Rant about DP Windows Phone 8.1

[Asharon Baltazar]

Five months ago I bought a Nokia Lumia 620, running, of course, Windows Phone 8. Then WP8.1 hit the scene and I immediately downloaded the Developer's Preview and enjoyed it for a short amount of time , WP8.1. I loved the notification center, Cortana, WordFlow keyboard, revamped lock screen, faster animations and such. But then little things started to nag me and they didn't want to let go of them. Loading... Loading... This is what I had to stare at everytime I wanted to switch applications. Skype, a notorious application, took 5-10 seconds to load on WP8 but 20-25 seconds to load on WP8.1. But it never promised to load. Nope. It also liked to crash. A lot. Opening a different tab on Internet Explorer sometimes left me staring at a loading screen and making Internet Explorer crash. A lot. Launching the camera on WP8.1 took five seconds longer than WP8. In fact, the WP8 camera launches instantly, no loading! And I'm talking about an mid-entry level device! Battery life... *shudder* Worst thing ever. Not to mention the heating of the device to hot plate level temperature. Play 10 minutes of Wordament, browsing the web for 10 minutes and writing this on OneNote, lowered only three percent! While all this on WP8.1 can lower 8 percent or maybe even lower! The background sometimes froze and my tiles disappeared from the Start screen, making me wait until they refresh. While reading something, the screen would suddenly freeze for five seconds and then Cortana's familiar circles would pop up, making me wonder is it that hard to optimize Cortana like the Bing search button. Why?! I understand this is the Developer's Preview but after 4 updates, it still sucks! After the Update 1 update, I couldn't take it anymore. Reading an article for ten minutes lowered my battery ten percent... Whaaaattt?!?!? Having enough of this bullsh*t, I used the Nokia Recovery Software and downgraded to WP8. Suddenly, everything started working in complete harmony. The awesome pictures hub, the music and video hub, the games hub, the People hub, Family Rooms for crying out loud, the awesome pointer thingy when you want to edit something in the middle of a word, Facebook chat in messaging hub, the awesome Store layout etc, the fast loading times. I miss all of this in WP8.1. We all do, right? While I do miss the Action Center, WordFlow, Cortana, background pictures, cooler animations, push updates in Store, I understood all of this comes at a price. Sloooooooowwwwwwwness and battery life. I'd rather wait till the official Cyan update and not take my chances with DP. Again. It's cool and awesome but not worth it.

 

[roni09riku]

I understand what you mean. If you're not pleased with WP8.1 DP then you can just wait for Cyan and the official WP8.1. However, let's not put all the blame on MS since your phone has limitations too. First of, your phone is an entry level phone, with only a dual core 1ghz krait and running on 512mb of RAM, plus your battery is only 1300mah. It was released with WP8 so it SHOULD run good on WP8. WP8.1 is released more than a year after the 620 is released. That much time gave room on other, more powerful phones, and you can't expect MS to dial everything down just because of other phone's limitations. If you really want a smooth experience with WP8.1, you should consider getting a more powerful phone. Get the 930 so you'll get WP8.1 without the need for updating.

 

[IEhrgeizI]

Sorry but you're on Developer Preview which means you're going to have bugs and it's highly likely lots of apps aren't optimised for the version it runs. Basically don't run DP if you cant deal with these things. Having low end hardware does make these things worse too.

 

[Pete]

If things are lagging/overheating or not working as they should, then there's two or three courses of action that should be taken before stating there's an issue.

1) Battery usage/background processes - use Battery Saver to see what's eating up your battery, this tells you what apps are causing the overheating (heat = CPU overload = battery drain). Go down the list and set "not allowed" on any apps you don't want working in the background.
2) Soft reset - press + hold the power+volume down buttons until you feel the phone buzz. Phone will then restart (this does the same as removing/replacing the battery and will kill any locked processes)
3) Used when the soft reset doesn't resolve the problem.

If you've covered those, then something else needs to be looked at.

If neither of those resolve the issues, then

 

[anon(123856)]

I have to agree roni09riku. I've installed the 8.1 DP on a Lumia 520 and a Lumia 822 and the experience was not great on the 520. The 822 on the other hands runs very well (especially after a hard reset) and I'm actually running 8.1 GDR1 on it now. My point is the 520 just wasn't happy running the DP even after I did a hard reset so I used the Nokia Software Recovery tool to revert it back to 8.0. Even though the 822 is far from a flagship device, it has the muscle required to run 8.1 smoothly.

 

[Asharon Baltazar]

I understand what you mean. If you're not pleased with WP8.1 DP then you can just wait for Cyan and the official WP8.1. However, let's not put all the blame on MS since your phone has limitations too. First of, your phone is an entry level phone, with only a dual core 1ghz krait and running on 512mb of RAM, plus your battery is only 1300mah. It was released with WP8 so it SHOULD run good on WP8. WP8.1 is released more than a year after the 620 is released. That much time gave room on other, more powerful phones, and you can't expect MS to dial everything down just because of other phone's limitations. If you really want a smooth experience with WP8.1, you should consider getting a more powerful phone. Get the 930 so you'll get WP8.1 without the need for updating.

Still. It's horrible that such a gap happened. I still have no idea what makes the apps to take so long to resume... Probably because of the bigger OS. I know it's a DP and that's why I admit that it's a bad idea to use DP as your daily driver. Still, removing so many things from Windows Phone 8 and substituting them for other things, I don't think it's supposed to run so laggy... Whatever. Hey, the Nokia Lumia 630 and 530 have, in some ways, lower specs than the Lumia 620. Plus, I've been hearing that some people that do have a Nokia Lumia 620 with DP their phone has been working perfectly fine... Strange.
..

 

[psiu_glen]

Sorry but you're on Developer Preview which means you're going to have bugs and it's highly likely lots of apps aren't optimised for the version it runs. Basically don't run DP if you cant deal with these things. Having low end hardware does make these things worse too.

Stop spreading this FUD. This is the release software, heck the DP users will be getting bug fixes long before anyone else. This is not beta software.

 

[roni09riku]

Still. It's horrible that such a gap happened. I still have no idea what makes the apps to take so long to resume... Probably because of the bigger OS. I know it's a DP and that's why I admit that it's a bad idea to use DP as your daily driver. Still, removing so many things from Windows Phone 8 and substituting them for other things, I don't think it's supposed to run so laggy... Whatever. Hey, the Nokia Lumia 630 and 530 have, in some ways, lower specs than the Lumia 620. Plus, I've been hearing that some people that do have a Nokia Lumia 620 with DP their phone has been working perfectly fine... Strange.
..

With regards to the 630 and 530's specs vs 620, the screen size and battery are the noticeable differences. Processor and memory don't differ that much from the 620, only slightly higher. The 620 however, has a front cam. I've also been wondering why they took off the front cam on the 630.

Somehow, the DP works differently on individual phones. I've seen some people posting problems on their 1520 that I haven't experienced at all. My friend's 520 also works quite fine compared to other 520's reported here. Just luck, I guess.

 

[Asharon Baltazar]

Stop spreading this FUD. This is the release software, heck the DP users will be getting bug fixes long before anyone else. This is not beta software.

So no bugs were ever addressed... Like the mending of call history and the speed dial when you swipe too soon. Or how about the appearing of the black theme keyboard for just a sec when you're using a white theme? Or how about the constant refreshing of the Start screen, for crying out loud!!! Battery life was improved and then forgotten about as they continued to update the OS. Want anymore? Yeah. How about the sudden black screen when you lower the notification center and press the multitasking back button and then you're left with a black screen. Or the weird behavior of the lock keypad when you swipe up on the lock screen and then access the action center and then tap settings and the lock keypad does something strange before showing up? I can go on and on. You know what? You can try them too! Go ahead. No bug fixes were released. Sheesh.

 

[David P2]

With regards to the 630 and 530's specs vs 620, the screen size and battery are the noticeable differences. Processor and memory don't differ that much from the 620, only slightly higher. The 620 however, has a front cam. I've also been wondering why they took off the front cam on the 630.

Somehow, the DP works differently on individual phones. I've seen some people posting problems on their 1520 that I haven't experienced at all. My friend's 520 also works quite fine compared to other 520's reported here. Just luck, I guess.

Agreed... I have zero issues on my 620 whether or not it's running Preview. I only have battery issues because the 620's battery isn't all that good to begin with.... I mean 1300mA is woefully underpowered for a phone these days.

 

[IEhrgeizI]

So no bugs were ever addressed... Like the mending of call history and the speed dial when you swipe too soon. Or how about the appearing of the black theme keyboard for just a sec when you're using a white theme? Or how about the constant refreshing of the Start screen, for crying out loud!!! Battery life was improved and then forgotten about as they continued to update the OS. Want anymore? Yeah. How about the sudden black screen when you lower the notification center and press the multitasking back button and then you're left with a black screen. Or the weird behavior of the lock keypad when you swipe up on the lock screen and then access the action center and then tap settings and the lock keypad does something strange before showing up? I can go on and on. You know what? You can try them too! Go ahead. No bug fixes were released. Sheesh.

Exactly my friend.