With more of the UK networks cutting down on usage limits, reports of Windows Phone 7 phones being voraciously data-hungry can’t really come at a worse time.
As we know, Windows Phone 7 pulls a lot of data from the web to keep things like Facebook information on the home page constantly populated with fresh information. Then there’s email, internet, Bing Maps, Xbox Live and so on.
Worryingly, there’ve been reports of Windows Phone 7 devices consuming data even when they’re idle, as much as 2-5MB per hour. In a worse case scenario, this tots up to 120MB a day.
So when your data plan gets cut down to 500MB a month, you can see how this could be a problem. What’s worse is that phones seem to be using 3G data even when the phones are connected to Wi-Fi.
Tests done at Windows Phone Secrets shows just how data-hungry Windows Phone 7 can be; Paul Thurrott picked up his new Win Pho 7 phone in July last year and there’s been an upward climb in data use ever since – with a massive spike in November 2010.
It’s also worth nothing that Paul’s on an AT&T plan in the US, which gives him just 200MB of data a month. Getting cut to 500MB a month doesn’t seem quite as bad in comparison.
At CES last week, Microsoft announced that “several improvements” were being worked on for Windows Phone 7. Chief among these were cutting and pasting of text and improved multitasking, but there was no mention of what else was in the pipeline. So it’s possible that Microsoft is aware of this and already working on a fix.
We’ve contacted Microsoft and are waiting to hear back.
Source: Windows Phone Secrets via PC World
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