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Waiting impatiently for the first proper Windows Phone 7 update to hit your handset? Join the crowds. The phone-bricking installation bugs that afflicted some users with the pre-update ‘update’ in February have delayed the launch of the full thing.
Microsoft is referring to the next update as the ‘copy-and-paste update’, since that’s the major new feature, along with a better search function for the Windows Phone Marketplace app store, and other performance improvements. In a blog post, Microsoft’s Eric Hautala explains the delay.
“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.”
That means the update should start rolling out in 2-3 weeks, assuming no tricksy gremlins are unearthed during the final tweaks. Hautala takes care to point out that this delay won’t have a knock-on effect.
“This short pause should in no way impact the timing of future updates,
including the one announced recently at Mobile World Congress featuring
multi-tasking, a Twitter feature, and a new HTML 5-friendly version of
Internet Explorer Mobile.”
He also deals with one of the big questions around Windows Phone 7: whether mobile operators can block users from receiving updates to the OS. In short, no. But that doesn’t mean they’ll launch each update at the same time.
“We work closely with carriers to test and schedule updates. They may ask
us for a specific date to start an update. They may ask for updates to
be bundled together. But you should ultimately receive all the updates
we send out,” writes Hautala.
