So today is JumbleCat’s second birthday, but yesterday was Valentine’s day and Bell finally showed my HTC 8X some love just in time!

Bell seems to have a love hate relationship with Windows Phone, they always support it but it always seems to take a long time for them to get around to it.  It’s kind of like they’re always two weeks late giving their girlfriend a box of chocolates for Valentine’s day 😉

The update message appeared later in the day and installation took about 10 minutes.  There were actually three updates to install but they all went smoothly.  The longest part of the process was the final step which had to migrate my data.  I guess they updated the data formats or something as everything was still there after it was done.

The Portico update contains a few key items:

• Draft TXT messages (I do think this will be useful once in a while)
• TXT replies to incoming calls (don’t think I’ll ever use this one)
• IE Improvements (deleting sites in the history is a nice feature)
• WiFi (being able to keep WiFi active all the time is a great feature, turned it on ASAP after the update)

The WiFi change is nice, but it looks like it eats battery life pretty quickly.  In about 2 hours of standby I lost 14% of the battery life which means only about 14 hours of standby time.  I’m going to play around with it a bit but it looks like I’ll have to turn it off as I suspect the fact I have mail delivery set to “As items arrive” probably plays a big part in how much power the WiFi draws when in standby.

The real fix I want though is the random reboot issue, which hopefully will be resolved now.  I’ll have to wait a few days and see to be sure.

[sc:mobile-category ]When Bell released the HD7, it’s first Windows Phone device, they provide a self service “app”, they’ve now updated this app for Windows Phone 8.

The original “app” was actually just a link to a website, it wasn’t installed through the Marketplace and didn’t really work very well.  A few months later Bell released a proper application and then disabled access to the website.  Of course they didn’t actually tell anyone they had done this so from and end-user perspective all that happened was the self-service app no longer worked.

After a few weeks of this I finally called in to Bell support and they told me about the new app.  The new app still wasn’t much more than a coat of paint over the website, but it was an actual app and functioned well enough.  It still looked like a web page instead of a Windows Phone app, but something was better than nothing.

With the release of the 8X a few months ago Bell shipped the Windows Phone 7 version of their self-serve app along with the phone.  Again, it was workman like,  but no more.

A few weeks ago I received an updated notification from the store that the self-service app had an update.  I downloaded the app and the first thing that became apparent is that it seem to disappear from the program list.  The Windows Phone 7 app was called “Bell Self Service”, which made sense.  The new app is just called “Self Service” which means it gets listed way down the app list with the S’s.  And really, no one else is going to make an app named “Self Service”?  Come on Bell, put your name in the app again, it just makes sense.

Anyway they app itself has had a slight upgrade, but visually it is still a web site, Bell should invest in supporting the platform with a proper app, they’ve done it with their other apps, like the Remote PVR (ok, it’s ugly, but it at least it looks like Windows Phone app).

So Microsoft has finally rolled out Windows Phone 7.8, the update that adds the new start screen from WP8 to WP7.

I’ve moved to my HTC 8X for my primary phone so I decided to boot up my old HD7 and see what it looked like.  Upon boot up, the phone immediately detected an update and after connecting to my PC and running the Zune software, the updated started right away.

The first update was not WP7.8, but instead 7.10.8779.8, which doesn’t appear in the MS update list, but must be something HD7 specific.  The update was quick enough to install so it was fine.

A second update, 7.10.8783.12, also installed, again without any info on the MS update site.

And finally update 7.10.8858.136 came down which was WP7.8.

The whole process only took about 15 minutes and completed without incident.

The start screen experience is exactly as you would expect and the Bing image of the day for the wallpaper works just fine as well.

I have to say holding my HD7 again was kind of nice.  The 8X is a nice phone but the HD7 just seems to feel better in my hand.  I really do still prefer the form factor of the HD7.  After thinking about it for a bit I think there are several things I prefer about the HD7:

• The shorter form factor.  The 8X is quite tall in comparison to the HD7 and the overall feel suffers for it.
• The 16×9 display of the 8X contributes to the height of the phone, but doesn’t make it any thinner.
• The edge of the 8X is quite thin and almost comes to a point, where as the HD7 has a thicker side to it.  I think the thicker side gives a better feel to the phone even though the actual phone’s have a very similar thickness to them..
• The corners of the 8X are almost pointy, and only slightly rounded.  The HD7 on the other hand uses it’s thicker edge and more rounded corners to good effect and give a better feel in your hand.

The more I look at the Nokia 820, the more I think it’s the kind of form factor I want out of all the WP8 devices available.  Perhaps we’ll see some new phones released at Mobile World Congress.