[HD2 Windows Phone 7 Development] Alcatrazx:
Well I am posting this thread to point out the issues which have been identified in the Mango update for the HD2. As of now (14/7/2011) Mango is still in its Beta stage so

- I presume that pointing out these things might get the devs looking into it (hopefully to make for a better release)

- I would also like to point them out particularly to save any of you the hassle / disappointment of going to Mango for any of the listed features with issues ... (listed below) ...

- I would also like to know of any potential solutions (I will post these in blue if solutions exist underneath each issue respectively) if there are any ... because I made a lot of research to find no viable replies ...

By all means it's a great OS and the multitasking etc are all cool but if it's at the expense of the following issues, I'm afraid I will have to go back to NODO or Android ..... I would like to see if any of you are encountering the same exact issues. If possible if there are any potential fixes let the community know.

Issue #1 - Speech to Text problem

When trying to text somebody I get the requester to say my message. The weird thing is, I always get the message "Cannot connect to bing right now ... please try again later....". Now I am not really sure why does speech to text have to access Bing in order to text the message ....Might be a web service or something .. but maybe it could be due to the tighter integration between the phone functionalities and bing that bing is trying to be accessed .... Maybe it analyzes your text to pop up any relevant results ... Say you're talking about Britney Spears and you get images etc ... retreived from Bing which could be conveniently attached to your message ....

Anyways fact is ... I got a 3g Connection and a data connection (with configured apn) ... I can access bing physically by pressing the second button on my HD2 ... but I still get that weird message when using Speech to Text .....Weird isn't it? Question is ... anyone else is xperienceing the same problem ? Can we disable the bing functionality via registry to at least use this otherwise nifty speech recognition on our phones to get our smses written? Has this got anything to do with the profile Region (being US or UK?) I recall that certain web services from M$ don't work when using certain regions instead of others might be the same issue?

ISSUE #2 - Chevron

Well obviously as you may have expected ... The blokes at M$ are hard at work to block sideloading of apps on our devices .... I tried Chevron with the usual .cer technique as we used to do for previous releases of WP7 on HD2 ... and surprise surprise ... It didn't work .... So you can ave goodbye to all your favourite goodies and apps which you used to install via Chevron unless we get this one fixed...... :(

ISSUE #3 - The Marketplace

Using the Mobile data connection I am getting a weird error code when trying to access portions of the marketplace .... The apps which I had installed previously on all builds (up till nodo) ... Did not install themselves as is usually the case ... The phone remained empty ... Now it's either a Zune issue or .... it is related to Issue #4.....

Solution for ISSUES #2 and #3 - Using the Mango ROM by elfinlazz you get the apps to install from Marketplace just like they used to with NODO and other apps. When games were installed however using existing XAP's (previously tested to work on NODO and original WP7 rom), some of these XAPS did not work. The reason has yet to be determined However if you are in desparate need of trying out Mango with some of your old XAPS feel free to use this ROM

ISSUE #4 - Xbox Live .....

I am not an avid fan of this feature ... but it bothered me when I got a pop up on my screen saying that apparently ... the ID is screwed ... and that you cannot sync to XBOX live via mobile ... so wave goodbye to all games which make use of online updates via XBOX live to work ... There are some games which come to mind which do this ... including that 3d puzzle game ... which always checks for XBOX Live connectivity prior to playing ... (can't recall the name so don't ask...) ... I am not a fan of mobile games but this sux..... kind of....

ISSUE #5 - IM not working .....

I cannot speak about facebook because I did not have the time to try it out as yet ... however , after running into issue #4 ... when I tried to connect to IM ... which is one of the key benefits of using mango . . . I am getting a "can't connect to IM " message ... be it if I go and tap tne "me" live tile ... be it if i go into the "messaging" section ... The mobile is unable to connect .... :( Now i really longed for this one .... On the other hand the comment (next to your profile ... the message you share ...) gets updated .... weird ..

Am tinkering about with different profiles and different regional settings (localization etc) are related to this... I recall that I had problems when trying to sync Zune with the system using a US profile ... This might be related (some food for thought anyone?)

ISSUE #6 - GPU Performance

Seems like the older ROMS (especially NODO) perform better GPUwise from what I have seen so far.... Video playback is laggy .... and HTML5 hype is not as should be on the HD2's .... I don't really think that the HD2 is incapable of running Mango smoothly ... I just think that M$ is behind this .... I won't get into this but I guess that just because of this I would not keep Mango on the HD2 .... Nodo worked a charm .. the development model used by M$ for WP7 is in favour of a lightweight OS with good performance simply because the main thread focusses on running the current task at hand ... if anything Mango should be faster not slower than previous builds! There must be something wrong here ...

ISSUE #7 - Twitter not working

While Facebook / Windows Live and Gmail synchronizations all work fine. I still did not manage to get twitter working. If you try create a Twitter account (in a similar way to creating other accounts) you get a redirection message ... and a grayed out button .... This remains so indefinitely ... Would have been cool to have this working together with IM....

Configuration Used:

I am running HD2 (512) using the DFT release of Mango ... Radio 2.15 ... and MGLDR 1.13 [Thanks for pointing out type :) .....] and just for the RECORD ... my SD Card works fine , it stores/retreives all data well so don't point this one out because it's not to blame besides it worked perfectly on all previous WP7 roms I used....

Cheers all and thanks for reading .... your suggestions are appreciated ...

Regards

Al