jennell2jenson: Windows Phone's NoDo Update Bigger Than Expected

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Windows Phone's NoDo Update Bigger Than Expected

Microsoft's long-awaited Windows Phone 7 "NoDo" update is apparently pushing its way into the ecosystem. That follows news from a couple weeks ago that the update was being pushed back from the first two weeks of March to the second half of the month.

For some time, users have known that "NoDo" includes a cut-and-paste feature previously missing from Windows Phone 7, in addition to faster application loading and improved Marketplace search. According to a Windows Phone Update History posted on Microsoft's Windows Phone Website, though, the update (OS version 7.0.7390.0) contains some other interesting tidbits.

First, there are improvements to Messaging, WiFi and Outlook. With regard to the latter, according to the Windows Phone Website, "We've improved the experience of viewing iPhone photo attachments you receive from a non-Exchange-based email account."

Microsoft's update also improves the "stability of switching between camera and video modes," the experience of "syncing Facebook accounts," and "the experience of using a Bluetooth headset to make calls when you're playing music or videos."

That's pretty wide-ranging, certainly more so than some previous public announcements had let on, but also somewhat expected for a platform that's been on the market for six months. While Microsoft plans to stagger the update's worldwide release, new Windows Phone 7 smartphones from AT&T and Sprint are hitting the marketplace with the latest software preinstalled.

The HTC HD7S, available on AT&T within the next few weeks, features Windows Phone 7 on a 4.3-inch high-resolution screen. Sprint's HTC Arrive, the first Windows Phone 7 smartphone to appear on a CDMA (Code Division Mutliple Access) also includes the updated Windows Phone 7 software.

In February, Microsoft introduced a Windows Phone 7 update designed to help with future updates. Within a day of that update's rollout, however, a small number of users began complaining it stalled their smartphones.

In a corporate blog posting, Microsoft then claimed that only 10 percent of users' smartphones had choked on the new software. Nonetheless, the company temporarily suspended the update for Samsung phones until it could puzzle out some of the underlying issues.

In the wake of that little incident, Microsoft seemed more cautious in how it proceeded with the "NoDo" update. "After careful consultation with the team and our many partners, we've decided to briefly hold the March update in order to ensure the update process meets our standards and that of our customers," a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in a March 10 e-mail to eWEEK. "As a result, we will plan to begin delivering the update in the latter half of March."

Microsoft has an additional series of updates planned for the second half of 2011, including greater integration with Twitter, multitasking, and a new HTML5-friendly version of Internet Explorer Mobile.

But let's just see how smoothly the "NoDo" update proceeds, first.

Editor's note: The original version of this posting had the next few WP7 updates arriving in the second half of "3011" instead of 2011. Some updates come slowly, but not *that* slowly.