MYNORTHWEST NEWS

Windows Phones smokes iPhones, Androids in simple challenges

Feb 19, 2012, 8:53 AM | Updated: 11:49 am

When it comes to smart phones, iPhones and Androids appear to be leading the charge with the Windows Phone playing catch up in the marketplace. That shouldn’t be the case, according to a Windows Phone developer who thinks his phone could “smoke” yours.

It’s a challenge Microsoft’s Ben Rudolph first put up at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “It’s a gambling town,” Rudolph told Geekwire’s Todd Bishop and John Cook. So no one batted an eye when he put a $100 challenge on the table, betting his Windows Phone, was faster at the simplest, most-used smart phone tasks.

He bet his CES challengers that his phone could do things like take a photo and post it to Twitter and Facebook faster than their iPhone or Android. For all of the bets he took up at CES (34) – he won 30 of them.

Then he took his “smoke-out” challenge to the street. This time he targeted the average smart phone user by challenging shoppers at a Microsoft store San Diego.

“We had a girl who had an iPhone, and we were doing the photo challenge, and she never even took a photo because she’s misplaced her camera app. She didn’t know what folder she put it in. Instead of capturing the moment, she was sifting through screens of apps.”

In San Diego, he won the challenge 43 out of 43 times.

So why is the phone better at taking on these simple tasks? Instead of a “sea of applications” that Rudolph calls largely disjointed in the way they are presented, “We built this phone that makes the stuff you do every day faster and easier.”

Rudolph says the reason he wins these simple speed challenges on the smart phone is because of how the Windows Phone was built and designed. “It’s a different way, a smarter way, a faster way, a better way to do the things you do every day. Whether it be searching or photos or social, the stuff that people do every day, the Windows phone took a different approach.”

For the record, when Rudolph challenged Bishop and Cook, who were using an iPhone iOS 4 and an iPhone 4 respectively, Rudolph won again. However, this time they didn’t bet $100.

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Windows Phones smokes iPhones, Androids in simple challenges