upload a pic as soon as you took it? On my G-Nex at least, as soon as you take the pic, it gives you all the services available (BT, Picasa, MMS, Google+, Gmail, Gdocs, Skype, Facebook, etc.) to upload the pic to without switching to the Gallary. There's native direct upload services on Android and iOS too.
 
T4rd said:
I thought every platform allowed you to upload a pic as soon as you took it? On my G-Nex at least, as soon as you take the pic, it gives you all the services available (BT, Picasa, MMS, Google+, Gmail, Gdocs, Skype, Facebook, etc.) to upload the pic to without switching to the Gallary. There's native direct upload services on Android and iOS too.
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Is there a single camera app what comes in Android?
 
heatlesssun said:
Is there a single camera app what comes in Android?
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Yes, Android has a native camera app, which is what I'm referring to on my Galaxy Nexus. But I know other manufacturers skin/customize the native camera app too, so I'm not sure what features they offer, but I'm sure they offer the same functionality at least.
 
T4rd said:
Yes, Android has a native camera app, which is what I'm referring to on my Galaxy Nexus. But I know other manufacturers skin/customize the native camera app too, so I'm not sure what features they offer, but I'm sure they offer the same functionality at least.
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This is the problem with a totally open platform if you're a developer. It's extremely difficult to know just what every device offers. Every Windows Phone has a camera that works a certain way. And this would would to iOS as well of course.
 
I think i like customizing my OS more than having a super simple OS, not that Android is not simple...

BDS23 said:
If you've been checking around ''Ben the PC guy'', he (or was it MS?) made a publicity stunt where he bet $100 that his WP7 phone (should've used a Lumia, not a Titan) is faster than any phone you're holding.


The twist here is that they're measuring 'fast' based on the everyday stuff that you do. Not synthetic benchmarks, real-world things. What do you guys think of WP7 now?
Click to expand...
 
W.Feather said:
I think i like customizing my OS more than having a super simple OS, not that Android is not simple...
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And I think in the phone arena there's a bit of split on that one. I've seen tree people at work trade in their Android phones for iPhones, and all of them were computer programmers. The average person simply isn't willing to deal with fucked up phones and complicated, even technical people Complexity is Android's ceiling. Again, anyone that knows me that I'm no Apple fan, indeed I as of a Microsoft fan as it gets. My desktops, laptops, tablets, media players and phones all come from Redmond.

But Apple got it first, people don't want complex and wonky shit when it comes to phones. Sure Android fans love being able to root and all of that, 90% of people buying phones want to press a button and have the shit work. And that's becoming what people expect of computers. Complexity, and I love it at some levels being a Windows tablet fan that loves having a desktop OS that I can manipulate with my fingers, is like having leprosy,
 
Well for Android, it's really only as complex as you make it. The option to root it and then install custom roms is there but most people I know with Android just use it.
 
heatlesssun said:
And kudos for you for getting Windows Phone. The point of Windows Phone isn't number of cores or resolution or any of that. It's about trying to do things simply and quickly and naturally and in that regard there's little people can say that's negative. Not perfect but yeah, a phone camera should post to FB these days if that's what you want.
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It does kind of fall apart, though. Change the test from upload a picture to Facebook to upload a picture to G+, for example, and WP7 is going to get owned hard. If any of the tests had fallen off of WP7's integrated, built in flow the "speed" advantage would have vanished.

It's a good marketing campaign, sure, but not entirely fair. One of the ones I saw was checking the weather locally plus at home, and the WP7 guy used live tiles as an example of why he won (since it shows the weather where you are?). I think that was against an iPhone user, but it would have been hilarious if he tried to do the same thing to an Android user that had some weather widgets - especially if he had a widget that showed both current location and saved ones.
 
True. For instance, you can have WidgetLocker for Android and the widgets will be available on the lockscreen even.
 
kllrnohj said:
It does kind of fall apart, though. Change the test from upload a picture to Facebook to upload a picture to G+, for example, and WP7 is going to get owned hard. If any of the tests had fallen off of WP7's integrated, built in flow the "speed" advantage would have vanished.
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The point here is that there are a base set of capabilities that EVERY Windows Phone device has that behave the same and that can be easily leveraged by a 3rd party developer. Throwing in another app to do something can be done on any phone and has nothing to do with 3rd party leverage. G+, well it's not surprise that a Google phone would work great with Google's stuff. Throw in Skydrive and see an Android phone have fall apart problems.
 
WP7 still has the pre-school like tile interface that is hideous and a very small selection of apps.
 
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