Mango Goodness Arrives sans Visual Voicemail on AT&T

Today marks the official release of Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango”.  Around lunchtime, the status on the “Where’s My Update?” page for most carriers was switched to “Delivering Update”. 

Although I didn’t receive an OTA notification that an update was available, I got home and plugged my phone in and the Zune software immediately came up with the Update screen.

Since I am in the developer program, my phone, a Samsung Focus, was registered and had the beta build (7712) of Mango installed on it.  Many wondered how this was going to work for developers running the beta code, and whether they would have to use their backups to return to “NoDo” before applying the the update.

The good news was the first update I received was the actual Mango update building the code to the RTM level of 7720.  I then received a second update which cleaned up “beta stuff”.  A third update then arrived which was a “Samsung Update” which I assume provided baseband and hardware firmware updates.  The final update switched the phone configuration to pull updates from the production Microsoft servers instead of those used for the ISV beta updates.

All said and done, the updates took about 15 minutes. 

Mango is a nice step up, and the RC bits of Mango ran very well.  Rarely had any issues.  It’s definitely worth the update if you’re still on original bits or even running “NoDo”.

No visual Voicemail…A disappointment.

It was a stretch for me to switch from iPhone to Windows Mobile, but I fell in love with the calendaring and email functionality, and I’ve been able to find equivalent apps on Mango that I regularly used on my iPhone.  I even went as far as to try a Zune Pass.

With the release of Mango, one of the additional features built into Windows Mobile is visual voicemail.  This became hugely popular with the release of iPhone, that its so strange to be without it.  It appears that visual voicemail isn’t quite enabled for Windows Phone 7 devices on the AT&T network, as confirmed in my conversation with AT&T tech support.  Trevor, an AT&T support representative told me:

“While the Mango update does support the functionality of visual voicemail for this phone, we do not yet have the feature available to support that phone.  I apologize, but I expect it in the near future”

I asked him if we’re talking “a couple of weeks”, or “a couple of months” and he responded with “Unfortunately I don’t have an ETA on when it may become available…Hopefully soon, but we do not yet know.”

I’ll stop short of saying that this ruined the celebration for me, but it’s close.  Having to call voicemail to get messages seems so archaic now, right?  I really hope they get it turned on soon.

If you’re looking for a list of enhancements included in Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango”, you can find those here.