A new build of Windows Phone 7 has leaked and this one is apparently the "RC1 escrow" build (as in "release candidate 1 escrow"), which means that if it passes certain quality criteria it will be declared the actual release candidate 1 build. If not, fixes will be made and the build will be incremented, and they’ll try again. (PocketNow apparently doesn’t understand the "escrow" language, which has been used at Microsoft for many years; they just believe it is the RC1 build.)
In any event, you can download an unlocked version of the RC1 escrow (build 6176) from XDA Developers and then use the instructions I linked to earlier in How to try Windows Phone 7 right now to get it up and running in emulation.
I’m doing this right now and will report back in a bit to make sure it works properly.
Update: Still downloading, but if I’m reading that build number right, the build is actually a month old already, so it’s pretty likely that Windows Phone 7 has indeed hit the release candidate stage.
Update: OK, it appears to work properly. No major differences that I can see quite yet, but it does appear to work OK.
This is the same build that was in the April CTP Refresh, I don’t know why pocketnow.com only noticed it now. And it can’t possibly be a release candidate. It’s buggy and missing lots of pieces. If it indeed is an RC, I’m surely passing on WP7.
Yeah, I think everyone’s jumping the gun. I just think that MS took a build back on April 6th and used it in the emulator but that, regardless of the build string, has nothing to do with RC1.
As many have said it’s buggy and missing things. I figure the build tag wasn’t changed. I think that, being a month later, MS could be well into the 62xx numbers. Just a slow news day and pocketnow didn’t have anything better to post.
I’m going to post a bunch of shots of this on the SuperSite in a bit. I can’t get online with the device emulator–is there a way?–but oddly enough, I did connect to my local SharePoint Server (!) which is pretty cool.
Yes, there is a problem with the unlocked emulator – you lose connectivity. It’s been discussed quite a while ago in the xda thread where this was initially posted.
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