katamari

Frankly, donuts would have been a more exciting proposition after the dizzy heights of excitement to the lows of feeling let down by a dear friend experienced tonight.

It finally arrived, a notification in Zune saying I have an update available for my prized HD7. I clicked that update button faster than a cheetah on roller skates (now there’s a thought…).
The update took about 40 minutes all told (I didn’t really take much notice while it was doing it’s thing) and after a couple of reboots at the end I had the update, codenamed NoDo.

Such was my jubilation, I sent my friend a text message only to find that the message ‘disappeared’ instead of tagging onto the bottom of the conversation thread (the pretty speech bubbles view).
FUUUUUU-

I quickly got my wife to send me a text, which arrived with the usual toast notification. So texts weren’t completely broken and I went to read it, but the message was nowhere to be seen in the conversation.

Then it happened. I flipped.

After I calmed down I started to go through a process of logically testing various things. Deleting an entire conversation thread (MMSs and all), I tried the tests again. The same thing happened with the added bonus that the entire thread was missing now, and I started to lose all hope of ever receiving or sending another text.

Then I found (I don’t remember why or how – desperation?) the missing message thread. It was at the right at the very bottom of the messaging hub list page. Y’know, the one that’s ordered by date received descending? So, new texts now show up at the bottom of a really, really long list of conversations  that I have to scroll to the bottom of to read and respond to…

Here’s what it looked like. Note the dates of my earliest conversations in my phone Pre-NoDo was the 31st of October 2010, but then the test message “Neigh” is ordered BELOW with a more recent date of 5th of April 2011 (today).

It was only during the process of blurring some of the information in the photo that I realised suddenly that it wasn’t 09:09 in the morning!

Then it all fell into place and I quickly checked the Settings > Date and Time in the phone and although set to “Automatic”, something was clearly not working right. Forcing it to “manual”, the date and time showed the problem in it’s plain and ugly form. It was not 9am, and it certainly was not 1980!
I corrected the date and time, and did a couple more tests and everything seems (for now) to be working as it was before.

It turns out that SMS messages (or their conversation containers) are displayed to the end user based on something in the payload of the message. Hence the date in the photo above is correct. BUT the date the SMS is received is cached on the date/time that the phone _thinks_ it is when the message comes in. It is this value that the phone uses to order both the conversation list page and the individual thread view too!
So unless you correct the date and time straight away, any messages you send or receive are doomed forever to be at the bottom (or top) of the list.

Microsoft Phone support @WinPhoneSupport were reasonably helpful, and “sorry for the inconvenience”, but that does little to repair the big dent in confidence I have in the technology at the moment.

I make light of the situation now that it’s apparently solved, and I can only hope that severity of the problems do not increase with the size of the update, otherwise I may find my cats are set on fire as the result of Mango.

Now there’s an odd sentence.