HTC HD7: Now With NoDo

Somebody Forgot Donuts?

Windows Phone 7 Build 7.0.7390.0 represents the first upgrade for the WP7 platform. Codenamed “NoDo” because somebody forgot to bring donuts to a WP7 development meeting (I swear, I’m not making this up), the update brings improvements to Marketplace, faster app loading, general performance tweaks, and copy/paste (finally?)

My general impressions? It’s mostly the same. This isn’t an earth shattering update by any means, it brings about much needed copy/paste functionality and makes games that much less annoying to load. Otherwise, it’s the same Windows Phone 7 that we’ve all come to know and love.

The browser benchmarks show basically the same results pre- and post-NoDo (terrible JavaScript performance remains...), but the real winner in NoDo is the app load times. Everyone likes to make a big deal out of copy/paste, but it wasn’t a huge deal with iOS, and it’s not a huge deal here either. Convenient at times, but you can live without it. The difference maker on a daily use basis? Way faster load times for third party apps.

Normal apps are a few seconds faster, anywhere between 10 and 30% decrease in load time. The big reduction is in games. BlockBuster and Unite were well into the 20+ second range, but post-NoDo, load in less than 10 seconds. It’s huge. (Sidenote—the load times for Facebook and Twitter are pretty lengthy since I included the refresh time as well. I did that consciously because it better represented the amount of time between when you hit the icon and when you can really start using the app. The loading times for the apps sans-refresh were in the 5-6 second range and dropped by about 1.5 seconds each.)

In daily use, you do notice the changes, and the whole usage experience feels a bit peppier. Copy and paste work well, selecting text is similar to the method used in Gingerbread, but a little bit cleaner. The copy button appears next to the highlighted text, the paste button in a bar just above the keyboard. I don’t know why they took so long to release the copy/paste feature (they’ve been demoing it since before the WP7 launch party last September), but at least it works well. 

But Mango is the one to really wait for. Slated to bring much fuller multitasking to the platform, in addition to a much improved IE9 mobile browser, and Twitter integration, amongst other things. Mango should go a long way towards bringing the WP7 platform to feature parity with Android and iOS, and as long as Microsoft gets it out on time and doesn’t delay the update like it did with NoDo, it’ll be a big step forward.