If you have a malfunctioning Windows Phone 7 device from Samsung, don’t demand a refund just yet. Microsoft announced Wednesday it will try again to update the devices’ firmware, having fixed the bug that caused some to crash or fail completely.
Microsoft said the problem affected about five percent of people who received the update.
Pinpointed the Problem
“During the past week the engineering team has pinpointed and fixed problems that were preventing a small percentage of Windows phones from installing the February software patch,” wrote Michael Stroh, Microsoft’s Windows phone blogger.
He said the update, which — perhaps ironically — was supposed to make future updates easier but was suspended for Samsung phones after two days of complaints, is now back on track.
In an earlier post Stroh insisted that 90 percent of users who downloaded the update via USB connection to PCs had no issue, and some who did have difficulty didn’t have enough disk space or a strong enough Internet connection. But Microsoft conceded there was an unspecified issue with certain Samsung devices, suggesting a flaw in the synchronization of software and hardware.
“Has the update process gone perfectly? No — but few large-scale software updates ever do, and the engineering team here was prepared,” Stroh wrote last week.
On the Microsoft Answers Windows phone user forum Thursday, there were a few scattered reports of error messages during the update attempt.
One user of a Samsung Omnia 7 posted Wednesday that it “seems to remain stuck on the connecting to computer screen. I was expecting it to show the ‘connect to PC’ image and then switch to the ‘do not disconnect’ image, but rather it just remained on the first. So … My hopes for a certain fix on this update have been let down. Is this seriously that hard of a problem to…