While I am in love with my HTC HD 7 Windows Phone 7, and the updates went buttery smooth, there is a pain point that might not go well with many, ‘The Market Place (App Store) is not yet functional for India’. I will tell you a work around for this in this post.
Before buying the phone, I had done my research and was sure that app store will work properly. Following links suggests that:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/india/marketplace-for-windows-phone-7-apps-now-working-in-india/435
But there is a catch, the zune market place on PC shows prices in INR until you connect a WP7 with live id registered to India. Marketplace just disappears from zune once such phone is connected to PC.
So I changed the regional settings of my PC to US and connected my phone to Zune on my PC as expected the marketplace was visible again with prices in USD. But when I tried to install free apps I got an error message saying ‘The location setting for your Windows Live ID doesn't match the setting for your computer’.
To overcome this issue, I tried to change the country to US for my existing live account (To check yours: log in to live account >> options >> Email Account >> Account Information >> Country/region) but it did not help, because I believe the country settings are imported only once and changes done later won’t affect the location setting in phone. I was still facing the country mismatch issue mentioned above.
Solution:
Now, only way out was to create a new live id with country as US to use with your WP7. To change the registered live account from WP7 one has to reset the factory settings, this will remove all your contacts and apps however the phone updates remains intact, and then use this new live id to log-in to your phone.
This wasn’t a big problem as I did not have a lot of things on my phone. Following link gives you steps to change live account on WP7. I suggest instead of creating new live id with US as country try changing country to US for your existing live id before you log in for the first time this might save you from creating a new live id just to get access to market place.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/winphone/forum/wp7-wptips/how-do-i-change-the-windows-live-id-that-i-signed/56f83660-6ea7-4c4b-979b-ebdaa3b24a8c
It is important to note that changing the country to US will make it very much impossible you to buy the applications, you can only install free apps on your phone, and right now I am not keen on buying applications so it works well for me.
Conclusion:
It would be interesting to see how much efforts it will take to back up and restore contacts and settings when the marketplace is functional for India.
This isn’t certainly coolest thing to do but I am living with it, isn’t a deal breaker for me as I can see Microsoft is silently working on marketplace for India.
Before buying the phone, I had done my research and was sure that app store will work properly. Following links suggests that:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/india/marketplace-for-windows-phone-7-apps-now-working-in-india/435
But there is a catch, the zune market place on PC shows prices in INR until you connect a WP7 with live id registered to India. Marketplace just disappears from zune once such phone is connected to PC.
So I changed the regional settings of my PC to US and connected my phone to Zune on my PC as expected the marketplace was visible again with prices in USD. But when I tried to install free apps I got an error message saying ‘The location setting for your Windows Live ID doesn't match the setting for your computer’.
To overcome this issue, I tried to change the country to US for my existing live account (To check yours: log in to live account >> options >> Email Account >> Account Information >> Country/region) but it did not help, because I believe the country settings are imported only once and changes done later won’t affect the location setting in phone. I was still facing the country mismatch issue mentioned above.
Solution:
Now, only way out was to create a new live id with country as US to use with your WP7. To change the registered live account from WP7 one has to reset the factory settings, this will remove all your contacts and apps however the phone updates remains intact, and then use this new live id to log-in to your phone.
This wasn’t a big problem as I did not have a lot of things on my phone. Following link gives you steps to change live account on WP7. I suggest instead of creating new live id with US as country try changing country to US for your existing live id before you log in for the first time this might save you from creating a new live id just to get access to market place.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/winphone/forum/wp7-wptips/how-do-i-change-the-windows-live-id-that-i-signed/56f83660-6ea7-4c4b-979b-ebdaa3b24a8c
It is important to note that changing the country to US will make it very much impossible you to buy the applications, you can only install free apps on your phone, and right now I am not keen on buying applications so it works well for me.
Conclusion:
It would be interesting to see how much efforts it will take to back up and restore contacts and settings when the marketplace is functional for India.
This isn’t certainly coolest thing to do but I am living with it, isn’t a deal breaker for me as I can see Microsoft is silently working on marketplace for India.
Update: There is no way you can use your existing live account registered for India. Even if you change the country in accounts information to US, reset the phone and use the live id afresh, your phone still somehow detects that the account was not originally an US account so you will not be able to install any of apps with this live id. This is silly.
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