Lumia Denim has started making its way to devices locked to carriers in South American and the United Kingdom, starting what hopefully will be a rapid release on other carriers globally. As you may remember, Lumia Denim was released back in December but it is up to carriers to test and release it for specific devices on their network. Those who have Country Variant version of Windows Phones have already received Lumia Denim by-and-large.
Brazil’s TIM and the UK’s EE have both begun rolling out Lumia Denim to the Lumia 930 on their respective networks. If you are on TIM or EE and have a 930 then go to Settings>Phone Update and see if it is available to you.
The carrier dependent rollouts have always been painful for users. Here in the US, the only carrier that has rolled out Lumia Denim is Verizon (which is shocking given their Lumia Cyan fiasco on the Lumia Icon) on the Lumia
Lumia Denim
822 and 928. AT&T, Sprint, Cricket and T-Mobile are all still testing with no dates indicated on when devices on those networks will see the latest version of Windows Phone 8.1. In Europe the story is far brighter. Most providers in most of the region have already released Lumia Denim on their devices but there are still a few gaps depending on the country.
As a reminder, you can read my Guide to Lumia Denim and my Lumia Denim Rollout Guide for more detailed information on the release and the rollout process.
The carrier dependent rollout process has been an issue for Windows Phone (and Android for that matter) since inception. Unlike Apple who controls all of the releases of iOS regardless of carrier, Microsoft and Google have been at the mercy of carriers to roll out updates on their respective platforms. It creates delay and a poor user experience and sometimes the carriers simply do not provide the update ever. This has been the case so far on the Lumia Icon on Verizon. It is still on Lumia Black.
Microsoft has hinted that with Windows 10 this will be changing and clearly have proven they can run the update process themselves through what is now the Windows Insider app on Windows Phone. For Windows 10 for Phone adoption to be high and essentially overnight, Microsoft needs to be in control of their own destiny on the rollout.
For now, on Lumia Denim, we have to wait on the carriers to decide when to rollout to their devices. Given we are a month since the release, hopefully the wait is not too much longer.
