Tuesday, April 1, 2008

finally updated my shadow.

When I first found out about the Shadow update from T-mobile I was pretty excited and I immediately pulled up the update site on my Shadow's browser.

After about twenty minutes of futzing around, I realized that the only way to get the update was to plug the Shadow in to a desktop computer and install it from there.

I have to say I was disappointed by this. Its reasonable to expect a smartphone to sync with a pc to back up files and reconcile email inboxes and whatnot. But to have to hook your phone up to a pc for a critical update sort of defeats the purpose of having a smartphone, mobility.

So I put the update on the back burner for a while. Choosing to live with no alarm clock and having to plug my phone in every twenty minutes to keep the battery charged.
the other night I crashed at a friends house, and I happened to have my shadow's usb cable with me so I pulled up t-mobile's upgrade site and downloaded the update.

Updating was fairly painless, though I needed to have my phone plugged in for an hour.

I didn't back up any of my files but most of the things I use, TCMP, jb5, Google Maps, are easy enough to download again.

I did lose some contacts that weren't saved to my sim card, so you might want to back up your contacts if you have a lot of numbers card to your shadow.

The verdict; the update is worth it just for the improvement in battery life alone, its only a 1/4 to 1/3 improvement but it allows me to leave home and use all of my shadow's features without the battery dying on me prematurely during my commute, a huge improvement.

The accuracy of text input on the Shadow is also vastly improved with this update.

Windows Live driving directions have been added; I already am using google maps but its a nice feature for those unwilling to go with google. A feature called Audio Postcards was added as well; it seems like a glorified mms program to me, but it could be fun.

Get the update here;

http://www.t-mobileshadow.com/update.asp

Mike at allshadow.com has a lot more info on the shadow update.

http://www.allshadow.com/

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