Microsoft Recommends Against Directly Loading Media On WP7

Yesterday we heard of a registry hack that would allow you to add media directly to your WP7 device, dragging and dropping rather than relying on Zune to sync all your files across. It turns out that this might not be the best idea in the world.

Paul Thurrott, write of Windows Phone Secrets and generally chummy guy with Microsoft has put up a blog post asking people not to do this, as he believes it’ll cause major problems down the line:

Microsoft very specifically designed Windows Phone not to be used in this way. The software giant is no stranger to mass storage, obviously, and if this wasn’t going to cause problems, they would of course have designed Windows Phone otherwise.

Here’s what Microsoft corporate vice president Joe Belfiore said to me on this topic the day after the Windows Phone 7 launch event in New York late last month:

“Windows Phone is not a mass storage device. It’s a Zune device. The data on the phone must be consistent, and [the system] needs to be able to identify items in storage. We don’t want the user to have to do that stuff manually. Yes, some may want to. But we wanted a synchronization system that was simple and easy and does metadata mappings automatically.”

I think this really underscores a major problem associated with hacking your device when the product is so new on the market: no one really knows what’s meant to happen, and you could end up screwing it up. It’s probably a fair bit safer to wait for a few months until braver souls have bricked their devices to figure out what will and won’t work, and what tweaks won’t give you any grief.