Prototype Windows Phone 7 boots up really fast

As I’ve noted briefly in my TechEd 2010 coverage, Windows Phone 7 have come a long way in terms of responsiveness and performance. Perhaps a good benchmark of the improvements they’ve made to the operating system since MIX10 and certainly its debut at Mobile World Congress is the start up time.

The short video above features a prototype LG Windows Phone 7 device with a recent but still not final build of the OS doing a cold boot after removing and replacing the battery. Consistent across several tests, the device booted in an impressive 30 seconds. What’s remarkable is that as soon as the lock screen displays, it’s fully initialized and ready to be used.

Smartphones are not known for the fast boots and the fastest Windows Mobile 6.5 device on the market today, the HTC HD2, takes easily a minute to boot and at least a further 15 seconds before you dare to touch it. Earlier builds of WP7 at MWC took at least a minute to boot too. Considering this is still a work in progress, I’m optimistic they’ll improve it even further.

50 insightful thoughts

  1. My Windows 7 laptop boots up in about the same time, I wouldn’t say this is fast for a phone with less capabilities than a laptop. Having said that, it certainly beats the 4mins my Blackberry takes!

    1. i had a 1st gen curve & i takes i’d say about 20 mins. to boot & about an hour after a firmware change

  2. This is, after all, the same company that has improved boot times in its client operating system by large margins over the last couple of years.

  3. My Nokia 6233 only takes 6 seconds to cold boot, bit of a different spec though 😉
    How does this compare to the competition? Would be cool to see a side-by-side video.

  4. Doesn’t sound all that impressive. My iPod Touch running iOS 3.1 cold-boots in 15 seconds.

    1. My iPod Touch running 3.1 takes 30 seconds to boot.The iPhone 3GS on 3.1 takes around 24 seconds to boot, the Nexus One takes about 47 seconds to boot and the HTC HD2 takes around 42 seconds to boot. My source is this test: http://tweakers.net/reviews/1684/11/schone-schijn-samsung-wave-met-super-amoled-praktijktests-snelle-starter.html (It’s in dutch so you’ll probably have to grab some translator).

      Long Zheng, you’re such a tease. Only showing us small glimpses of WP7 and never the full experience. I’d say keep those glimpses coming. You’re showing us WP7 one piece at a time.

  5. Surely the phone itself has to do a few things before the OS starts the boot sequence, right?

    There’s a clear advantage when you develop both the device and the OS and can easily test them together. If Windows Phone 7 on any device can boot up with around the same loading time as the iPhone, then it is in fact a big deal.

  6. of course the last time I rebooted my iPhone was when I updated the firmware 6 months ago… my Windows Mobile phone on the other hand needed a reboot every couple of days.

    I guess if you need to reboot a lot fast boot times come in handy… other than that who cares.

    1. The boot itself is pretty useless but this is a good indication of the improvements in performance they’ve made in the last couple of months in development.

    2. My old iPhone would crash every now and again. I usually only reboot my smartphone when I must. It has intermittent performance issues that I think may be due to the custom rom I’m using but I’m too lazy to go and wipe out the phone and install the new rom release. I would say the boot is over a minute though. Then again I have not actually timed it yet.

  7. Seriously, who cares how fast a mobile phone boots? Who reboots their phone? I booted my phone 18 months ago when I bought it.

    1. I turn mine off before I go to bed soooo mine reboots fairly frequently… It’s also an iPhone 3G so it has to boot up again every time the battery dies… I’m so glad my mum pays for it and not me

    2. You have to reboot your phone if you remove the battery, after a software update, after removing/replacing the memory card and/or SIM card. I’m not saying that it will be something you will do very often, but there are occasions when you will have to reboot it.

    3. Maybe not something you do everyday. But everyone will turn it on Day One…and if you have experience with other smartphones it would seem fast to you.

    4. I’ve told you a million times not to exaggerate.

      I doubt you havent updated your firmware in 18 months.

    1. Eh…The only smartphone that boots up faster is the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. A 30 seconds boot up time leaves pretty much all other smartphones in the dust. Then you also have to consider that what they’re showing is still alpha/beta software.

  8. ~30 seconds isn’t bad, I wouldn’t consider it really fast though – considering all it’s loading is the WP7 OS.

    By comparison my HTC Touch Pro running a custom ROM from xda-developers takes about 40-45 seconds to cold boot WM6.5, then another 40-45 seconds to load HTC Sense 2.5 + Cookie Home Tab 1.8. But thats with a ~520Mhz Processor, today’s technology for CPU and RAM is twice as fast.

    To load a mobile OS today on good hardware (with a 720+Mhz/1Ghz CPU) I’d expect it to take 20-30 seconds.

  9. Lovely and simple boot animation. I wish the logo looks flatter instead of gradient. 🙂

    1. coincdently, it also looks like every other “smartphone” out today and does absolutely nothing nearly as great as WPS7 will… why’d you bother posting a “comment”

  10. This still feels like a failure by all smartphones. 30 seconds is forever. Free idea: re-architect the OS so it loads everything that’s needed to run the phone first, and then lazy load everything else, afterwards. The goal should be you can make a call 5 seconds after boot. everything else can load up later. It would even be acceptable if you had to do it with two phone applications… a preboot emergency phone app which runs before/during boot… and after boot is finished, that gets replaced by regular phone app.

    1. Your ‘free idea’ has been in OS booting for a long time, and more than anything they play today with making progressively more decoupled services and components of the kernel to support this more, it is however a lot harder to implement than the idea is.

      30 seconds is a long time, but you should be booting your phone less than once a month.. so whilst I agree 30 seconds isn’t impressive, it also isn’t really an issue at all, iphones don’t exactly boot fast and that hasn’t stopped them taking over the universe.

    2. Don’t things last longer when they’re off? Mine boots everrrry morning.
      Please don’t talk about Iphones likes that… It’s depressing. >.<

    3. it all depends if its gsm or cdma. sometimes it can take a sim phonebook longer even on a basic cell phone

  11. Who uses a microsoft windows phone instead of an iphone you fools puahahaha snioahahahaha

  12. Apparently the Windows Phone 7 team is aiming for boot up times in under 20 seconds. Just read this article: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20007973-56.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0
    It’s pretty interesting. The article is a bit about the people behind the development of Windows Phone 7. The thing I’m talking about is this part:
    “In the first meeting, 14 people sat around a standard-issue Microsoft conference table–big, nondescript, with a light wood finish–while 26 more stood or found something to lean on. The attitudes and attire varied greatly, starched shirts next to T-shirts, one developer getting excited about a bug while another got defensive. Among the agenda items was a discussion on how fast the phone is turning on.

    “Am I happy about the boot time, am I legitimately happy?” asked Alex Hinrichs, the release manager.

    You should be, responded developer Maher Saba, noting that the device is now booting in 19.5 seconds, one second away from the eventual goal.”

    Just read the article I’d say, there is much much more in there if you have even a little interest in Windows Phone 7 or smartphones in general.

  13. Not bad at all, but of course that begs the question how often to your reboot your phone? Just timed my HTC Desire, and it took 58 seconds.

  14. Sorry to restart a dead post, but I just wanted to let you know my iPhone 2g takes 8 mins 46 secs to cold boot! And my new HD7 takes a little under 20 secs!! Huge diffrence!

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