Introduction

So Microsoft announced yesterday that their Windows Phone 7 Mango Update would be available to all phones, that do not run any customized or branded version of the OS on their phones. Luckily, my HTC HD7, which I use for my master thesis, is unbranded.

Instead of booting up my Windows 7 VM, I decided to use this time the native Windows Phone Connector Client which is only available to macs running Snow Leopard or Lion. This is because the software is only available through the Mac App Store. The phone asked me to setup synchronization and after that I was allowed to search for new firmware. Up to then, my phone was running with the 7720 Mango Beta 2 refresh, which was available to registered developers.

Update Experience on the Mac

The Mac started to download the updates and pushed them to the phone without any problems:

The running OS version on the phone is now 7.10.7720.68. However, after I decided to boot my VM for the installation of the final WP7.1 SDK, Zune asked me again to update my phone again. This time its the “Mango ISV beta Bundle: Cleanup”:

I guess this update is still necessary to remove all remainders of the beta firmware. The best part about all these updates is that I did not need my old WP7 backup and I had not to restore back to NoDo. Each time I tried this, it took me about an hour to get the phone back in its original state.

Anyways the phone completed this update process as I wrote this blog entry. It’s now running the same OS version, so it must be just a small update. But there are even more updates: this time it is the “HTC update for Windows Phone”.

HTC Update for Windows Phone is installing

Conclusion

I guess it must be some kind of special application pack or firmware update for HTC devices. It takes definitively longer than the first two updates for Mango. I checked again if the OS version changed, but nothing happened. Unfortunately I did not compare all firmwareversions, so it could be a modem update.