First posted a week ago, Microsoft has updated its Windows Phone 7 update pages for the US and the rest of the world. The good news is that most networks are now rolling out the copy-and-paste update codenamed "NoDo," giving users of the platform the much talked-about feature, as well as some healthy performance boosts and other minor improvements.
The company does warn, however, that due to its "gradual" updates, it could still take two weeks to receive the update, even if other users on the same network have it already.
The bad news? AT&T is still "testing" the update. A footnote says that the company hopes this "testing" will be complete by "early April." It's worth pointing out that the first Windows Phone 7 update started rolling out more than six weeks ago, and still isn't available to AT&T users—and yet over that same timeframe, Apple has developed iOS 4.3.1, tested it internally, given the software to network operators for whatever testing they may need to do, and then rolled it out to every user of the iPhone 3GS, GSM iPhone 4, iPad, iPad 2, iPod touch 3rd generation, and iPod touch 4th generation. Including AT&T customers. We've asked AT&T if it is willing to shed any light on this—explain what the testing is, why it takes so long, and why the iPhone has none of these problems—but the company hasn't got back to us.
German operator Deutsche Telekom and Spanish operator Telefonica are similarly holding back both updates.
Microsoft is starting to acknowledge the disappointment—or outright anger—that the cack-handed update has caused. In an update to an earlier blog post, Eric Hautala (general manager for Windows Phone "Customer Experience Engineering") wrote:
I know many of you are disappointed, even angry. You certainly have a right to be. We've fallen far short of your expectations, and our own, and for that I'm truly sorry. We didn't set out to let you down. But it's clear we did. Whether you're someone who has followed our progress from the start, or are new to Windows Phone, you deserve the updates we've promised. My job is to get us on the right path and deliver them.
What he didn't do, and what I suspect many users of the platform would rather see, is actually fix anything, or give any indication of how Microsoft would make things better in the future. Though some of the problems are certainly Microsoft's to fix—the slow, staggered rollouts, the poor communication, and the infrequent updates (one feature update in six months simply isn't enough if the company wants to achieve parity with its competitors)—the ability for carriers to hold the platform, and their users, hostage looks set to remain a fundamental problem. Without clear, positive steps taken to address this problem, Windows Phone 7 updates are always going to leave users with an experience that is more Android than it is iOS.
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