One of the cool new features with Windows Phone 8 is the ability to have live lockscreen images. This is where applications can define the image to be placed on your lockscreen. Lockscreen apps are popping up in the store on a daily basis. As well, the phone ships with a Bing engine that will automatically use Bing’s daily image for the phones lockscreen. The result is that you get to see the beautiful Bing images on your lockscreen everyday.
Unfortunately, the Bing engine is broken and doesn’t correctly update your image. Don’t get me wrong, it does update your lockscreen to show the Bing image, the only problem is that it updates at the wrong time, which results in showing yesterdays image. So your phone is always a day behind. If you go into the settings and turn it off and then on again, it will then download todays image, but you will be stuck with that image for 2 days before you see it change. And yes, when it does change it will be to yesterdays image. The below image is today’s (December 16, 2012) Bing image for both the US and Canada.
And this is what my lockscreen shows after an automatic update during the night:
My guess is the problem stems from poor planning on when the device should check for an updated image. Instead of checking in the early hours of the day, the phone checks before the end of the day. The image is downloaded and then before you know it, the clock rolls past midnight and you’re now looking at yesterdays Bing image. Most likely this is related to an update schedule that was defined without thinking about time zones. Regardless, nobody is looking forward to seeing yesterdays Bing image on their phone. Which means this is another cool feature crippled by a stupid bug. I wonder if we will ever see this fixed?
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