Whatever you do, don’t lose a WP7 handset

Rating: No means of restoring all your data to a replacement handset

Having upgrading our existing Nokia Lumia 800 to the very latest release of Windows Phone 7 (Update 7.10.8773.98) see ‘GoMo bricks its own Nokia Lumia 800 W7 Mango phone’ here, the handset just would not reboot. Luckily we’d possessed the handset less than six months so Orange sent a replacement by the next day. We’d backed up the original handset using the Zune software suite on a PC, so we thought we were safe. Wrong. Bizarrely, Zune correctly identifies the replacement handset as a new device. So it starts all over again. Efforts to force Zune to recognise the replacement as your previous phone fail miserably. GoMobile News couldn’t believe this was the case until we found this thread on the official Windows Phone/Microsoft Answers forum. It confirms that you still can’t get all you data back.Do Microsoft and Nokia realise just what damage this kind of oversight does?

Take this typical comment by a forum member … “I know it puts off some of my friends from getting a WP7 phone.”

Until some clever Geek comes up with a way of fooling Zune into thinking a new handset is its predecessor, then you are going to have to jump through hoops to get you handset’s content back again.

There’s one bitter irony here. We’ve found that old addressbooks can be easily imported into one particularly online service – Google’s Gmail.

So we restored our contacts highly successfully from Gmail rather than Windows Live. The reason why we used Gmail rather than Windows Live?

Windows Live tends to pull information in from Facebook and you can’t then edit Facebook entries.

Now, if you been sensible, all of the personal media you’d stored on the WP7 would be also stored on the PC/Mac.

That data you can download to the replacement handset by going into the Zune Sync settings and picking ‘all’ rather than anything else.

You might think that we’d be happy with a restored addressbook and restored media content. Well you’d be wrong.

GoMobile News eats its own cooking and has installed a fair number of WP7 apps onto its phone. There’s no single button to press to get them all back, though.

However, you can pull a fast one by logging onto Windows Live using your standard Windows ID.

Just visit www.wimdowsphone.com and that should take you where you want to be.

Now select My Phone. You will probably see the settings for your replacement handset.

Click underneath on ‘Other Phones’ and you will see an option for your lost/damaged handset. Select that.

Now click on ‘Account’. Hey presto you have a list of the apps you have installed and next to each one is an option marked ‘reinstall’. Sadly you can’t select them all. Microsoft please note.

When you click on Reinstall, the system will force you to sign into WindowsPhone Marektplace (again).

You’ll then be taken to the page for the app which you wanted to reinstall. In our case we picked Adobe Reader for example.

Now if you are sneaky, you can change the name of the handset to which the system will send the app using ‘ Download the application immediately to my phone using messaging.’

You change the name from your dead handset to the replacement handsets name and press Next and then reinstall.

This is fine but you will still not install any data associated with that app. In our case we have lost the tags we made with Shazam. Gamers lose their high scores.

Nokia built its reputation on recognising all the features which would make a handset really useful and building on that feature set continually.

Unfortunately, having made the switch to Windows Phone 7 (W7 Mango) whole chunks of this inheritance have literally flown out of the Windows!

We’re not sure how much Microsoft listens to user feedback but a hole like this one needs to be plugged urgently. It really is just down to tweaking a bit of code.

Footnote: Thanks to Seenthisbefore who posted a suggestion for trying to recover our faulty handset. Sadly it didn’t work but it might do for other readers.