Windows Phone News: Battery Life, Data Use and More Apps
There have been questions about the battery life of Windows Phone as well as the data use (since it’s all syncing through the cloud) and questions about the number of available apps at launch. Well, good news on all fronts. On the data side, Paul Thurrott has shared some info based on his actual data use as he’s moved from an iPhone to Windows Phone. The results? Looks like there’s a decrease in data use despite ‘the cloud’. 
A few notes here though. July was split between both devices and August had inflated data usage (since data was prepaid so he was using it up). Paul also notes that a lot of apps are too large to download OTA so you need to sync them locally and the WP7 games are not multiplayer (real time) yet. He was also streaming Zune Pass through wifi. It’s still encouraging that there’s not a spike in data usage as more carriers shift to tiered plans. [In unrelated notes, he’s played with all AT&T WP7 devices and prefers the Focus and there’s no visual voicemail in WP7]
On the batter front, Chainfire noted that with light usage he gets “about 50 hours” on the LG GW910 (which is a Panther so it’s not final hardware/software which should be even more optimized). In response, l3v5y noted that “In light use they last ages. In heavy use, battery life is a day or so fairly comfortably.” Yeah so that blows away my HD2 by days…
And let’s wrap this up with some notes on the new Marketplace. We know there are more apps than are loaded now. Some devs have stated that they are holding off (there’s no need to show their hands when there aren’t a lot of buyers yet) and we know a large number of apps/games that are ready to go but aren’t in the market yet and we’re starting to see a lot of the apps coming in (like Netflix, Foursquare and Seesmic that all appeared within the past day). Well Jesse Liberty (a “Senior Community Program Manager in Microsoft Developer Guidance, focused on Windows Phone 7”) stated on a podcast that there are apps being held back from the store until launch as a surprise so you can expect a spike in available apps when devices are live.
OK that’s all good news so far…you happy with what you’re hearing?
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Very happy with what i see, can’t wait to get the focus on Nov. 8th. Have been checking the marketplace daily, nice to see more populating the store every day
Didn’t expect data usage to be all that different (it is really based on what a user does with their device) but still a bit skeptical on battery life. Once Facebook, Twitter, a few email accounts, Weather, Zune, XBox and a couple panels that I haven’t though of get populated and updated live I expect some (many) users are going to want to stay close to a plug.
I have had the windows phone for 3 days and have already used 500mb. The data usage is extremely high compared to my wife who has used 50mb in same time period with iPhone. WP7 uses data when phone not in use. I am taking back an exchanging for iPhone
Just checked my data usage and as of today I am at 961.95MB, which includes 121MB of usage between 10/25 and 11/8 with my Tilt2. So that’s 841MB in 14 days of WP7 or about 1.8GB over a 30 days period (60MB per day). And that includes some pretty heavy usage, syncing three mail accounts, downloading nearly 80 apps & games, viewing some online video and all the other stuff.
My average with the Tilt2 was 300-500MB month. Based on the above info I expect my “average” month will probably shoot up to 1. to 1.2GB with my Surround. Potentially a problem for someone with a 2GB – $25 AT&T monthly plan, where they might tip the scale from time to time.
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