Windows Marketplace for Mobile App for Windows Mobile 6.0/6.1 Buggy as a Anthill

T-Mobile USA seems to have no plans to provide the Windows Mobile 6.5 update for my HTC Touch Pro2 any time soon. So, I’m stuck with ol’ version 6.1. This meant I couldn’t use the horribly named “Windows Marketplace for Mobile” (say that 5 times fast) on my recently purchased phone (August 2009)… until now…

Windows Marketplace for Windows Mobile 6 and 6.1

Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 phone users can point their browsers at…

http://mp.windowsphone.com/

…to download…get this…an installer for the Windows Marketplace for Mobile app for Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1. The installer seems to do a quick job of it. But, my experience following this seems to indicate the app is as buggy as an ant hill. Here’s what happened to me after installing the marketplace app on my Touch Pro2.

The appeared to have installed fine. But, wow, who chose that gigantic typeface? Could it get any bigger? What a waste of screen real estate? FYI: If you switch to landscape viewing mode, you’ll find that there are more app icons in the horizontal bar at the top. There doesn’t appear to be any way to scroll it when viewing it in portrait mode.

I decided to install the AP Mobile news app first since it was free and I think the iPhone app is reasonably good (though a bit slow these days). The installation progress bar got stuck at about the 80% mark that you see in the screenshot above. After waiting about 5 minutes with no further progress, I took a look at the Programs window and found the app had installed and launched properly. But, here’s another issue: At no point was I asked if I wanted to install the app to my SD storage card instead of wasting system memory. So, I tried installing another free app (Weather Bug). This time the marketplace app froze entirely and I had to stop it manually using the TP2′s Task Manager. Restarting marketplace, I found it knew where it left off and, again, installed the app in system memory without asking if I wanted to install it on the SD card.

My current thinking is to stop using the marketplace app until an update is available for it.

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