Mango

Official Chevron WP7 Unlock Available And Approved!

by Peter Murphy on 05/11/2011

A little under a month ago, the Chevron team let us know that they were on track with their alternative unlock solution for Windows Phone, approved by Microsoft. People have been waiting for an alternative to Microsoft’s Developer Solution, that allows you access to all of the resources of the developer hub, allows for side loading apps, and costs an arm and a leg. Many early adopters of Windows Phone resorted to the developer unlock, because at the time there was no other option. Hopefully many of those have taken advantage of access to the hub, and actually dabbled in some development as well. The price though was to steep for many, and a little over a year after the OS was officially made available, the Chevron team have finally released their budget unlock solution for Windows Phone.

Released yesterday, apparently the service has been overwhelmed with users wanting the solution, so be patient, the Chevron servers are working as hard as they can. It’s a budget solution, $9 US for each device, what’s not clear is if you need multiple Live ID’s to unlock multiple devices. Basically, you sign in with your Live ID. It becomes obvious then that the whole process is intrinsically linked to Microsoft, in fact much more so than I thought it would be.

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Colorizer For Window Phone!

by Peter Murphy on 31/10/2011

Colorizer is a pretty cool one trick pony for photo editing an Windows Phone. I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of the app before as it was featured at the launch of WP at Mix10, commissioned by Microsoft from Matchbox Mobile. Commissioned by Microsoft, the app was used to demonstrate, high light the power of the graphics engine, that is part of the package that makes Windows Phone so powerful.

Windows Phone by having a dedicated GPU,allows the CPU to process only the computing side of the OS. These separate processors combined, facilitate the rich media experience that the platform offers. In layman’s terms, no matter what type or sort of screen you have on your WP device, you get awesome graphics, as their is a dedicated processor making them fantabulous.

Back to Colorizer though, while it was featured in Microsoft’s presentation, way back when, it’s never become freely available, and their are some clones on the market for sure, at least apps of the same, or similar names by different developers.

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Screen Capturer Updates to V3, Full Metro Styling and Better Functionality!

by Peter Murphy on 24/10/2011

This is incredible, yesterday when I posted about Screen Capturer Version 2, little did I know that it would become an awesome full featured app in version 3. Screen capture has been one of the features that Windows Phone users, have been crying out for. The app has had a UI overhaul, and the interop limitation has been removed. There’s still a problem with the way the app syncs files to he PC, the way the files are named in particular, once generated from the app.

It’s an app you will want to be patient with, but for single or multiple screen shots it works really well, and the capture quality is pretty good. It won’t capture video, stills of video, or stills of games in play. It will allow you to capture itself. All you need is a developer unlocked phone, so that you can sideload the app. There’s a bit more of an explanation of how the app works here, which API it works with. It’s a little inconsistent, as I don’t seem to be able to find all the shots I’ve taken. It’s a great step forward though, and a boon for many.

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Updated HTC Hub for Windows Phone! Video

by Peter Murphy on 10/10/2011

The Original HTC Hub for Windows Phone, while clever, and including some great animation, was probably a knee jerk reaction from HTC. How could they make a mark on devices they produce that run Windows Phone, when their hallmark is the Sense interface. HTC have been skinning phones that run Windows Mobile, and Android, for ages, providing a consistent user experience, with Windows Phone they [HTC] haven’t been able to do that, but they do have a quiver full of apps that they ship with their WP devices. The HTC Hub is one of those, and in it’s original form was fairly bleak. It was recently updated to version 2.2, and with the update came some big changes. The original hub was a panoramic app that just sat on the phone, with lots of bling.

That was then, back on release OS about .7004, the UX while impressive, and the animations cute, it was a whole lot of bells and whistles with promotion for HTC’s apps and that’s about it. At the time it was impressive and showy, but as we have seen, HTC are now able to include their add on apps directly into the OS. The changes from the release version of Windows Phone to now are huge, and the way OEM’s are approaching apps has also been refined.

The latest update to the HTC Hub, whilst still a panoramic app, has lost a lot of the bling, but added some sense features that a lot of us would not choose to install.

Again the app is panoramic, although that is not obvious, weather is foremost, and you can add, delete feeds and locations etc as you wish. One thing I found is that you can not remove all of the stocks feeds, when you get to the last one, it stays, I think I was left with Yahoo finance. As an app, it seems you have to have input an all screens and cannot delete all inputs, feeds on a screen, so as not to see that screen. The best feature, an RSS reader, and while the preset feeds seem to go back to the WinMo days you can add a feed from any site you like as long as you have the address. What seems apparent is that even after all this time and some major updates, HTC’s design team can not cope with the fact that they cannot skin windows phone. It’s Metro or nothing as far as Microsoft are concerned. Maybe HTC’s design team have a brief, that cannot be waivered from, but they need to add some Metro sensibility to their apps for Windows Phone.

Seeing the first update for the app, it doesn’t seem like there’s been a lot of thought put into it, and one would think HTC are not throwing many resources at the OS. Compared to Android, it feels like Windows Phone is an afterthought for HTC, and while they are a major OEM partner of Microsoft and the OS, it feels like they haven’t got their heads around it properly yet. HTC have hit on a design formula that produces beautiful handsets, but at some point with Windows Phone, they will have to abandon the way they approach user experience on their Android devices, graphically, visually, and start to embrace Metro design.

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Mango, Tethering and HTC! Internet Sharing On Windows Phone!

by Peter Murphy on 03/10/2011

The lack of Internet sharing, in the Mango update for Windows Phone is causing a lot of consternation. There seems to be a way around it though, if you have a developer unlocked phone and it’s a Samsung. Long Zheng, points us to a thread over at XDA Developers, that runs through a complicated process of registry editing and installing homebrew apps. If followed correctly, should get the feature running on you Focus or Omnia7.

SO that gets a couple of first generation devices out of the way, proves that they can do the whole tethering thing, and that the feature is not confined to new handsets. The comments on the post lead to some further info concerning Vodafone au, and the tethering feature being available on their only WP7 The HTC Trophy.

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Windows Phone Mango RTM In The Wild @XDADevelopers!

by Peter Murphy on 13/08/2011

SO this is a curious little tale of subterfuge, and a Microsoft insider sharing the RTM release of Mango for Windows Phone [build 7.10.7720]. So the circle of intrigue started with Microsoft making the Mango RTM available to it’s employees. Not via any online channel that could be subject to hacking, and would involve a similar process to updating to the developer beta versions that have been circulating. No it’s much more cloak and dagger, involving back rooms on the Redmond campus, shady characters and a secretive process to install the Rom onto the phone. [or as WPCentral put it,

or do they just go to some guy's office, line up with their phones and have it flashed?

Turns out, it's actually closer to the latter part! Employees can take their phone to the Device Lab on the Bellevue campus and have it flashed to the finalized, RTM version of "Mango"

]. On receipt of this news, clever planning, and a ridiculously complicated plot was launched, by the incredibly powerful hive mind, that is really behind the machinations that are presented to the public encrypted, as the development community over at XDA Developers. SO an incredibly convoluted and well thought out plan came into being, involving mass hypnosis and consciousness altering substances, careering towards the ultimate goal, extracting that which is most precious at the moment, the yet unreleased final build of Windows Phone Mango. What was their ploy?