Right out of the gate...

I had such high hopes for the 900 too. Aggressive pricing. Actively promoting the phone. And now this. Not gonna win over too many hearts and minds with a data connectivity problem...

@DeathByVisualStudio: From what I've read it is not a data corruption problem, it's a data connectivity problem; big difference.

-Josh

@JoshRoss:

Either way, it is disappointing.   I am actually planning to buy a Nokia phone when my contract ends, WP8 because my contract ends around December (can get early as August). But, this discouraged me. I have HTC, it works great, but, it looks too office like. Based on this news, I am leaning toward staying with HTC, just that their phone doesn't look fun.

You have to wonder how the inability to connect to the data network wasn't picked up during testing. Fair play to Nokia though, at least they come right out and admitted it and offered compensation to those affected.

And if you remember, many other phones also had similar issues at one time or another (including the iPhone, see here and here).

Plus Nokia already said they found the problem and will have a fix on April 16th, so I won't be too worried.

Tell you this though, in almost all areas my Lumia 900 is quite a bit better than the iPhone that it is replacing. For instance there is no comparison when it comes to call quality. Those of us with iPhones forgot what calls are supposed to sound like. The speaker phone functionality is outstanding on the Lumia 900. We can always tell when someone has an iPhone in conference calls - you can barely hear them properly (they keep cutting out) and we always end up asking them to turn speaker mode off.

So yea, it is a bit embarrassing, especially after Nokia's "The beta test is over" campaign, but once they fix the problem, I doubt it will have any significant impact.

@AndyC:

Or AT&T for that matter. Because I remember AT&T took obscene amount of time to test NoDo for my Surround. So, I expect AT&T to test connectivity like crazy.

1 hour ago, DeathByVisualStudio wrote

I had such high hopes for the 900 too. Aggressive pricing. Actively promoting the phone. And now this. Not gonna win over too many hearts and minds with a data corruption problem...

Who said anything about data corruption? Seems they found a bug that caused dropped data connections while in airplane mode. Not only do they have a fix ready to go, they have offered refunds and a replacement for what sounds to me like a rather small problem.

I think they've gone above and beyond on this one, and I suspect somewhere behind the scenes, Microsoft is footing the bill.

2 hours ago, Ray7 wrote

*snip*

Who said anything about data corruption?

well, maybe this happend ... Death by visualstudio started to read the linked article. Please notice that there is a linebreak between "loss of data" and "connectivity". So maybe it stopped reading in the middle of the sentence and instead when to c9 and posted his message ..

5 hours ago, JoshRoss wrote

@DeathByVisualStudio: From what I've read it is not a data corruption problem, it's a data connectivity problem; big difference.

-Josh

Corrected. Thanks.

@fabian: LOL. Yeah. That's exactly what happened.

I think the thing a lot of people are forgetting is that the underdog has to be better than the established competition (or pull of one amazing marketing campaign).

@Ray7: Airplane more "or after the phone is turned off". I think the ability to have your data connection keep working after you turn your phone off (or back on again) is pretty important don't you? I had a WinMo phone that didn't turn it's radios back on or after the phone is turned off after airplane was turned off (i.e. when deplaning)  and that annoyed the hell out of me. Reset button he we come...

23 minutes ago, DeathByVisualStudio wrote

@Ray7: Airplane more "or after the phone is turned off". I think the ability to have your data connection keep working after you turn your phone off (or back on again) is pretty important don't you?

Yup, very important. But the blog post said that the problem occurred in 'some cases' so how many people were affected?

It certainly didn't get much press. This is the first I've heard of it.

@Ray7: I hate to say it but relative to the iPhone how much press does any WP7 device get anyway? That might be a good thing in this case.

Supposedly this only affects phones manufactured in Mexico. Mine was manufactured in Korea and I have not experienced this issue, so it might very well be limited to a small subset.

I think the big take away is that even as technology becomes more complicated the expectation for ramp up time is the same as when times were simpler.

It is good that technology can do more and more complex things.  We just need to find a way to allow end users to see inside the sausage factory to appreciate it.

So the phone is currently priced at -$100? Too bad it with contract, otherwise I'd pick up a few million of them..

@Bass: Technically I think it's -$1 ($99 - $100 credit).