Microsoft's much awaited update to its Windows Phone 7 software is starting to be pushed to punters and since they are a nice couple they told us about it.
This update brings the much awaited cut and paste facility to the phone but it also promises optimised performance for software, a better Marketplace and other performance tweaks and stability improvements.
The copy/paste feature is found in a contextual menu that can be opened by tapping a word and then dragging handlebars. You can also tap -and-hold the handlebars to bring up the menu. Pasting is done on the text suggestion bar.
There are improvements to Marketplace search. Vole tells us that it can now handle large downloads without going unstable.
It can also handle photo attachments from non-Exchange accounts and the iPhone in a better way. In the case of an iPhone it emails the sender to tell them to get a life and a better bit of technology much cheaper. Actually we made that up.
Microsoft has put the phone's Media Access Control (MAC) address in Settings and removed the limit on the number of Wi-Fi profiles that you can store. It has also cut the time it takes to start your phone if you've stored lots of Wi-Fi profiles.
There is also better Facebook integration and improved stability in the switching between camera and video modes.
Vole will continue to update the Windows Phone 7 later this year. Dubbed the Mango update, it will provide an IE9-based web engine which will bring HTML5, multitasking, and integration with Kinect games and it won't be a Prickly Pear.
There have been many published reports that say it won't arrive in consumer handsets until 2012. If that's true, then it means the Copy/Paste update is the only one this year.
You could not recommend this rotten phone platform to your worst enemies, as nobody needs to be subjected to such pain.
Seems when Microsoft have a spat with a partner (Samsung), mysteriously the update processes for that partners phones are less than ideal?
Problem with proprietary software ecosystem, is that it allows vendors to play just this sort of 'premium partner', versus 'we support you but we do very little testing' kind of arrangements.
With a more open ecosystem, the updates are visible to partners in non-binary form, meaning partners themselves can take up the slack if Microsoft is shy on testing, because of a recent falling out.