Windows Phone 7 "NoDo" is a must-have update. It has the much talked-about (and occasionally useful) copy-and-paste feature and perhaps more importantly, boasts some significant improvements in load times and Marketplace performance. Which makes it all rather annoying that it's still not available to everyone. Though most mobile operators have authorized its distribution, there are still some laggards. The staged rollout means that, even if your operator has signed off on its testing, you may still be waiting weeks for Microsoft to actually give it to you.

There have been various hacks to enable users to get the patch immediately, however. Some rely on getting standalone firmware installers from handset companies; others rely on tricking the phone into thinking you live in a country where the update is available to all. These worked, kind of, but were far from perfect. The firmware installers aren't available for every handset, and the foreign country trick relied on luck and timing.

That has changed with the release of a new tool that will grab the update packages directly from Microsoft and then install them. And the best part is that it builds on Microsoft's own code to do this. The result? A simple and robust update system.

On Saturday, Microsoft released the Windows Phone 7 Support Tool, which is designed to re-flash phones with corrupt firmware or that are otherwise having problems with the update process. It downloads the necessary firmware files and flashes to the phone. The Support Tool won't update the firmware to a newer version, however; it just knows how to restore the current version.

Developer Chris Walsh took a look at Microsoft's tool and realized that he could use the Support Tool's code to flash any firmware. The normal update process is restricted by carrier and geographic checks, but the Support Tool doesn't have any of those—it just taps directly into the update system. So he wrote a program to take advantage of this. The result is ChevronWP7.Updater, which can install NoDo onto any handset, regardless of carrier or model. No hacking or guesswork—it just does exactly what Microsoft's own software does.

The only slight headache is the Samsung Focus; some Focuses won't install the firmware properly, and the only solution is to hard-reset them using the official Support Tool before updating them with ChevronWP7.Updater. This problem isn't unique to the update tool; flashing through the Zune software can require the same workaround for this model.

Slight teething difficulties aside, this is a great option for Windows Phone 7 users. The current carrier blocks are inexplicable, and the delays even after the carriers sign off on the update cause a substandard experience. My T-Mobile US-branded HTC HD7 received both the pre-Nodo update and NoDo itself within about 24 hours of T-Mobile throwing the switch. But I know others with the same phone on the same network who have only received the pre-NoDo update. Even with the published update schedule, there's still too much guesswork involved.

Looking forward, unless Microsoft radically changes the update process in future versions, ChevronWP7.Updater should continue to be an effective way of installing firmware without carrier approval. One might hope that the presence of such unofficial workarounds would spur Microsoft to get its house in order and push the updates out a little more aggressively—if end-users are going to skip the carrier checking anyway, there's no point in continuing to maintain the pretense.