How long does your phone take to boot?

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

David Fearon recently lamented the fact that, from the moment he presses the power button, his bleeding-edge PC takes a staggering seven-and-a-half minutes to doing anything vaguely useful. Well, I’ve begun to notice that today’s so-called “smartphones” are becoming similarly sluggish.

I own a reasonably bog-standard Nokia N73. In the smartphone world, this is the equivalent of a 2:1 from an ex-Polytechnic, as compared to say, the first-class honours from Oxford that is the Apple iPhone. There’s a mere smattering of non-core applications installed on the thing – the Opera Mini browser, the Gmail mobile app. No antivirus software or anything else that could potentially interfere with the boot process.

So why on earth does it take 50 seconds to get from pressing the power button to a phone that can actually, well, phone? I always turn my phone off at night to save battery and stop random drunk idiots waking me up at 4am in the morning, when they dial the number their mate Carl had 12 years ago. But should I wake up one night to find my house burning to the ground with only my mobile in reach, I’ll be suing Nokia for the 50 seconds it took my phone to kick into life, display a gruesome welcome message, and blast out that infuriatingly twee jingle, while my family are busy choking on the fumes.

And I bet the N73 isn’t the worst offender, either. Let us know how long your phone takes to wake up using the comments feature below.