[Windows Phone 7 General] N8ter:
Anyone with an iOS and WP7.5 device can clearly see the iOS device is clearly faster at recieving push notifications than the WP7.5 device. The number of people bold enough to claim otherwise is extremely small, because that difference does and has pretty much always existed since the OS launched.

Maybe it's an app issue, maybe not. I know third party apps that have WP7 versions (like IM+) also recieve push notifications on iOS and Android (when set to C2DM) much faster than the WP7 version.

Call me a skeptic.

---------- Post added at 02:23 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:16 AM ----------

Apple took the best parts of WP7 (Toasts) and Android (Notification Center, Lock Screen Notifications from some device types), added a bit of graphical flourish and made them easier to configure, and put them in iOS 5.

There is almost nothing wrong with the way they implemented the Notifications there. iOS went from having the worst Notification system to having the best one in one revision.

Microsoft should have tackled this issue in Mango, along with the laggy push notifications which is an issue as many consumers are moving from mostly phone-based communications to Social Networks and IM/Chat services.

Getting your PUSH Notifications 30 seconds to 5+ minutes late is like someone pausing 30 seconds to 5+ minutes between sentences when you're talking to them on the phone. It's unacceptable, especially so when your other devices are getting them so fast. It basically forces you to just put down your WP7.5 device and use the other one. Is that what Microsoft wants people to do?

Not only does it look bad, but it's a bad user experience.

If someone has an iPod Touch and [for example] an HTC Titan and the PUSH Notification lag is constantly causing them to use the other device to communicate, the likely hood that they'll consider an iPod with a Phone is much higher. No one is asking them to blow Apple or Google out of the water with Blackberry-level push notification speed. We just need a user experience that is at least on par with the competitors. At the moment the PUSH lag is grief inducing.

Good that Tango is instant for you, or whatever. I don't use that and it's less important to me and several million other people that i.e. Facebook, Facebook Chat, and Windows Live Messenger, among other things...

---------- Post added at 02:32 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:23 AM ----------

The only time a PUSH Notification shouldn't be sent in real time is if the recipient's phone is off. I don't even know why they would do something like that, TBQH...

The whole point of PUSH Notifications, period, is that the Notification is sent to the recipient's device immediately when it comes in - provided that device is powered on (then it should be queued).

Implementing them in a way that can cause delays provides hardly any benefits in user experience because they then become volatile and the user is forced to poll the server whenever they want to know if a Notification is available (because now the PUSH servers are untrustworthy).

All Notifications should be real-time. Maybe they did this to save their servers from strain or something, I dunno. It's just a bit illogical. Google and Apple certainly have better engineers than Microsoft...