I wrote last week about the IE9 and Windows Phone 7 updates that were due this past week and it seems accuracy was at 50%.
As expected the IE9 Release Candidate was made available on 10 February without any issue. However, the rumored Windows Phone 7 update that would have brought cut and paste functionality along with speed improvements to the mobile OS never materialized.
After a couple of days wondering where the update might be news started to circulate that it would not be out in February.
Mary Jo Foley, from ZDNet’s All About Microsoft Blog, provided some insight later in the week into the status of not only the cut and paste update but a larger update that is also supposed to come to Windows Phone 7 later this year.
Microsoft ‘NoDo’ Windows Phone 7 update to be a no-show until early March – The first “NoDo” update for Windows Phone 7 is now slated for early March, my sources are saying. (Neowin is reporting they’re hearing March 8, the same date cited by an individual who asked not to be named with whom I’ve conversed.)
What’s the holdup? Microsoft has been talking up plans to release its first Windows Phone 7 update for weeks. That update is slated to deliver copy-and-paste functionality, Windows Phone Marketplace search improvements and various stability/performance updates, among other features.
She then posted about the larger update due later this year:
Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 ‘Mango’ update to get IE Mobile 9 – From what I hear, we may get to hear a bit more (officially) about “Mango” the first “major” update of the Windows Phone 7 platform.
I first mentioned Mango a while back, noting that Microsoft was aiming to deliver that release in August/September 2011. From what I’m hearing from my contacts, getting the code to handset makers and carriers in time to get the Mango release to market for holiday 2011 is still the goal.
I also noted previously that the goal with Mango was to deliver HTML5 support for Windows Phone 7. The vehicle for this, according to my tipsters, is IE Mobile 9.
It is good that these things are coming to Windows Phone 7 users and I imagine it is no mistake that the smaller update is coming out first. What better way to test the network for distributing the update and getting any issues worked out before the much larger update comes out later this year.
Actually makes a lot of sense.
There is also a lot of people I follow on Twitter who are very concerned about the carriers role in these updates and whether or not they can cause them to be held up and possibly not distributed to their user base at all.
I hope that is not the case as it is was a problem with previous versions of Windows Mobile when certain carriers/manufacturers would not supply an updated ROM for end users and then give the update as part of a hardware upgrade.
Windows Phone 7 was supposed to eliminate that from the ecosystem and I hope it does.
