DailyTech - Quick Note: Sprint Bails on Windows Phone, as HTC Arrive Hits End-of-Life

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Gadgets Quick Note: Sprint Bails on Windows Phone, as HTC Arrive Hits End-of-Life
Jason Mick (Blog) - August 23, 2012 5:12 PM

20 comment(s) - last by Wolfpup.. on Aug 28 at 9:51 AM

HTC Arrive was well loved, but not a sales hit

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) has drawn a modicum of support from top phonemakers such as Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (KSC:005930) and HTC Corp. (TPE:2498) with its Windows Phone smartphone operating system. However, it has struggled with these vendors devoting their premium product to Google Inc.'s (GOOG) Android. And Microsoft first exclusive vendor, Nokia Oyj. (HEX:NOK1V), took its sweet time to deploy actual product to the market and has had mixed results since.

Now even as Microsoft looks forward to Windows Phone 8 and attempting to bring America's largest carrier -- Verizon Wireless -- onboard, word has come that its been essentially dropped by Sprint Nextel Corp. (S).

Sprint, the nation's third largest carrier, moved the HTC Arrive Windows Phone to end-of-life. The Arrive (HTC 7 Pro) came out in March 2011 and was somewhat limited due to being stuck on Sprint's CDMA network, a shortcoming that rendered it incapable of sending multimedia messages, and had a 160-character SMS limit.

_{The HTC Arrive on Sprint [Image Source: Sprint]}

Never a real sales contender, the phone nevertheless had a small and devote following boasting the highest customer satisfaction rating on the Sprint network, for a time (though not anymore). Sprint never updated the handset to Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, although it did deliver an earlier update that allowed copy & paste and some other improvements.

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RE: The HTC Arrive DID get Mango

By acer905 on 8/24/2012 12:33:03 PM , Rating: 2

Yeah, that is flat out mis-information. The Arrive most certianly has Mango, and it recieved it exactly when every other WP7 device got it. This isn't Android we're talking about here.

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RE: The HTC Arrive DID get Mango

By euclidean on 8/24/2012 2:38:13 PM , Rating: 2

I love Android, but had to +1 your comment....hehe.

However, I actually was geting so tired of not getting an updated OS for my original Sprint HTC EVO 4G, that I started sending emails to HTC support on what was taking so long. Apparently, each new release takes up more and more internal storage space and they don't want to cause users to have phones that can't install Apps....

...Lame excuse for them to continue to install all of their bloated HTC Sense apps in the Core OS...I guess that's the reason I opted to ROOT and install a custom ROM; processing speed, storage, and battery life have all improved exponentially since then :)

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