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

Source.

 

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..

 

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:

 

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.

 

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

 

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?

 

Yes they did. Read the quotes I posted.

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

 

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

Article

 

A response to that article: http://www.examiner.com/article/windows-phone-smokes-android-iphone-but-no-one-carries-it

Also see:

Nokia Lumia 900 is the #1 seller on amazon

AT&T Sales: Nokia Lumia 900 Demand Exceeding Supply

 

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.)

 

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.

 

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.)