Sep 292011
 

Ok, I know I broke the rule and installed the beta on my WP7 trophy, but I heard too many things good about it to not at least try and no one seemed to have difficulty with the install. I also realized that when the official one came out that I would need to revert back to my pre-mango state to then go to full release Mango, I was worried but not too much since I do not really have anything major on my phone anyway. You can imagine my surprise when I plugged in my phone on 9/27/2011 and Zune told me that I had an update available….SWEEEETTTT! So I did what anyone would do in my situation and installed it. Which worked great for the most part, after about an hour or so of the install running automatically, I was pleasantly surprised when it said congratulations you can unplug your phone now. Like I said it went great for the most part, everything was still installed like it was when I started the install, even Wifi was online and ready to go, so everything is right with world….or so I thought, then I left my house and wonderful Wifi and boom, no data connection….dang it all, after searching high and low for fixes and seeing everything from reset your phone to hard reset to take your phone back to pre-mango state, I was a bit worried at this point but then I thought Microsoft wouldn’t really want their developers having to flash their phones back to factory to install this update, so I thought I would go with the simplest options first to see what would happen. I fired up Zune and found a Restore button on the main updates page, so I clicked it, which took me back to Beta Mango, ok fine, then I saw a post about Connection Setup Wizard by HTC being an issue and I had noticed some errors with it on boot up, so I thought what the heck and I uninstalled it and then immediately tried to update to full Mango again, after another hours or so, the same window popped up saying unplug your phone you are done, but this time I had Wifi off for testing and low and behold I was receiving data over my data connection….YEESSSSS and no hard resets no lengthy reverting back to pre-mango. So if you are installing Mango from your carrier and encounter no data connection afterwards, restore… then uninstall the connection setup wizard… then reinstall the update.

Hopefully that will help someone out there! And NO this was NOT Verizon Wireless’ fault as they have no control over the software we install, I think that is how it is with our PCs as well, we run the chance of messing something up anytime we install a simple app.

Jul 292011
 

Yesterday I made a post about my HTC Trophy WP7 phone and mentioned some glaring flaws I have noticed, to which someone mentioned many of these issues were fixed in an upcoming update called Mango. Well, I must confess that got my interest a bit, so I went looking for the update. I found that more than a few people installed it on the Trophy with no issues, just a few hoops to jump through. Now, I must admit there were times when I was worried with the install, and with the time it was taking to install, but all in all the install went unbelievably well. I am guessing that is mostly attributed to the makers of the setup program not necessarily Microsoft, but I think they did a really good job of making the install work correctly. Even if it did take over an hour and a half. One caveat, you NEED to make a backup before proceeding with the update so it can be removed eventually when the full release is done.

First impressions? OMG, I can not wait for the final release of this update, this update addresses nearly every issue I have noticed about WP7!! There are very few issues that they didn’t cover even some I didn’t notice, like making the app list searchable and broken down by letters. Office now works with Skydrive properly, so place a file in skydrive and it shows up on your phone. Custom ringtones works, but only for ringtone, no custom sounds for anything else yet, but they seem to be moving in the right direction. Battery percentage? yep they got that covered too, although it is a bit hidden in the settings menu “battery saver” at the very bottom is battery percentage and expected usage, woohoo, now it needs to be a live tile! They even have a built in app switcher, no not multi-tasking, that is in place but the app devs need to recode to make it work right. There are other things that have been corrected as well like IE9 is now onboard and guess what Google Music even works now, not the greatest but this is still just a beta update and is QUITE IMPRESSIVE!

I hope that helps you to get a feel for the GREAT strides Microsoft is making in addressing the users of WP7’s needs and wants.

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