[sc:mobile-category ]In my previous post about forcing the installation of official Windows Phone 7 Updates, I mentioned I had installed 8107 just days before Bell officially announced the would be rolling it out over the last couple of weeks.
I was curious to see if there would be any issue on my phone and am glad to report that there have been no issues and the Zune software reports my phone being up to date.
Source: mobilesyrup.com
[sc:mobile-category ]During the CES keynote by Microsoft, the let slip that they would have the new Nokia Lumia 800 for sale, unlocked, at the Microsoft store. This seems like a really good idea, perhaps your carrier doesn’t have it or you want to pick one up to take to another country. Either way, buy it from Microsoft and do with it as you will.
So the question is, why isn’t EVERY Windows Phone available at the Microsoft store unlocked?
Why doesn’t Microsoft have an online store where you can buy every phone unlocked? Sure it’s going to be a small percentage of phone buyers who would go this route (obviously no financing from the carrier would be available), but why can’t Microsoft do it for those that do want it?
Write it off as a marketing expense at worst and get the phones out there, only good things could happen 
.
[sc:general-category ]I have to apologize to anyone who has registered an account in the last few weeks, it looks like one of the WordPress updates wiped out the SMTP authentication settings for the site and passwords have not been going out through e-mail.
The issue should now be resolved, if you have registered recently and have not received your password e-mail, go through the lost password process to get a new one.
Once again, my apologies and thanks for joining as well!
[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:
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:
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
[sc:mobile-category ]Last week HP sent out an update to the TouchPad, version 3.0.5.
Installing was easy, though I have found the TouchPad’s update notifier to be a little bit lacking, both firmware and software updates seem to take days to appear instead of when the update is available.
Included in this release:
Much of this is simple bug fixes, but I did noticed right away the addition of the sender’s photo in e-mail, which I think is a pretty big waste of screen real estate.
I haven’t noticed any improvement in web pages with video, but it will be a welcome addition if true, loading a webpage with multiple video elements on it pretty much ensured a browser crash.
The double space for a period function really annoys me, but fortunately it can be turned off. Speaking of short cuts, here’s something about the TouchPad that makes no sense to me. The TouchPad keyboard has a tab key on it, but when writing an e-mail or other text items, it acts like a web browser and goes to the next field instead of acting like a TAB key and inserting a TAB in the text.
So far it’s been hard to tell much difference with 3.0.5, but something I did notice (and isn’t in the above list) is that a vertical scroll indicator now appears in the web browser. It might have been there before, but I don’t remember it and do remember wishing one was there…
So now the only question is weather this will be the last update for the TouchPad or not?