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View Full Version : Are Windows Mobile Phones Underpowered?


Jerry Raia
03-29-2008, 11:00 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://mobilitysite.com/2008/03/are-windows-mobile-phones-underpowered/' target='_blank'>http://mobilitysite.com/2008/03/are...s-underpowered/</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>&quot;Its been nearly 2 years since the Dell Axim X51 and the HP iPAQ 4700, but those two Pocket PCs are still regarded by many as the best Pocket PC out there. Well, there aren&rsquo;t really that many standalone Pocket PCs being made anymore. Think about it though, has there been any advances in processors in the last two years? Not really. You can go buy the hottest Pocket PC Phone on the market and still get the same specs as the Dell Axim X51 from 2 years ago. Look at the AT&amp;T Tilt&hellip; It has a 400mhz processor.&quot;<br /><img alt="" border="0" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/500/spt/auto/1206822834.usr6.jpg" /></em></p><p>Well let me think, browse the Internet on a Windows Mobile device or take out my own appendix with a warm spoon. Thinking, thinking. I'm going to have to find a spoon. The question of whether or not WM is sluggish is answered every time you try to turn one on from a dead sleep. The wait is almost comical. To me, most of the latest WM devices are no faster than the first iPAQs I used. I have a Tilt as mentioned above, it seems sluggish to me. How many times have you sat there looking at that stupid little pie spinning around waiting for something to happen? How often has it just stopped dead letting you know your device had vapor locked. Then you get to soft reset and wait for the wonderful startup sequence to play out. Not to beat a dead horse but after this many years WM should be much much better than this. The above link leads to a survey as well. Go take&nbsp;it and weigh in on this issue.&nbsp;Then let us know what you think here.</p><em></em>

freitasm
03-30-2008, 12:25 AM
My iPaq h4150 was the best performer I've ever seen. Since then all Windows Mobile devices are slow... Very slow.

I have a couple of HTC touch devices here and it's annoying. I also got two i-mate Ultimate series, and my goodness they are the worst things I've ever seen!

RogueSpear
03-30-2008, 12:40 AM
I know I'm alone in saying this, but some of us here have been beating that dead horse for a couple of years now. I remember one particular rant I spewed out that went into painful detail, chronicling the time line of desktop CPUs and GPUs vs. the hardware advances of PPC/WM devices.

Well with absolutely nothing on the horizon that seemed to have a whole lot more than my 6+ years old iPAQ 3975, I finally went ahead and abandoned ship - got an iPhone. Went from the Flinstones to the Jetsons overnight. When my two year contract is up I'll take a look at the WM side of things again but I seriously doubt they'll have anything more appealing than what Apple or Google will be offering by then.

Jerry Raia
03-30-2008, 02:34 AM
The iPhone has redefined what to expect from a device, at least in the area of the interface and responsiveness. It did this on the first try.

ctmagnus
03-30-2008, 03:35 AM
imo, this is tied into the whole WM stagnation issue. I've had four "native" Pocket PC/Windows Mobile devices and a Windows Mobile Treo. The Treo is a pleasure to use; the other four were painful in comparison.

Then do that comparison to the iPhone/iPod Touch... :rolleyes:

rzanology
03-30-2008, 04:03 AM
one thing i can agree with you is the fact that the newer devices seem to faster than some of the older ones. i still have my x50v, which i use as my "digital camera's assistant." I also have a tilt which i love to death. I dont think its the device's hardware per say.

one of the many things XDA has thought me....a "cooked" rom goes a loooong way. For those of you who dont know what a cooked rom is, these guys rip the rom apart, tweak the hell out of it, remove unwanted things and add nessary apps. My tilt is atlease 3 times faster as it was from att. not only that but i get way better battery life.

so i dont really think the phones are underpowered. as much as it pains me to say it, MS has got to optimize the OS some more. wm6.1 really does feel alot better than 6.0. but the gap between WM and the compition is getting larger.

im still pulling for MS tho....have been for 5 years now!

zohaer21
03-30-2008, 07:37 AM
i my friends have a imate 8150 which is blazingly fast and not sluggish at all !
i also have a htc p3600 (trinity) with a wm 6.1 custom rom that is even faster than the 8150 ! i dont know about the tilt , but not all wm devices are sluggish

SomeAudioGuy
03-30-2008, 09:32 AM
Nothing of late has even come close to my hx2750. That thing was brutal. And when overclocked handily destroyed anything else on the market (I don't remember exact numbers but I set a record with init13's graphics bench mark when I doubled the memory bus @664Mhz clock).
If they could've swapped out one of the memory card slots for a cell radio, and put in a VGA screen, it EASILY would've been the most powerful smart phone ever made. Would've been better than most phones out now...

But here we are years later, and we're only just now stumbling into 128MB of RAM. There hasn't been ANY processor development in years (if anything we've regressed). The OS is LESS stable. I don't care what they say, WM2003SE was the fastest OS they've made, and the least buggy. I'll deal with losing info on battery discharge. Iwant to be able to use my expensive uber phone without all this lag!
Also security is laughable. Biometric just plain works the best. People are wanting to use these things like little mini laptops, but putting in a password is excruciating!!!

Why are we SO LESS ADVANCED from the days of the h5500?
I shouldn't be missing my hx2750 (or my old h3970 for that matter) THIS much...

Kassad
03-30-2008, 09:53 AM
I went back from a HTC TyTn to my HTC Universal because of the screen and was amazed to find it much faster aswell, the last generation mobile CPU's from Qualcomm and Samsung just weren't that good (let alone those from TI). I hope the new generation recently announced will be the step forward we need.

virain
03-30-2008, 10:09 AM
Underpowered? Sometimes. Stuffed with crapware that slows down performance? Most of the time.

LeonardR
03-30-2008, 06:50 PM
I purchased an HTC TyTN II several months ago. I loved the idea of what this phone could do.

In the real world day to day use, with 80% being as a phone and most of the rest for quick web based financial updates, I found the phone interface intolerably slow.

As a result I went back to a Samsung Blackjack II. The Smartphone does a much quicker job as a phone, I can still browse the web, and the few times I use the GPS Live update works great. I was sad to see the Ty TN go but I just got tired of the waits and lockups.

Eriq Cook
03-30-2008, 07:46 PM
To me it's the same "progression" as with the regular Window operating system--Vista for example. As devices get faster, Microsoft software gets slower. I've been a big fan of Winmo devices since the Casio E-100 and original iPAQ, and I agree that the overall speed has NOT improved. It seems many things with Microsoft software development has changed over the past 7-8 years and they just do enough to "get consumers by" nowadays. I've been pretty dissapointed with the direction many of Microsoft's software products have been going in terms of overall speed and "bloatedness". My T-Mobile Wing is just as fast as my Casio E-100 in 1995.

Best Windows Mobile phone I owned was the original MDA by T-Mobile. It worked great, although the physical form factor was terrible.

PdaAddict
03-30-2008, 07:50 PM
i am also thinking of abandoning the htc and wm ship. apple got it wright at first try. imagine what iphone 2 will be like

Clymmer
03-30-2008, 09:48 PM
I have a T-Mobile Dash. It's a tad on the slow side. I've worked with other PPC/WinCE/WinMob devices at work...they're slow too. The kicker to me is that when I migrated to my Dash from my Tungsten C, it drove me nuts how slow the contacts application was. I had about 4k contacts in my address book. On my TC, I could access ANY of them in less than 2 seconds. On my Dash, it took 20 seconds just to OPEN the address book app.

Lame.

The acceptable work around is that you can just start typing names on the homescreen and it will start looking up pretty quickly. Not as fast as my TC, but still workable. Now that I think about it, my 66Mhz Palm Vx was faster than that. The Vx couldn't do a fraction of the multimedia/phone functions, but for the functions that it did support...it was faster.

What drives me nuts is how often I have to reset my WinMo device. Several times a day mainly because of how the OS mismanages memory/memory leaks.

Is this underpowered? Absolutely. Especially since it seems that the WinMo OS has so much overhead.

plinydogg
03-30-2008, 11:10 PM
I agree with you and posted a similar rant last July: http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=27&p=2122&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1#more2122 If my old iPAQ h1945 were still alive I'm sure it would still be able to hold its own against newer models...

deich
03-30-2008, 11:35 PM
I would like to point out that the HP iPaq 110 is a fine PDA with a 624 MHz processor. IMO, it's the best QVGA unit ever built. Of course, it is saddled with WM6; and that's a shame.

When I had to replace my PDA, I tried to consider alternatives. But if you aren't an Apple lover, what's out there? Not much. Disclaimer: I don't want my phone and my PDA combined into one unit. And I do have quite a bit of software that makes it harder to convert to Palm. Still, I maintain that WM units are the best there is.

What's on your list of the worst things about WM6? My top two:

1. It takes forever to soft reset, and there's not even any user feedback. The first time I did it, I thought the unit hang. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

2. Active Synch (plus whatever they call the Vista version). It hangs. It disconnects. I refuses to connect. It simply does not work very well. I have three XP machines and a Vista machine. It's the same on all. And it was no better with my WM5 unit, before it died. A high school programmer could do better than this.

CESkins
03-31-2008, 02:27 AM
I own a Loox N560, HTC Mogul, and iPod Touch. I have to agree with all the previous posts that Apple got the interface for a mobile touch sensitive screen device right the 1st time. The Touch also flies through various tasks (like a rocket even with all of Apple's fancy animations active). However, one should keep in mind that Apple maintains tight control over what gets on the iPhone/iPod Touch. A WM6 PDA/Phone out the box without customization is pretty snappy. Once we load on all the bloatware to customize WM6 to our liking, the resource drains slows down the OS. I wonder how many lockups and memory leaks are due to buggy 3rd party software and not the OS. I will agree though that if Apple can create such a robust, fast, and efficient interface out the box on the 1st try, WM days may be numbered. MS just keeps churning out the same tired interface that is not optimized for such a small PDA screen with each new version of WM. If Apple had MS Office support and synced fully with MS Outlook, I would be ditching WM in a heartbeat especially given upcoming 3rd party software which should fill any niches Apple misses.

virain
03-31-2008, 06:31 AM
i am also thinking of abandoning the htc and wm ship. apple got it wright at first try. imagine what iphone 2 will be like
You can find this info in the article here: http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/28/magazines/fortune/tech/moritz_iPhone.fortune/
And Release date sometimes in June is not that far away. If you own iPhone already you can download 2.0 Beta from Apple website, so you won't have to use your imagination anymore, just facts

eagle63
03-31-2008, 02:10 PM
I don't think anyone has mentioned this yet, but keep in mind that the whole WM performance problem started when they switched to a persistent memory-model a few years ago with WM5. (NVRAM) Couple that with the fact that clock speeds haven't gone up, and you have a double-whammy effect.

I still occasionally use my Dell Axim X30 high with the 624 mHz proc. Man it flies! But it's not just the fast cpu, it's also the old volatile ram configuration.

bitbank
03-31-2008, 04:31 PM
It's true that processor speeds haven't improved dramatically in the past few years, but you can also blame battery technology. The majority of new phones/PDAs have some variant of the TI OMAP CPU usually running at around 200Mhz. This is plenty fast if you write good code. The only thing stopping the manufacturers from using the 624Mhz (or faster) chips is the battery life and cost. A better CPU could be designed with more cache memory and better power usage, but then that would cost more. The right solution is to use what we've got to the fullest by writing efficient software.

Apple has done a good job with the iPhone; it's just another ARM-based device running at about 400Mhz. 400Mhz is plenty for what it has to do because Apple cares enough to optimize their software.

If you want to see what's possible on a lowly 200Mhz ARM CPU, try some of my software.

L.B.
www.bitbanksoftware.com

Russ Smith
03-31-2008, 05:22 PM
On the one hand, I tend to agree that WM is underpowered, but not from a processor perspective at all (unless, like bitbank points out, you're dealing with the TI OMAP). I've been using my hx4700 (with a cooked WM6.1 ROM) since I returned to WM after a two-year stint with handtops (OQO and Sony UX). I had no problems with responsivity. Now I've got an hp 210 and it's even a bit better.

The issue, in my mind, is software; both OS and applications. The OS has only incrementally improved over WM2003SE in what is now going on five years. I understand that WM8 looks pretty impressive, but that's two years away. WM still has some functionality "holes" that Microsoft not only hasn't fixed, but has not intention of fixing. (For example, they don't add printing capabilities because they don't want WM to compete with Windows.)

On the application side, some WM apps are phenominally good. Pocket Informant sets a standard that even handtops with full OSes don't match. PlanMaker and TextMaker, CoPilot, and Pocket Bible are very, very good too. If someone wants me to jump, they'll have to have at least the functionality of the WM apps and OS I'm using right now and then add something compelling.

On the other hand, there are some apps that haven't made any significant improvements in five years. If I wasn't somewhat happy with what I have I'd be looking elsewhere too.

iPhone? Not likely. The GUI is nice, true, but it lacks some basic functionalities that I'm way too used to (like cut-and-paste and external keyboards).

Linux? More likely by far. I'm actually hoping for a pretty good release of Mobile Ubuntu, but I'm still waiting.

In the interim, WM, underpowered as it is, is still my choice.

ScottC
03-31-2008, 06:43 PM
I don't think the phone itself is underpowered, but there are some applications that need a clearly need a rewrite.

If I browse the web using PIE, things are sluggish and rendering is slow. But the same web site with Opera loads fast and efficiently.

Pocket Outlook is terribly slow, especially switching to or from it.

Opening the phone dialer is a nightmare, some keypresses take 3 seconds to respond.

I'm sure that the core of the OS is nice and fast but they really need to look at some of the bottlenecks in the applications and fix them.

eagle63
03-31-2008, 07:05 PM
The whole performance problem started a few years ago when the data model for WM was changed to persistent storage. (WM5) That coupled with the fact that clock speeds haven't changed gives you a double-whammy.

From a usability standpoint it was absolutely the right thing to do, but they just haven't been able to get the performance back up to pre-NVRAM standards. (and maybe it's unrealistic to think that they can without more CPU/GPU power)