Microsoft comes clean about Windows Phone 7 update process. Confirms NoDo delay caused by previous update issue

News · 11 Mar 2011 · MTW Editorial Team

Microsoft has finally decided to post a lengthy explication about what’s currently going on with the Windows Phone 7 update issues and delays. There’s basically nothing new in there especially if you’ve already seen my months old post about the update process. Microsoft is essentially explaining how the updates are developed, tested buy OEMs, Carriers etc then packaged.

Regarding the dodgy February update that screwed up on some Samsung Omnia 7 and Focus handsets, Microsoft said the following:

Of the customers who’ve so far tried to install it, the overwhelming majority have been successful. If you’ve been following along, you know that we did encounter a few issues, which we quickly identified and fixed or provided workarounds for.

I think that it should be noted that it wasn’t “quick” , that the so call “fix” was to bypass the backup process on the affected handsets (and this didn’t work for everybody) and the workaround is a hard-reset. So, in my eyes Microsoft didn’t really fix the issue at all. Anyway, here’s the follow up:

Let me be crystal clear: We’re not satisfied when problems prevent you from enjoying the latest Windows Phone updates. When we find an issue, we study and fix it. To that end, we’re carefully studying the current update process and will apply the lessons learned from it to all future ones. This is how we get better.

Here’s a suggestion: Instead of backing-up the handset and then applying the update. Why not do it the “clean” way: back-up, hard-reset, apply update and then copy the backed-up user content to the phone (similar to iOS)? This way the issues faced on the Samsung devices would have never happened.

The company is also confirming that NoDo has been delayed because of the 7008 issues:

But I believe it’s important that we learn all we can from the February update. So I’ve decided to take some extra time to ensure the update process meets our standards, your standards, and the standards of our partners. As a result, our plan is to start delivering the copy-and-paste update in the latter half of March.

And also confirmed that Multi-Tasking, IE9 Mobile , Twitter etc are part of the same update (Mango) and not separate like some recent rumors are claiming & that its schedule is not impacted by the NoDo delay:
and

This short pause should in no way impact the timing of future updates, including the one announced recently at Mobile World Congress featuring multitasking, a Twitter feature, and a new HTML 5-friendly version of Internet Explorer Mobile.

So what’s my take on this? Well, I personally think that this post is one week late. But I guess that it’s better late than never. I also hope that Microsoft drastically changes its PR / communication around Windows Phone 7 because all we have now is blogs making up stories, fake dates, rumors etc to generate traffic. At the end of the day this frustrates the end users who are only left with questions without answers. One word of advise for all my followers and readers: Don’t always believe everything you read…