Microsoft racks up 50,675 wins, 638 losses to date with Smoked by Windows Phone

Source.

Originally Posted by Neowin

The Smoked by Windows Phone campaign kicked off at CES 2012 and has been a major victory for the Microsoft camp. Sure, the campaign has had its ups and downs but overall, Windows Phone has been besting the competition with an impeccable 98% win rate (98.7% to be exact).

Read more: http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft...phone-campaign

[acr1965]

I wish Neowin broke down the stats more. This "contest" has been on slickdeals a long time now and FWIU the vast majority of contestants are just going for the $25 gift card. They find a near worthless phone to take to their MS store and enter it in the contest and get the gift card once they lose. It would be nice to see how the Windows phone stacks up against contemporary androids as opposed to how it stacks up against phones people are close to throwing away, but decide to exchange for the GC instead.

Originally Posted by acr1965

I wish Neowin broke down the stats more. This "contest" has been on slickdeals a long time now and FWIU the vast majority of contestants are just going for the $25 gift card. They find a near worthless phone to take to their MS store and enter it in the contest and get the gift card once they lose. It would be nice to see how the Windows phone stacks up against contemporary androids as opposed to how it stacks up against phones people are close to throwing away, but decide to exchange for the GC instead.

Hmm..

Originally Posted by thenetavenger

You do realize that Microsoft actually owns virtually EVERY Android phone sold, and has run tons of internal tests before they launched this campaign.

How about this, maybe stick with 'facts' or experts that have done what you want to do, and found out they weren't able to get the results you think you can get.
Heck even in the most of the Galaxy S III reviews, they talk about how 'fast' the device is, but often mention that even with the quad core design, it is not as fast or fluid as WP7. (Go look it up...)

PS Just had a couple of techs looking at your post and testing your suggestion as close to exact as possible, and even the slowest WP7 phone we had beat the Galaxy III, as the multitasking and suspension is far more seamless on WP7, where the Galaxy III was doing data refreshing and watching it repaint the UI was almost painful.

One thing that really kills Android in these tests is the 'App flipping, as even the 1GB devices are having trouble not 'dumping' Apps, and when having to shove through the Camera App, and Gallery App and back to the Web Site and the Facebook App, the lag times start to really get annoying. As this type of 'flipping' isn't necessary to accomplish the same task, WP7 often will win there alone.

However, even flipping to the browser and back and forth between Apps can be a head smacker when you are filling out a form on Android and even with 1GB of RAM, flipping back to the launcher, opening up a contact or some notes in an App and back to the browser, the page refreshes, erasing all the information you typed.

This type of stuff is all around 'bad' performance watching the page re-download and redraw (eating both CPU and bandwidth) and it wastes the user's time, so that they often won't leave the browser to lookup information on the phone if they are filling out a form, or need the browser to stay 'live'. Play music from an HTML5 audio site, and see how well Android handles this compared to WP7, which keeps the audio running and integrates into the OS media controls and DOES NOT close the web page, no matter HOW MANY Apps the user loads. Android, each App you open, you gamble when tight on RAM and any App could be fully terminated, and often without a chance to properly even suspend, sadly.

[acr1965]

I'm pretty sure MS is a smart company. And I'm pretty sure they figured the overwhelming majority of contest participants would be more interested in exchanging some old phone they don't even use anymore for a $25 gift card. Then MS can advertise the numbers as if they have beaten the daylights out of all these high end competitor phones. In reality they probably won some tests against high end competitor phones and lost others. And they handed out $25 gift cards to some 50,000 people who have nothing better to do than stand in line for such an event to get a freebie. I don't care about the 50k people who were only interested in a gift card. That goes back to my original point that I wish neowin had more stats about which high end phones beat WP and which ones lost. Advertising a 98.7% win rate really means nothing unless the target audience is the same folks with nothing better to do than stand in line for no telling how long to get a $25 MS Store gift card.

From all the videos, comparisons and reviews I've read, my conclusion is that WP7 is really faster by a mile..

BTW:

Originally Posted by pickypg

Besides, the vast majority of winning [against MS] examples that I have heard about have been from people running custom Android ROMs that were basically tooled for the various cards (I don't really believe Daniel_Pooh won 14 times though, as they did take down IDs for the phone swaps, so I expect they would when giving away $1000+ as well, and I also doubt that they wouldn't recognize him after the second or third time). To be fair, there have been a few iPhone victories related to posting pictures, but I wonder if any of those were jailbroken also.

Finally, to clarify yet again, the MS reps have the competitor pick a card from a deck. They used to turn off their phones and require that competitors turn off their phones as well to prevent preloading, but the last time I swung by the store they were not doing this to people (though they may have an idea of who might win and only do it then). I also saw one guy doing the competition with a Samsung Galaxy Note, in which he was complaining that he had won earlier but not gotten anything. From the sound of it, the MS rep simply finished and did not put down their phone, so he proceeded to finish and put his down and claim victory (he even said that the rep had stated that they were already done). I have heard similar stories about some of the other would-be winners as well that have claimed foul (I have befriended a store associate).

Originally Posted by Gaffney

I love how people say the 'challenge is rigged'. It's a challenge being put up by Microsoft and you have to decide if you can beat their challenge. The ones put up were daily tasks that you would do which is the best testing method, test it's real use not using a benchmark.

Fact is that WP7 is faster than most phones by a mile except from iPhone4S on some small tasks and custom Android Roms at some tasks. For the vast majority of people WP7 is the fastest mobile OS out there.

Originally Posted by thenetavenger

Quad core phones are struggle to keep up with a WP7 single core or an iPhone 4 dual core. What is really amazing is that just a few years ago, Vista was 'beaten' for requiring 1GB of RAM and a modest CPU, yet today people's phones running Android are requiring more RAM and computing power than Windows Vista did and Windows 7 today does. (And yes this is a CPU equivalent comparison, as Vista and Win7 run fine a PIII 800mhz CPU, that benches far below most Android phones sold in the past year.)

Why are people ok with horrible performance from an OS on a freaking Phone, but complained when a desktop OS asked users to move to DX9 level GPUs for the full 'glass' effect and 1GB of RAM?

[acr1965]

Originally Posted by guest

From all the videos, comparisons and reviews I've read, my conclusion is that WP7 is really faster by a mile..

BTW:

I should have asked for unbiased opinions. I'm not real interested in reading quotes from people who drink the kool-aide. But anyway, this "contest" was pretty popular because it was so easy to exchange a near worthless phone for a $25 gift card. It really was not much different than one of those promotions new car dealerships have when they advertise some dollar amount for any trade in (pull it, push it, tow it in). Now what if a dealership went on and "tested" one of these traded in autos against a new car in a "contest" and then advertised the results as some sort of big victory? I think the test scores would be questioned with good reason.

This was a popular promo by MS and probably did more to get people into one of their B&R stores, which I'm sure was a good thing. So I doubt anyone was complaining about the gift cards. The test scores, though, are a bit misleading.

[vasa1]

Originally Posted by acr1965

I should have asked for unbiased opinions. I'm not real interested in reading quotes from people who drink the kool-aide.

And they think they're helping their cause, whatever that is. But it's a real turn off.

[Hungry Man]

Are they all speed challenges? It's pretty obvious that MS is going to win here. Welcome to C++/C/C# vs Java.

Did they do any tests vs iPhone? That would be much better to see as I doubt they could really show significant speed increases over that on the same hardware.

But... I guess it's news to some that Java is a very slow language?

Originally Posted by Hungry Man

Did they do any tests vs iPhone? That would be much better to see as I doubt they could really show significant speed increases over that on the same hardware.

Yes they did. Read the quotes I posted.

Originally Posted by vasa1

And they think they're helping their cause, whatever that is. But it's a real turn off.

I just prefer the truth.

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer

[tgell]

Windows Phone Smokes Android, iPhone, But No One Wants It

During Microsoft's recent Smoked by Windows Phone challenge, Microsoft-based devices were almost always faster at completing everyday tasks compared to Android and iPhone handsets. But even the fastest Windows Phone can't run away from the fact that nobody's buying Microsoft-powered handsets.

Despite critical acclaim, cheap phones, and a novel take on the Pepsi Challenge, few people in the U.S. want a Windows Phones and its market share may be slipping faster than its predecessor, Windows Mobile.

Article

A response to that article: http://www.examiner.com/article/wind...one-carries-it

Also see:

Nokia Lumia 900 is the #1 seller on amazon

AT&T Sales: Nokia Lumia 900 Demand Exceeding Supply

Originally Posted by guest

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer

Nice pithy quote, but unfortunately the same is often true of propaganda. There's a very infamous statement related to that, which I won't repeat lest I Godwin the thread.

OTOH I wouldn't be surprised if WP7 is faster than Android, at least if Android-x86 is anything to judge by.

Originally Posted by Hungry Man

Are they all speed challenges? It's pretty obvious that MS is going to win here. Welcome to C++/C/C# vs Java.

Did they do any tests vs iPhone? That would be much better to see as I doubt they could really show significant speed increases over that on the same hardware.

But... I guess it's news to some that Java is a very slow language?

Umm. I thought Dalvik used a fairly stripped down version of Java, which was supposed to perform better?

(Oracle benchmarks show Java SE Embedded being faster than Dalvik by a factor of 2-3; but if benchmarks always told the truth, the universe would collapse from all the inconsistencies.)

[funkydude]

I always hated the whole smoked campaign. Maybe it's good at bringing attention to the platform, I just feel it's the wrong way to do it.

[Hungry Man]

Originally Posted by Gullible Jones

Nice pithy quote, but unfortunately the same is often true of propaganda. There's a very infamous statement related to that, which I won't repeat lest I Godwin the thread.

OTOH I wouldn't be surprised if WP7 is faster than Android, at least if Android-x86 is anything to judge by.



Umm. I thought Dalvik used a fairly stripped down version of Java, which was supposed to perform better?

(Oracle benchmarks show Java SE Embedded being faster than Dalvik by a factor of 2-3; but if benchmarks always told the truth, the universe would collapse from all the inconsistencies.)

Dalvik is great but there are limits to what you can do with Java and it's inherent to the language.

C++ gets compiled straight to asm. Java gets compiled to byte code and then from byte code to asm. This slows things down. You can optimize both a lot but that's not going to get over the inherent issues (in terms of speed) with Java and there's more to it than just having to compile it twice (JIT helps with this problem a lot and tries to optimize to make up for it.)