I am willing to bet many of you in here are almost in the same boat as me. You have backed Microsoft for some time now. Xbox, Windows, Windows Phone, Zune, etc. But now are starting to get sick of them messing up what they got right, ignoring what they got wrong, and ignore us all together.
My story is simple. I have watched Microsoft take many steps in the right direction with the Zune. Then they allowed the Apple clowns to drag the name through the mud. As a result, a VERY DUMB decision was made to do away with Zune. Many of us just thought we would see the same program and service with some new lime green accenting and a nice Xbox logo in the corner. Instead we were given a program that tore away 90% of the Zune functionality. Instead of hoping to get the last few missing features; like the ability to added DVD covers to our movies, volume boosting, cutting the intro or ending to songs, etc; we were given music/video programs that made duplicates of your songs, gave you no way to really control your cloud, destroyed the metadata that the Zune software so nicely put together, lost the ability to make playlists, lost the ability to use watch your video purchases on your PC, Phone, Surface, and Xbox....the list goes on and on. This was disheartening enough, but I figured I could wait it out and hopefully that will get better.
I'm sure many of you have had many, many other problems. But here is were I have decided to draw the line. I have now had my phone completely fill up for the THIRD time since I got it 4 months ago. How does this happen? The "other" section of my data grows and grows till it will hit 12+ GB. There is no way to clear it. The Shrink Storage app does not help. Now for those of you that have been with Zune since the beginning, this is nothing new. Since the first gen Zune, the "reserved" space would grow and grow until you would have to factory reset your Zune and start over. The first few times I called Microsoft support, I would be fed the line "the large amount of reserved space you are seeing being taken up is the OS". I asked why the OS was growing overnight. At which point I would get double talked. Soon, I began to refuse to take that as an answer when I would call. At that point, they switched gears to "that is past firmware". I told them it was odd that the firmware was 8x the size of the original OS and even weirder that it was cleaned up by the firmware install or that it couldn't manually be removed. Once again I was getting now where. I began noticing and pointing out to them, that as I watched more and more movies on my Zune, that deleting them only recovered about 2/3 of the original memory taken up by the video file. That didn't interest them any. But as I kept a more keen eye on the situation, that is exactly what was happening. Deleting videos, music, and later on apps, never fully recovered your memory. This would continue till your reserved/other space took over your whole device. This carried over from my Zune, to my Zune 80, to my Zune HD, to my Dell-Venue-Pro, and now to my Nokia 920. I have had over 20 calls with Microsoft on this problem, through all the devices. Each and every time, they claim that it is the first time they have heard of it, even though there is pages after pages covering this in forums, including Microsoft's own. With the Nokia 920, they still insist it is photos, even though there is a section in the memory already for photos, or even more strangely, how 110 photos could take up 11.5 GB. They have since informed me the only way to remove the data taking up that section of memory, is a factory reset. Now the kicker comes. Each time I factory reset, the Nokia 920 bricks itself. AT&T is sick of seeing me for this issue and has told me to stop factory resetting if this is the result. Furthermore, they tell me if this is the issue, to switch to an iPhone. To avoid this, I now have to flash the damn thing myself.
What I find worse than this situation, is that Microsoft, does no PR damage control. They have so many issues and they acknowledge 1/100th of them. We were told that we would be getting many more updates due to their ability to push updates without having to deal with your carriers. Well, where the **** are the updates then? With all the problems they have laid at our feet, there needs to be bi-monthly updates. Things need to be fixed now. Not in a year when most of us will be looking at a new phone within months. This is becoming the new pattern. Issues are fixed 18 months later, just as early adopters are moving on.
Unfortunately, you can't get anyone at Microsoft's attention other than the poor $13/hr yes-man on the other end of the phone. How can Microsoft ask us to continue to dump more and more money into them, when they fix nothing, and take away most of the things they did right?
WPCentral has done the best job of any of the tech journalists, of getting in touch with the right people at Microsoft and at least getting some answers. What I would like to see, is Microsoft dedicate at least 1 PR person, to take directly to sites like this AND LET US KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING. And before someone says this is out of touch.....what they have been doing is out of touch. They owe us so much more than how they have treated us. People have been jumping ship on them like no tomorrow, just to get the cool new fruit devices. And what do we get for sticking it out and remaining loyal to what we once saw under the helm of Bill Gates? We get 7 year old bugs that they sweep under the rug, and just implement into the next line of mobile devices. No one over there listens. They take our money, reinvest it in developing apps and software for all the Apple people that bailed on them when owning a white phone became cool, and tell us we might see the same app in another year. Thanks for Photosynth for WP8 by the way. Thank God you found the time to add more features to the iOS version first.
If you want answers and want to see ACTUALLY FIXES, please shout out, and add your input, or whatever you feel like. None of you are being treated like a loyal costumer. We are all being treated like BETA testers, whose findings they couldn't give a care about.
My story is simple. I have watched Microsoft take many steps in the right direction with the Zune. Then they allowed the Apple clowns to drag the name through the mud. As a result, a VERY DUMB decision was made to do away with Zune. Many of us just thought we would see the same program and service with some new lime green accenting and a nice Xbox logo in the corner. Instead we were given a program that tore away 90% of the Zune functionality. Instead of hoping to get the last few missing features; like the ability to added DVD covers to our movies, volume boosting, cutting the intro or ending to songs, etc; we were given music/video programs that made duplicates of your songs, gave you no way to really control your cloud, destroyed the metadata that the Zune software so nicely put together, lost the ability to make playlists, lost the ability to use watch your video purchases on your PC, Phone, Surface, and Xbox....the list goes on and on. This was disheartening enough, but I figured I could wait it out and hopefully that will get better.
I'm sure many of you have had many, many other problems. But here is were I have decided to draw the line. I have now had my phone completely fill up for the THIRD time since I got it 4 months ago. How does this happen? The "other" section of my data grows and grows till it will hit 12+ GB. There is no way to clear it. The Shrink Storage app does not help. Now for those of you that have been with Zune since the beginning, this is nothing new. Since the first gen Zune, the "reserved" space would grow and grow until you would have to factory reset your Zune and start over. The first few times I called Microsoft support, I would be fed the line "the large amount of reserved space you are seeing being taken up is the OS". I asked why the OS was growing overnight. At which point I would get double talked. Soon, I began to refuse to take that as an answer when I would call. At that point, they switched gears to "that is past firmware". I told them it was odd that the firmware was 8x the size of the original OS and even weirder that it was cleaned up by the firmware install or that it couldn't manually be removed. Once again I was getting now where. I began noticing and pointing out to them, that as I watched more and more movies on my Zune, that deleting them only recovered about 2/3 of the original memory taken up by the video file. That didn't interest them any. But as I kept a more keen eye on the situation, that is exactly what was happening. Deleting videos, music, and later on apps, never fully recovered your memory. This would continue till your reserved/other space took over your whole device. This carried over from my Zune, to my Zune 80, to my Zune HD, to my Dell-Venue-Pro, and now to my Nokia 920. I have had over 20 calls with Microsoft on this problem, through all the devices. Each and every time, they claim that it is the first time they have heard of it, even though there is pages after pages covering this in forums, including Microsoft's own. With the Nokia 920, they still insist it is photos, even though there is a section in the memory already for photos, or even more strangely, how 110 photos could take up 11.5 GB. They have since informed me the only way to remove the data taking up that section of memory, is a factory reset. Now the kicker comes. Each time I factory reset, the Nokia 920 bricks itself. AT&T is sick of seeing me for this issue and has told me to stop factory resetting if this is the result. Furthermore, they tell me if this is the issue, to switch to an iPhone. To avoid this, I now have to flash the damn thing myself.
What I find worse than this situation, is that Microsoft, does no PR damage control. They have so many issues and they acknowledge 1/100th of them. We were told that we would be getting many more updates due to their ability to push updates without having to deal with your carriers. Well, where the **** are the updates then? With all the problems they have laid at our feet, there needs to be bi-monthly updates. Things need to be fixed now. Not in a year when most of us will be looking at a new phone within months. This is becoming the new pattern. Issues are fixed 18 months later, just as early adopters are moving on.
Unfortunately, you can't get anyone at Microsoft's attention other than the poor $13/hr yes-man on the other end of the phone. How can Microsoft ask us to continue to dump more and more money into them, when they fix nothing, and take away most of the things they did right?
WPCentral has done the best job of any of the tech journalists, of getting in touch with the right people at Microsoft and at least getting some answers. What I would like to see, is Microsoft dedicate at least 1 PR person, to take directly to sites like this AND LET US KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING. And before someone says this is out of touch.....what they have been doing is out of touch. They owe us so much more than how they have treated us. People have been jumping ship on them like no tomorrow, just to get the cool new fruit devices. And what do we get for sticking it out and remaining loyal to what we once saw under the helm of Bill Gates? We get 7 year old bugs that they sweep under the rug, and just implement into the next line of mobile devices. No one over there listens. They take our money, reinvest it in developing apps and software for all the Apple people that bailed on them when owning a white phone became cool, and tell us we might see the same app in another year. Thanks for Photosynth for WP8 by the way. Thank God you found the time to add more features to the iOS version first.
If you want answers and want to see ACTUALLY FIXES, please shout out, and add your input, or whatever you feel like. None of you are being treated like a loyal costumer. We are all being treated like BETA testers, whose findings they couldn't give a care about.
. I love windows phone. It was my first smartphone and I enjoy it everyday. I never want to switch to another platform. But something's got to give
Glad they are still letting you post your comments, as I noticed a few of my comments have been mysteriously deleted. And one of my thread closed as it points out deficiencies in WP8.
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