Dell:
Today I called Tech support up to see if there was any information on the Dell Venue Pro’s compass not working after upgrading to Windows Phone Mango / 7.5. It took a good 5 minutes to explain to the technician what a compass was, that it was a part of the phone, and then he thought I was talking about an android phone. Finally he talked to a supervisor and told me it was “A compatibility issue”. I do not like being lied to! I know for a certain fact that the compassDrv.dll was deleted during the update process. It was the only file to be deleted!!! My logs and the File Copy tool in the engineering mode application provided with the phone back this fact up.
Here is an excerpt from the UpdateApp.Log from my device
================================================
START OF UPDATEAPP INFO MESSAGES
================================================
SETTING THE INSTALLING UPDATE STATE.
**** STARTING IMGFS UPDATE SIMULATION @ 16:46:32 ****
DELETING FILE COMPASSDRV.DLL.
Now with almost any other WM7.5 phone on the market, I could simply deploy the compassDrv.dll file from another phone. But since Dell has yet to release any applications that support homebrew/advanced development for their phone this is impossible.
Please either fix the issue by the end of the month and/or give us a way to edit the registry to get the interop unlock working so we can have native com access and fix it ourselves. Us developers like to tinker with our phones so please give us the option to do so.
Lastly, I am a developer and I was planning on making an application that uses the compass. Now I can’t and am potentially losing revenue for my company. This is not acceptable.
Thank you,
Windows Phone Developer and Disgruntled Fan