LG Optimus 7 – Updated to WP7.8

To make a long story short, I read the news at WPCentral, where rumors about all existing WP7.5 Windows Phones (no matter which the manufacturer was) were to be upgraded to WP7.8 in the next hours. That seemed to good (and optimistic) to be true, especially as manufacturers like LG and HTC have stated that they were not interested in supporting their older Wp7.5 devices.

Waking up today and without checking any news, I decided to plug my LG Optimus 7 to my laptop and open Zune – in fact

I first checked through the WiFi connection of my phone for updates and it showed that some updates were available and I had to connect my phone to my computer (which I had already done by then). After checking for updates through Zune, I got two of them along with a long backup of my phone’s content and then the third one was… WP7.8! Everything was done automatically, so there was no need to “push” or “trick” this update to my phone. Has Microsoft decided to show to its reluctant partners like LG and HTC who is the boss in the field of Windows Phones? We will never now; however, it seems that those who stated that the update was up to MS and not the manufacturers were right.

I was never fond of this update, nor I was really disappointed to hear that LG is not to update the Optimus 7 to WP7.8. The main features were purely cosmetic (large and small tiles along with more color accents!) and for the rest of the fixes there were not much mentioned. So far, the standard size of the tiles looks bigger than I would like and the small ones tiny for my large fingers – as for the color accents? No comment! However, I like to see my devices always up-to-date featuring all the latest firmware and features and this is why I ended up with this update.

LG Optimus 7 – Minor upgrade

Well,don’t expect too much… since LG officially announced that the Optimus 7 will not receive the WP7.8 update, my device should not expect any special care apart from being in good shape to serve my daily needs. I wasn’t really anxious to receive the WP7.8 update, but still I was frustrated by the lack of support for this device from LG…this will affect my future purchases of course.

Apart from that, I recently noticed that the battery life is sometimes awfully short. Sometimes, it will not even hold for more than some hours before the mobile shuts off, which is pretty annoying, especially if you are not close to a power source (which was the case some days ago). Therefore, I decided to make myself (and Optimus 7) a gift and buy a brand new battery, hoping that this will solve the problem. The battery was ordered about a week ago via Ebay, arrived just yesterday and will be tested in the next days to see how things will go with battery life.

It is rated at 2,430 mAh, which is a significant difference compared to the 1,500mAh of the original LG battery, but as they say “size does not matter”… only time will tell if this minor upgrade will be substantial for the daily usage of my mobile phone.