One may argue that the 19th of April no longer counts as "early April," and many are sure to be frustrated that it took so long, but AT&T has at last authorized the release of the NoDo copy-and-paste update to Windows Phone 7. For two of the handset models it sells, at least. The Samsung Focus and the LG Quantum are both receiving the update. Anyone with an HTC Surround still has a few more weeks to wait, a result of custom HTC-specific software that will be included on that model.
One factor that likely contributed to the delay is that AT&T is bundling a couple of unique features with the update. The first is support for the AT&T Address Book service; a cloud-synced address book feature. This is fully integrated with Windows Phone 7—go into the "add account" settings page and there will be a new AT&T Address Book option, and contacts from the address book will show up in the People hub.
The second new feature is support for the WISPr protocol. This allows an AT&T phone to automatically roam onto an AT&T WiFi hotspot if it detects one, something that should both improve data performance and reduce the risk of overage charges.
Neither of these are bad features as such. Though AT&T Address Book is only a minor improvement on an operating system that's so thoroughly dependent on cloud services anyway, it does have some Web-based messaging facilities which aren't found on regular cloud services, so it's certainly not completely useless. WISPr definitely beats signing on to WiFi hotspots manually.
However, it's not so clear that AT&T customers were best served by delaying the NoDo update itself. It would have been perfectly possible for the network operator to roll out NoDo in a timely manner, and then provide a second update for these new features. This is the scheme that hardware vendors plan to use to update their phones, after all. Given the choice, many customers may have preferred a similar approach to be taken for these updates—especially if they own an HTC Surround.
Some impatient customers have already installed NoDo using a couple of techniques, either tricking the phone into believing it's associated with a different network operator, or using special software to install the update without the eligibility verification that normally occurs. Microsoft warned that this latter technique could cause problems, but so far users of both techniques are reporting that their phones have updated as expected. Users who have updated in this way should still expect to see an update pushed to their device; it is this update that should include the new AT&T-specific features.
With this release, the slow and painful NoDo rollout is finally coming to an end, with just Deutsche Telekom throughout Europe (including T-Mobile UK), Telefonica in Spain, and Optus and Telstra in Australia remaining. The updates can't come a moment too soon—there are rumors that an update will ship in May to address the Comodo certificate hack, and it would be bad news if some users were unable to install a highly desirable security update just because its precursor updates were not yet authorized.
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