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Code Project – Text to Speech
Microsoft Tellme – Speech to Text
Apps that take advantage of Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango)
Both sides of the story – Oliver Ulm
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On the issue of In App Purchases. It is just a theory but it is possible that MSFT is simply not providing this due to the whole Lodsys situation. I don’t know if you know that yet but Lodsys is suing lots of Android and iOS developers because they use In App Purchase functionality to which Lodsys holds a patent.
Apple is arguing that it is sufficient for them to have a license to that patent. Up to now nothing concrete has come from this but as most developers don’t have the financial resources to go into a legal battle many are simply paying Lodsys.
You gave a lot of credit to Microsoft for how the roll out of Mango went. I think you looked over the fact that many people (most important being me) are still waiting and by the sound of it could be for weeks. I know several people with windows phones and as of 10/1 we are all still waiting. I feel like we need to hold back on the praise until we see how long this really takes. Reading the blog it seems like it will take a month or more for them to roll out to everyone. Considering the relative market size of windows phone taking a month for everyone to get mango doesn’t seem all that impressive to me. Would be interested to see a poll of listeners to see who has the final bits.
I hope you are enjoying your offical mango while I am still waiting
I have a Omnia 7 with German T-Mobile branding and no Mango for me yet. The force update trick doesn’t work for it either. So I keep waiting too…
@clark and @wanderer. The force update trick is sometime hard to pull off on the first attempt. Keep trying, its all in the timing. I didnt get it to work on my unbranded Dell Venue Pro until the fourth attempt (on the next day). On a TMobile htc HD7 it took me three attempts, on my developer unlocked htc HD7 it notified me first, I also did a few friends (varying devices) and it all worked. The only device I couldnt get it to work on is my htc Mazza (a device that is similar to the htc Trophy), it already has Mango, but an older version of the full release (7720.50 the final release is 7720.68)
Just keep trying guys, and you’ll get better results if you pull the internet by yanking out a network cable instead of trying to disable your wi-fi (turning off wifi just isnt quick enough sometimes to trick Zune)
Feel free to contact me if you need any help
@lancewmccarty (twitter)
@Lance: Thanks for your offer. But I already tried it many times by yanking out the network cable to no avail. I’ve read different forums and it seems that no owners of the German T-Mobile branded Omnia 7 version got Mango yet. According to some info posted on T-Mobile’s German help channel (http://www.facebook.com/telekomhilft) they plan to roll out Mango for the Omnia 7 in early November. So I guess the force update trick cannot work for my Omnia 7 since the correct branded ROM is not available.
Well there appears to exist some convoluted way to get Mango on a T-Mobile branded Omnia 7 which works for some people. But it involves going back to Zune 4.7 and flashing some unbranded NoDo ROM. But I’m not sure whether this would void my warranty. So I’ll keep waiting for the time being.
Even if it did take a month to roll out Mango *worldwide* – that still would be quite a feat for a diverse hardware platform. If you’re not convinced doing some research of Android’s update record – even to this date. And if you say, well that doesn’t mean they can’t do better: true, but it doesn’t mean they’re doing that bad, either.
Actually the WP7 hardware platform from last year is not that diverse. Though the phones look different from the outside they all use the same SoC (system on a chip), the Qualcomm Snapdragon 1st generation. Even the Samsung WP7 phones do though they have their own SoCs. Having little hardware fragmentation was the whole point of Microsofts chassis spec. So they are pretty much able to do most of the work in-house. Of course there are still some differences but compared to Android they are insignificant. Android is extremely diverse hardware platform. Android OEMs get just the base system and have to do all the hardware adaptation themselves. On the other hand this hardware freedom allows Android to cover a much wider range of price points. For this reason we will see more hardware fragmentation post Mango.
Diverse versus Apple. And the reason I mention this is that people suggest that WP updates should go as smoothly as iPhone’s (which, are they smooth?) and the consideration that you have to make there is that Apple only has a handful of models to upgrade and they have total control of the hardware, so dev, testing & deployment on those platforms is much less complex to pull off. Android is on the other extreme with 3rd party OEMs, very little guidance to OEMs and as a result is seeing a lot of fragmentation. Windows Phone sits pretty in between these two tactics, with a 3rd party OEM system, but much more guidance about hardware requirements and better communication with partners and they are making it work, work well, and get better with time.
Yeah, I agree! It’s now the 12th Oct and I still don’t have my update. I only found this podcast while searching the web trying to figure out why I don’t have my update. So, when I listened to it and heard you guys praising MS for how well this update has been deployed I felt a little hard done by. Also, I only know 6 people who have WP7 devices (and we all love them) and of them, only 3 have the update, so I’m a little unsure if your 98% success statistic is correct.
Yeah, I agree! It’s now the 12th Oct and I still don’t have my update. I only found this podcast while searching the web trying to figure out why I don’t have my update. So, when I listened to it and heard you guys praising MS for how well this update has been deployed I felt a little hard done by. Also, I only know 6 people who have WP7 devices (and we all love them) and of them, only 3 have the update, so I’m a little unsure if your 98% success statistic is correct.
Your podcast intro is WAY too long. 80 seconds? REALLY!?
Come on, that’s just ridiculous. It’s at least 4x longer than any other podcast intro I’ve ever heard.
Thanks for the extra info on text to speech options. I tried playing with TellMe but couldn’t quite get it working so I’m going to spend some time looking over that CodeProject article to find out what I did wrong. Uunfortunately I think there are licensing restrictions in using TellMe but at least I could test it out if they eventually decide to let us use it for free.
Also, I went to windowsphone.uservoice.com and created a new feature suggestion that they give devs access to the text to speech features. Feel free to vote it up if you want 3rd party apps to be able to use text to speech. My suggestion is here:
http://windowsphone.uservoice.com/forums/101801-feature-suggestions/suggestions/2295665-text-to-speech-access-for-developers-?ref=title
Thanks for another great podcast!