Windows Phone 7 updates – The story so far

Rumors are buzzing in the blogosphere about the upcoming first update of Microsoft’s new mobile OS – Windows Phone 7.

First WP7 update – NoDo

Microsoft themselves have detailed what is to be expected functionality wise in this first update codenamed “NoDo”. But they haven’t said anything about dates except “some time early 2011”. But now the blogs are buzzing about February the 7:th as a probable date. Microsoft has also recently created a new KB article (kb 2484484) which hint’s towards the update closing in on us.

The “NoDo” update is slated to bring:

• Copy and paste functionality
• Faster load times of some apps and most games
• Backup and restore functionality, first only to be used for updates
• Improvement of the Marketplace

Copy and paste

Microsoft writes on their description of the first patch:

Using copy and paste is easy and intuitive

Just tap to mark text, maybe slide your finger to mark some more text and then just press the copy icon. Later just paste this where you feel like it, email, apps, messaging, where ever.

It’s not really rocket science though, so I fail to see how it’s possible to not make this function intuitive.

Faster load times

Apparently they have changed the way the code handles preloaded data. So that any apps that are relying on loading a lot of the game resources straight off will be benefiting a lot form this. This has been a real issue but game programmers have been utilizing several different tweaks of resources and code to bypass this, hopefully this won’t be necessary any more after this patch. Check out the video below for some examples of improvement in load speed.

Backup and restore

All the settings and data and your phone is going to be backed up from your phone via Zune to your computer before the new update will be installed. To begin with this functionality will only be used for software updates, but in the future I hope they extend this so that users freely can restore their phones if anything were to happen to them.

This might not seem like such a big deal but Microsoft’s earlier mobile OS Windows Mobile 6.5 did not offer any backup functionality before updating. So after updating a WinMo device it was blank, you had to redo all your settings, and all your other info was lost.

Marketplace improvements

Only the marketplace search is said to have been improved. Right now you can’t specify what you want to search for, and shows you all possible hits for stuff available in the market. This leads to that your search results get totally drowned in song title matches most often.

I hope Microsoft is also aware of many users having issues with the Marketplace to the extent where it bugs out totally and need a cold reboot before it starts working again. I’m getting that a lot when I get over zealous and try and scroll through my search results to quickly, so it seems to have something to do with the lazy loading of pictures that they are trying to use. I know they are trying to keep memory footprint down all over the OS, but here is a place that could really need some extensive caching.

The future – “Mango”

During the MWC in Barcelona in February it’s said that Microsoft will detail more of their plans for their next update. The next following update is code named “Mango” and is rumoured to hold some updates to the ie browser, maybe running Silverlight in browser and some other stuff, but more about that in another post.

More info

You can read more about NoDo at Microsoft’s own site.