when you install more than 15 applications that use the push notification system in Windows Phone 7. To put it bluntly: it stops working. The first 15 push enabled apps work, but install more than that and the rest simply don’t get updates. Now of couse people looking to poo poo Microsoft’s latest attempt at trying to regain respect in the smartphone market are going to point this issue out and say it’s a major flaw, but the company swiftly responded with a blog post detailing exactly what’s going on and how developers can best write their applications so that they don’t hurt the user experience of the platform. They also hinted that in future versions of Windows Phone 7 the current limit of 15 might be bumped up. Microsoft written applications that already come with the device don’t count towards that 15 application limit, so unless you’re a social media addict who needs to know when someone on the internet the second they publish a public status update, most of you will be OK.
Microsoft, like Apple, implemented a system that tries to maintain a sole connection to a server that handles all the various application requests. The reasons are supposed to be better battery life and improved time to market for developers toiling away at their SDKs, but with Android, who opts to follow a different route and makes developers use their own notification system, but shove their notifications inside their top drawer like notification bar, battery life doesn’t seem to be an issue. In fact, battery life with Android gets better with every new version of the operating system.
Personally, I had to disable both push email and push notifications to get more than 12 hours of battery life out of my iPhone 4, so I don’t buy the improved battery argument. Some platforms are simply better built to cope with multiple concurrent connections.