Forcing updates to Windows Phone 7

[sc:mobile-category ]The Canadian Windows Phone environment is pretty limited these days, Rogers and Telus have announced new Nokia phones, but Bell hasn’t announced anything yet.  With the plethora of new Mango phones out from vendors this seems like a strange situation to be in.

To top it off, getting updates to first generation phones seems to have crawled to a trickle as well.

So what does one do with a first generation phone that has updates available for it, but haven’t been pushed to you yet?

The answer is to manually update. There’s also a tutorial over at 1800pocketpc.

My HTC HD7 has two updates waiting for it (a radio update for tethering and 8107 update to fix the keyboard and other issues).  I found the manual update process a few weeks ago, but had held off as in a conversation with Bell support they had indicated the tethering update was going to be pushed out.  However with the retirement of the “Where’s my update page”, no fixed timeframe from Bell and finally a fix for the disappearing keyboard I decided it was time to bit the bullet.

A while ago I picked up a second HD7, to do some development work/hacking on so my first task was to update this phone.

The first step was to down the “WP7 Update Cab Sender” (see the XDA thread for where to get it).  This is a great tool that uses the standard update process to push official updates to the phone.  The phone doesn’t need to be unlocked or altered in any way.

After extracting the “WP7 Update Cab Sender” to a directory I downloaded the three update packages to install:

• Radio update: 2250.21.51004.531_oemupdate_release.cab.pks_7c4cd70573f5bdd8529da845c8367b7e3e889173.cab
• 8107 update: diff-7.10.7740.16-7.10.8107.79-armv7-retail-microsoft.pks_c9b7f3bc5bb340ba30473b566b4557de0cf3322e.cab
• 8107 Language file: diff-7.10.7740.16-7.10.8107.79-armv7-retail-microsoft.lang_0409.pks_bfd9c047a7b27c28208c8a717f8d7511fb2586f1

I placed these in a separate directory as reading through the forum thread it was suggested to only send a single update to the phone at a time.  “WP7 Update Cab Sender” looks for update cabs in the same directory that it is run from.

The radio update was the frist one I installed, “WP7 Update Cab Sender” run from the command line and has a simple interface to it.  Four options are presented:

• S)end Cabs to device
• Send Cabs to device with (B)ackup
• (R)estore device backup
• Read last Update (L)ogs from device

As there was nothing on my development phone I didn’t bother with a backup and simply sent the cab to the phone.

After a few minutes the update succeed and the phone restarted without issue.  I repeated the process for the other two updates all without incident.

I then pulled my SIM from my regular phone and verified my development phone still worked as expected.

I re-ran the process on my regular phone, this time I did select the backup option.  This option does add about 10 minutes to the process, but otherwise worked as expected.

My phone now is up to date with official MS patches and there have been no issues so far.

NOTE : A few days after I wrote this article, Bell announced the release of 8107 for my HD7 (Ok, they didn’t release the announcement but it was leaked).  I’ll be posting a follow-up after I receive the 25th with what, if anything, happened on my phone.

Source: XDA Developers, 1800pocketpc.com, mobilsyrup.com