Microsoft Explains Why WP7 Update Bricked Phones

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nebun

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[citation][nom]alextheblue[/nom]You don't understand the update process. Next time, before you run off at the mouth about someone needing to leave their job, try to do a little reading. You hook the phone up to a computer so that the phone can be backed up and then updated. This is similar to Apple deploying updates via iTunes. If the PC doesn't have sufficient free space to back up the data on the phone, the update fails. That doesn't mean the phone is bricked.In fact, out of the 10% with problems updating, probably only a fraction actually had their phones truly bricked (phone dead, can not fix with a hard reset). But the media likes to be sensational and to report the "facts" before the facts are out.[/citation]


how big is the freaking update?....i am sure that most people have at least 5gb of free space
 
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If it had been a Maemo device, then you could have fixed your bricked phone yourself, but sadly those people don't seem to care which OS they have on their phone.
 

djh

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Wow, this is an extremely disappointing article. I remember getting fantastic information from Tom's Hardware Guides many, many years ago. With the conflicting stories about the Windows phone update, I was really happy to see an article from "Tom's" listed in my search results. But this article seems more like an unfunny parody of web news. I'm not sure if the editors here at Tom's noticed, but the title of the article is "Microsoft Explains Why WP7 Update Bricked Phones". The deepest we get in that area is "we still don't know how and why the minor update to the OS updater locked up Samsung phones". Then we get the statement that "the minor update literally "bricked" around 10-percent of the WP7 smartphones". Literally. I remember seeing that skit on Saturday Night Live about 10 years ago. Literally. Bricked. Based on that, I really don't think we can blame the author of the article -- he is probably doing the best that he can. But the editors here really need to read this stuff before they allow it on their site.
 

captaincharisma

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[citation][nom]cadder[/nom]Beware of Samsung smartphones!I had a Samsung phone prior to switching. It came with Windows Mobile 6.1 (or 6.2). A lot of the features of the phone and features of the OS were crippled by Samsung rushing the phone to market. Things just didn't work or worked poorly. So what does Samsung do, they just move onto another model and stop advertising this one, which doesn't help the many thousands of owners that are stuck with a 2 year contract. When MS came out with an update to Windows Mobile 6.5, other
manufacturers made it available to their customers for upgrades, but Samsung didn't. Overall I think Samsung makes pretty good products, but if you get one of their products that they took less care in manufacturing, they will forget about you and you are on your own.[/citation]

HTC did not give me the 6.5 update for my phone too so it not just samsung its everyone. if your phones too old they won't bother releasing the update for it. i would trust samsung phones more then any phone made by LG
 

Djhg2000

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It seems like the desktop version of 7 doesn't verify the boot drive after a crash either (funny story how I reported it to Microsoft to then have the support thread removed (I'm so glad I use Debian as my primary OS)) so I think it's a rule of thumb to always check your storage contains what you think it does when working with Windows.

Can't really see why they didn't just put a stupid md5sum utility in there when you can't count on the download being successful anyway, I mean there is a very good reason to why most devices verifies the update before it proceeds to actually applying it...
 

back_by_demand

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[citation][nom]NeBuN[/nom]how big is the freaking update?....i am sure that most people have at least 5gb of free space[/citation]
Most people, you mean around 90%?

Only 10% affected, only Samsung, those with insufficient hardware storage or crappy network connection. As it only affected Samsung and not other manufacturers I seriously doubt the problem is with the OS and yet again, the same as with Windows desktop OS, people are blaming the OS for shortcomings of the hardware.

Shame on the fanbois for not apportioning equal rabidity to Samsung.
 

alextheblue

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[citation][nom]NeBuN[/nom]how big is the freaking update?....i am sure that most people have at least 5gb of free space[/citation]
If you'd read my post more carefully, I wasn't talking about the size of the update itself. I was talking about how the data on the phone itself needs to be backed up to the PC as part of the update process. So if your phone has 16GB of pictures, music, videos, documents, apps, etc., then you would need OVER 16GB of free space on the PC to complete the update.

So Joe Blow on his old/cheap netbook/notebook could very easily end up S.O.L. on the free space department. Especially if he's been downloading a lot of pr0n.
 

kyu

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Why only Samsung phones has a problem with the update?
And is Microsoft scared to loose Samsung on WP7 market, or what is the reason to not tell what technical reason causes the brick?
 
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The only problem I had, which happened again with the Mango update, is that I keep losing my Network connection. Since the previous update, I figured out that for some reason my Cellular Network APN keeps getting deleted. This prevents me from getting any email or on the internet. This is ridiculous too. I haven't found any info on the Microsoft site about why this keeps happening or if there is a fix. In fact, I have yet to find anything at all about it on their site.
 
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