Author Archive: Matt

Microsoft wont support unofficial Windows Phone 7 upgraders

Bad news for anyone who has taken the unofficial route when upgrading their Windows Phone 7 handsets, Microsoft have come out to say that the latest WP7 update will probably NOT work on their phone.

Microsoft did issue a warning before but Microsoft’s Brandon Watson posted:

"Despite the fact that many people have claimed that an unofficial update mechanism worked fine for them, we cautioned that phones which were updated via this method were not going to be able to update past build 7390"

"Unfortunately for those customers out there who acted on information from sources outside of Microsoft, the rubber meets the road today."

I suppose for those with unofficial builds on their handsets will simply have to wait for this update to also come through from unofficial channels?

More on this below.

"With Windows Phone update build 7392 going out to phones via the official update mechanism, those people who have used the unsupported method of forcing 7390 onto their phones will find that their phones will not update to 7392"

"With the official update process there is a requirement that the package on the phone also be official in order to update itself."

"Phones updated via the unsupported method do not contain an official image and cannot be updated further at this time”

"Due to scheduling of engineering resources, we did not anticipate having to undue the changes made to phones by these unsupported methods. While we are not ruling out having a fix in the future, for now there is no fix."

Posted by: Matt

Qualcomm demonstrates MSM8660

There is an obsession at the moment with dual-core CPU’s in phones with the Optimus 2X  already on sale and HTC’s Sensation due out soon both sporting whizy new dual-core mobile CPU’s.

Now we’ve already see the benchmarks of Qualcomm’s latest MSM8660 CPU which runs at 1.5GHz, impressive enough for sure but a few days ago Qualcomm uploaded a demo video of the new Snapdragon in use within one of their own development devices. In the video, which I’ve embedded below, you can see them show off HTML5 video streaming, Flash video streaming, and 1080p playback. Not only that but there’s multichannel audio support and a phenomenal user interface.

Oh and they’ve crammed in a 13 mega-pixel camera on the back.

Check out the game demos too! I WANT ONE!!

White iPhone 4 thicker than the black

This is one of those odd titbits that popped up on my radar this morning and initially I was like ‘So what!?’ however, upon reflection it’s not only a bit curious but also potentially annoying.

Despite the iPhone 4 being announced last year and a delay of close to 10 months the white iPhone 4 model went on sale here in the UK this past week. Even the Apple website say ‘Finally!’.

So it turns out that the white iPhone 4 is actually 0.2mm thicker than the black model, the difference caused by the white glass on the front and rear being 0.1mm thicker each. No big deal I hear many of you say, and in itself I would agree. BUT, where the annoyance lies is in that quite a few of the cases designed for iPhone 4 wont fit the white model, particularly the more rigid plastic cases.

0.2mm doesn’t sound like a lot but the difference is visible when you look at the two side-by-side and is enough to mean that a number of cases manufacturers may end up back at the drawing board!

Posted by: Matt