MS keeps driving that number of users down, too. I was a die hard WP fan at one point, but you got to know when to fold 'em. MS shot itself in the foot too many times by resetting their app API. They've built no confidence for even the few existing developers. I figure MS will just make their own Android phones soon enough, with heavy integration of their own services. I think it would be more popular than WP ever was.
It's not even that. I'm not a big "apps" guy, and I'd *love* one of the new Lumia 950s. They're beautiful phones.
But they're completely unavailable for Verizon customers. The phones *do not function* on the Verizon network. That's a pretty big chunk of potential customers to abandon. Its 2016, the idea of any smartphone being network locked in a first world country is simply ridiculous.
The phone hardware is CDMA capable, but Verizon won't license the 950s on their network, so MS disabled the drivers. Should Verizon ever choose to play nice, MS needs only to push out an OS patch to "wake" the CDMA radios.
Yes the hardware is capable but the phone was never approved for CDMA by the FCC and that was Microsoft's decision to not have that done. So they can't just patch it to enable CDMA without getting all of that sorted out first and it doesn't appear that this is on the radar from what I've found.
The reason for this is that there's no getting around Verizon. If they chose to enable CDMA, Verizon would just block them and stall for many months. They've done it before to unlocked devices. Not to mention it would piss Verizon off and damage the prospects of getting something like a Surface phone on their network in a timely fashion.
I love my Windows Phone and I'm not an app guy, but there are a few missing apps on Windows Phone that are beginning to annoy me. Mint discontinued their app. I'd like see what all the fuss is about with Snapchat, but they don't have a Windows app. I wanted to buy a Pebble watch, but they don't have an app. I wanted to buy a Nest Thermostat, but they don't have an app.
I would argue that is not a new problem. I'm on AT&T and really wanted a Lumia Icon when it came out, but nope. Verizon only. And then I don't even think there was an official 930 for AT&T. If there ever was, it must have been about 9 months after the original Lumia Icon release, and by that time of course no one wants that last year's crap.
I'd honestly love android with tight ms integration.
I love me some Google services, but I don't discriminate. Ms has some useful stuff as well. So if I can get both deeply integrated into my phone, then I'm a happy camper.
MS plays pretty nicely with Android. It's a huge difference from how ludicrously anti-competitive Google has been with its services on windows phone/mobile.
I would not call MS behavior "playing nice" (neither would I call Google's "not playing nice"), it boils down to simple market situation: Microsoft simply has to, for their own business sake, support Android and iOS platforms since these two platforms represent almost the entire market. It is a matter of simple common business sense.
On the other hand, Google has zero business motivation to support Microsoft's phone OS, unless Microsoft pays them to do so.
It is mildly ironic that, in the smartphone market, Microsoft found themselves in a similar position Linux was and still is when it comes to widespread "consumer desktop". Lack of market share does not help with 3rd party application porting and it is a vicious circle.
I know Linux can be a great desktop OS for many people, but at least until recently the lack of the familiar application support was a barrier. In these days, consumers mostly use a web browser so this is not such a big problem it used to be, but the change in usage pattern also changed the preferred hardware, where smartphones became the "main" computing device for many consumers. Ironically for Microsoft, this transformation enabled Google to dominate the market with their Linux-based OS. Microsoft's management clearly lacked a clue here for many years and their ineptitude lost Microsoft an opportunity to power hundreds of millions of devices.
It is not a bug, but defective by design. Microsoft wants to monitor users' privacy so the phone will regularly transmit users' data to Microsoft servers. That's why you get high cellular data with it. Just stay away from Microsoft's products
I think the point in doing that is to give each company an individually incomplete view of the totality of your computing activity so that those companies have less data to correlate and are less effectively able to mine it to build a profile about you. For instance, say I have an Android phone and a Windows laptop. Google and 3rd party app developers will get access to my phone calls, text messages, how much I use each Android app, and the location of the phone. However, Google won't know about the blogs I read and the purchases I make from Amazon as long as I make it a point to do that sort of thing on my Windows computer and don't use a Chrome browser. If I were to swap out my Windows laptop with a Chrome OS device, Google would easily be able to gather that additional data and associate it with the profile they maintain. The argument is that you're going to leave bread crumbs around the Internet no matter where you go and what you do so you may as well spread those crumbs about to a wider variety of companies in order to make it more difficult for any single company to reassemble the entire loaf.
These are all public companies, so it is trivial for anyone to look up the respective company's quarterly reports and confirm the fact that Google is the only one that bases their business model on "seling your data to anyone that can pay".
The people upset about Google's various questionable practices have a new company to victimize in Microsoft because MS previously was using its lack of data mining and telemetry collection as a selling point in their advertisements. I personally think that Microsoft is only just catching up to Google so the change is more obvious and more upsetting than what Google was and still is doing because the passage of time has made us insensitive to Google's data harvesting efforts.
"Catching up", makes it sound like they were behind. They weren't behind, they were more advanced. Now they've thrown in the towel and stooped to Google's level.
Its funny that both apple and that ad company both have had issues like this in the past (even recently with iOS 9 and Wi-Fi assist) but it wasn't worthy of a headline i guess.
Swing and a miss on Apple... The WiFi assist issue seems to be nonsense, basically a scam by some lawyer hoping to gin up a case. What makes your claim so absurd and so ignorant is that there IS an Apple cellular data usage. On at least two occasions within the last three months, something has gone wrong on the iCloud backend resulting in it generating an excessive number of document synchronization requests with iOS, and if you're on cellular, that ramps up your cellular usage. Not by these MS amounts, but by around 5..10MB an hour, which can add up if you have a 200/300MB plan, or even a 2GB plan and are always outside. But this hasn't been publicized much.
Hi, This backup capability to OneDrive (apps+settings+text messages+photos+videos) is already available at Win Phone 8.1 Update OS, so it is not specific from Win 10 Mobile.
You'd think that if you're used to working with Android, where you have to play mother may I with OEMs and carriers to get updates or go full in and root it. Windows doesn't have an utterly dysfunctional update system, since you can pop into the insider program for updates as they happen. Thus the whole 10586 number after, which happens to be the build number of the version I'm running on my 1520.
Not understanding the problem. The linked reddit seems to indicate it is SMS syncing ignoring "earliest date" setting and also using system data priority. But how is this explaining megabytes and megabytes? I mean, even years of SMS's aren't likely to be that big? It sounds like a completely buggy implementation: resyncing over and over the same data. Also maybe it isn't even compressing over the wire.
MS has really gotten its software act together in a lot of areas, but basic plumbing kinds of things still seem to stymie them. Sky/OneDrive/Sharepoint sync for Office365 documents to the *desktop* is quite flaky, to the point one often wants to just throw the computer at them and force them to buy Dropbox.
It's not prerelease, stop calling it that. The second they shipped brand new phones like the 950 and 950XL with Windows 10 installed, it became release software.
Between this and the broken 5GHz Wifi on my 950XL (the entire 5GHz band frequently vanishes until the phone is rebooted), I've gone over my data allotment 3 times this month. I'm only on a 4GB plan but I went through that 4GB, plus ~3GB rollover, plus 2.8GB in overages billed per GB. About 10 days ago I had to flip off cellular data entirely to prevent more charges.
LOL. You People are just kids. it says there in 17 days. I even consumed about 1TB+ of cellular and wifi in just a week. And in the first place it's still a baby OS. Why always blame Microsoft? It doesn't even hurt since you people are wealthy. Instead of blaming and putting it down. Why not help them to deliver more reliable, user friendly OS? If you're an Apple(Macintosh) OSes or a Linux/Android OSes lover then you may shut your mouth. This post is concerned and informs Windows mobile users about what's happening with Windows mobile. There's nothing to do with you lovers of Apple and Android.
It is not a bug, but defective by design. Microsoft wants to monitor users' privacy so the phone will regularly transmit users' data to Microsoft servers. That's why you get high cellular data with it
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jiffylube1024 - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link
Funny that this potentially devastating bug isn't really any issue because nobody uses Windows 10 Mobile...MonkeyPaw - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link
MS keeps driving that number of users down, too. I was a die hard WP fan at one point, but you got to know when to fold 'em. MS shot itself in the foot too many times by resetting their app API. They've built no confidence for even the few existing developers. I figure MS will just make their own Android phones soon enough, with heavy integration of their own services. I think it would be more popular than WP ever was.Mushkins - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link
It's not even that. I'm not a big "apps" guy, and I'd *love* one of the new Lumia 950s. They're beautiful phones.But they're completely unavailable for Verizon customers. The phones *do not function* on the Verizon network. That's a pretty big chunk of potential customers to abandon. Its 2016, the idea of any smartphone being network locked in a first world country is simply ridiculous.
Brett Howse - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link
Just to be clear you can buy it unlocked, but it doesn't support CDMA. Still doesn't help you but it's not the same thing.AMRooke - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link
The phone hardware is CDMA capable, but Verizon won't license the 950s on their network, so MS disabled the drivers. Should Verizon ever choose to play nice, MS needs only to push out an OS patch to "wake" the CDMA radios.Brett Howse - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link
Yes the hardware is capable but the phone was never approved for CDMA by the FCC and that was Microsoft's decision to not have that done. So they can't just patch it to enable CDMA without getting all of that sorted out first and it doesn't appear that this is on the radar from what I've found.Alexvrb - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link
The reason for this is that there's no getting around Verizon. If they chose to enable CDMA, Verizon would just block them and stall for many months. They've done it before to unlocked devices. Not to mention it would piss Verizon off and damage the prospects of getting something like a Surface phone on their network in a timely fashion.beginner99 - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
The real issue here is Verizon and CDMA. Not MS or Windows Phone.hrrmph - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
+1MS is doing the right thing here. Verizon isn't.
The OP doesn't seem to understand that it is Verizon that is acting like an isolated Banana Republic here by using CDMA in the first place.
The rest-of-the-world has moved on to better things and Microsoft is moving forward with them.
So the best thing for MS to do here is leave Verizon and its kind behind. Others should too, if there are viable alternatives.
Duckhead - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
I love my Windows Phone and I'm not an app guy, but there are a few missing apps on Windows Phone that are beginning to annoy me. Mint discontinued their app. I'd like see what all the fuss is about with Snapchat, but they don't have a Windows app. I wanted to buy a Pebble watch, but they don't have an app. I wanted to buy a Nest Thermostat, but they don't have an app.grayson_carr - Wednesday, February 3, 2016 - link
I would argue that is not a new problem. I'm on AT&T and really wanted a Lumia Icon when it came out, but nope. Verizon only. And then I don't even think there was an official 930 for AT&T. If there ever was, it must have been about 9 months after the original Lumia Icon release, and by that time of course no one wants that last year's crap.ImSpartacus - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
I'd honestly love android with tight ms integration.I love me some Google services, but I don't discriminate. Ms has some useful stuff as well. So if I can get both deeply integrated into my phone, then I'm a happy camper.
xthetenth - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
MS plays pretty nicely with Android. It's a huge difference from how ludicrously anti-competitive Google has been with its services on windows phone/mobile.psyq321 - Monday, February 1, 2016 - link
I would not call MS behavior "playing nice" (neither would I call Google's "not playing nice"), it boils down to simple market situation: Microsoft simply has to, for their own business sake, support Android and iOS platforms since these two platforms represent almost the entire market. It is a matter of simple common business sense.On the other hand, Google has zero business motivation to support Microsoft's phone OS, unless Microsoft pays them to do so.
It is mildly ironic that, in the smartphone market, Microsoft found themselves in a similar position Linux was and still is when it comes to widespread "consumer desktop". Lack of market share does not help with 3rd party application porting and it is a vicious circle.
I know Linux can be a great desktop OS for many people, but at least until recently the lack of the familiar application support was a barrier. In these days, consumers mostly use a web browser so this is not such a big problem it used to be, but the change in usage pattern also changed the preferred hardware, where smartphones became the "main" computing device for many consumers. Ironically for Microsoft, this transformation enabled Google to dominate the market with their Linux-based OS. Microsoft's management clearly lacked a clue here for many years and their ineptitude lost Microsoft an opportunity to power hundreds of millions of devices.
andjohn2000 - Sunday, January 31, 2016 - link
It is not a bug, but defective by design. Microsoft wants to monitor users' privacy so the phone will regularly transmit users' data to Microsoft servers. That's why you get high cellular data with it. Just stay away from Microsoft's products10101010 - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link
For all of 2012-2014's anti-Google propaganda and rhetoric, Windows 10 does seem to be the ultimate scroogle-the-customer OS.boozed - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link
I can't imagine too many people are surprised eitherbeginner99 - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
I think that's why it's good to have a Windows PC and an Android or iPhone. Don't let one of the data krakens get to know everything you do.Communism - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
That makes no sense.Any of the companies mentioned will sell your data to anyone that can pay.
Giving your data to multiple of them is not magically going to change that.
BrokenCrayons - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
I think the point in doing that is to give each company an individually incomplete view of the totality of your computing activity so that those companies have less data to correlate and are less effectively able to mine it to build a profile about you. For instance, say I have an Android phone and a Windows laptop. Google and 3rd party app developers will get access to my phone calls, text messages, how much I use each Android app, and the location of the phone. However, Google won't know about the blogs I read and the purchases I make from Amazon as long as I make it a point to do that sort of thing on my Windows computer and don't use a Chrome browser. If I were to swap out my Windows laptop with a Chrome OS device, Google would easily be able to gather that additional data and associate it with the profile they maintain. The argument is that you're going to leave bread crumbs around the Internet no matter where you go and what you do so you may as well spread those crumbs about to a wider variety of companies in order to make it more difficult for any single company to reassemble the entire loaf.steven75 - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
These are all public companies, so it is trivial for anyone to look up the respective company's quarterly reports and confirm the fact that Google is the only one that bases their business model on "seling your data to anyone that can pay".BrokenCrayons - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
The people upset about Google's various questionable practices have a new company to victimize in Microsoft because MS previously was using its lack of data mining and telemetry collection as a selling point in their advertisements. I personally think that Microsoft is only just catching up to Google so the change is more obvious and more upsetting than what Google was and still is doing because the passage of time has made us insensitive to Google's data harvesting efforts.xthetenth - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
Yeah, it's disappointing, although from their claims MS at least tries to anonymize your data, something Google pointedly doesn't do.JonnyDough - Monday, February 1, 2016 - link
"Catching up", makes it sound like they were behind. They weren't behind, they were more advanced. Now they've thrown in the towel and stooped to Google's level.SpartanJet - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link
Its funny that both apple and that ad company both have had issues like this in the past (even recently with iOS 9 and Wi-Fi assist) but it wasn't worthy of a headline i guess.jiffylube1024 - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
Riight. It's this kind of conspiratorial thinking that always befuddles me. iOS 9 data leaks were a big deal at the time, before they got fixed:http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/apple-ios-9-wifi...
http://www.imore.com/how-to-turn-off-wifi-assist-i...
http://www.zdnet.com/article/cellular-usage-throug...
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2997573/mobil...
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ios-9-how-fix-increased-m...
http://reviews.gizmodo.com/ios-9s-wi-fi-assist-is-...
http://qz.com/510329/you-might-want-to-turn-off-th...
SpartanJet - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
Riiight. Gee I wasn't talking about every single news source, I was talking about here on Anandtech. Nice try though.name99 - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
Swing and a miss on Apple...The WiFi assist issue seems to be nonsense, basically a scam by some lawyer hoping to gin up a case.
What makes your claim so absurd and so ignorant is that there IS an Apple cellular data usage. On at least two occasions within the last three months, something has gone wrong on the iCloud backend resulting in it generating an excessive number of document synchronization requests with iOS, and if you're on cellular, that ramps up your cellular usage. Not by these MS amounts, but by around 5..10MB an hour, which can add up if you have a 200/300MB plan, or even a 2GB plan and are always outside. But this hasn't been publicized much.
Ruimanalmeida - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link
Hi, This backup capability to OneDrive (apps+settings+text messages+photos+videos) is already available at Win Phone 8.1 Update OS, so it is not specific from Win 10 Mobile.Murloc - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
the bug is.ViktorKitov - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
Seems to fine for me.Cellular - 39.78 MB
Wi-FI - 1.26 GB
Lumia 930 - 10586
Murloc - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
there is no wp10 on lumia 930 so no wonder you don't have this issueboozed - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
Hahaxthetenth - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
You'd think that if you're used to working with Android, where you have to play mother may I with OEMs and carriers to get updates or go full in and root it. Windows doesn't have an utterly dysfunctional update system, since you can pop into the insider program for updates as they happen. Thus the whole 10586 number after, which happens to be the build number of the version I'm running on my 1520.Hope this helps!
ABR - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
Not understanding the problem. The linked reddit seems to indicate it is SMS syncing ignoring "earliest date" setting and also using system data priority. But how is this explaining megabytes and megabytes? I mean, even years of SMS's aren't likely to be that big? It sounds like a completely buggy implementation: resyncing over and over the same data. Also maybe it isn't even compressing over the wire.MS has really gotten its software act together in a lot of areas, but basic plumbing kinds of things still seem to stymie them. Sky/OneDrive/Sharepoint sync for Office365 documents to the *desktop* is quite flaky, to the point one often wants to just throw the computer at them and force them to buy Dropbox.
ET - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
Since Windows 10 is prerelease, I look at this in a positive way, another bug caught before mass release.Still, my Lumia 620 phone with 8.1 always used more data than my Android phones.
Solidstate89 - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
It's not prerelease, stop calling it that. The second they shipped brand new phones like the 950 and 950XL with Windows 10 installed, it became release software.Solidstate89 - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
Good thing I've got a 20GB data plan.jhoff80 - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
Between this and the broken 5GHz Wifi on my 950XL (the entire 5GHz band frequently vanishes until the phone is rebooted), I've gone over my data allotment 3 times this month. I'm only on a 4GB plan but I went through that 4GB, plus ~3GB rollover, plus 2.8GB in overages billed per GB. About 10 days ago I had to flip off cellular data entirely to prevent more charges.Michael Bay - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link
Not seeing that on 730.felgate11 - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
LOL. You People are just kids. it says there in 17 days. I even consumed about 1TB+ of cellular and wifi in just a week. And in the first place it's still a baby OS. Why always blame Microsoft? It doesn't even hurt since you people are wealthy. Instead of blaming and putting it down. Why not help them to deliver more reliable, user friendly OS? If you're an Apple(Macintosh) OSes or a Linux/Android OSes lover then you may shut your mouth. This post is concerned and informs Windows mobile users about what's happening with Windows mobile. There's nothing to do with you lovers of Apple and Android.Michael Bay - Saturday, January 30, 2016 - link
>windows>baby OS
Giving free passes like that is the reason software does not improve.
andjohn2000 - Sunday, January 31, 2016 - link
It is not a bug, but defective by design. Microsoft wants to monitor users' privacy so the phone will regularly transmit users' data to Microsoft servers. That's why you get high cellular data with itJonnyDough - Monday, February 1, 2016 - link
That's not a bug, it's an NSA.damianrobertjones - Thursday, February 4, 2016 - link
"By Brett Howse on January 27,"Yet it's back to the top of the list? Foul play?