Microsoft Windows Phone team are reportedly buying up every type of memory card they can find. Well it all has to do with a decision to allow memory card expansion on their Windows Phone platform after all.

Initially the memory cards were locked down, but this did not please many consumers who were looking for more storage than the 8 GBor 16 GB that their device came with. In an interview with TechRadar Microsoft said that they were "... now busily buying every microSD card they can get their hands on and testing it in their phones, and when they have a list of which cards perform well enough to recommend they'll be distributing the information."

The testing is required because some cards are slowing down the phones. The OS sometimes requires short sharp access bursts to the memory card in order to work and not every card appreciates this. Hence the tests:  "Yes, its about read write speeds [which is what the SD class number indicates]. The IO rate is part of it but actually what's equally important are the bit error rates. That will impact the speed of the checksum rewrite."

Looks like Egypt will get the Windows phone 7 Earlier than Expected as Vodafone Egypt announced on their Twitter account that HTC Windows phone 7 Trophy is coming soon to Egypt and our source mentioned Next Month November as a Release date.

See Tweet Here

HTC Trophy is one of the HTC WP7 collection and it will be the First WP7 device that hit Egypt Ever, where other Network operators (Mobinil, Etisalat) is planning to get the rest of the collection (HTC Mozart, surround, HD7, Pro).

Windows Fans in Egypt Stay tuned with us for More info!

Remember the problems Samsung Focus caused when you try to use a new card in its non-hot-swappable slot? Well, the things have finally started to make sense. The cards cannot be read on any other device not because they are dead, but because they are secured on a deep system level.

When you configure a card to work with Windows Phone 7 device the OS generates a secure password and stores it within the Flash memory. Then your card is being formatted and becomes password-secured. It can work only with device that has the right password stored.

Although the SD is meant to be used that way, today there are no mainstream digital devices that make use of the feature. Because of this, there are very few platforms that can recognize a secured card and format it. As it turned out, Symbian^3 is one of them.

Once formatted under WP7, the card becomes inaccessible for other devices. But Symbian^3 smartphones can recognize and format it. You will lose the information, but you will bring the card back to life.

You can get your card back to working order but you still do not know what card to replace it with. As I told you before, the key factor is the random access speed. It turns out that quite unexpectedly high speed class microSD cards usually have higher RAS as a performance compromise. Of course this does not mean you go to the store and buy the cheapest class 2 card as they are not guaranteed to have good Random Access Speed either.

Internet Explorer is not exactly everyone favourite browser, but if you are using Windows Phone 7 then you are stuck with it right? A new browser has appeared in the Marketplace, but it looks to have been built upon IE's code.

The new browser, called Browser+, adds some extra features over whats available with the default IE option such as integrating a Google search box into the user's view of the webpage. There is also a private browsing mode.

Windows Phone 7 retail units have only been out for a few days, but a proper jailbreak is not that far off now that some devs gained root access to the system. Its not like anyone really thought Windows Phone 7 would be locked up forever, It was only a matter of time.

Developers swarm high-profile platforms with fun and profit in mind. Microsoft cannot be that upset. A good chunk of Winphone7 sales will come just because the owners will be able to use the device how they want. Hackability was one of the reasons the first Xbox succeeded. Creating a garden with impenetrable walls sounds great in boardroom discussions, but can ultimately hurt sales and hinder 3rd party developers.