How To Crash Windows Phone 7 ‘Tango’ Utterly and Completely

Windows Phone 7 (7.10.8773 codename ‘Tango’) has an unfortunate bug in it, where merely browsing to a standard website can crash it utterly and completely, to the point that the battery needs to be removed from the phone.

Users have discovered that simply browsing the home page of German news site bild.de, which has a complex home page, is enough to crash their phones. However, this has to be done in “desktop” mode using IE9. The problem appears to possibly be a memory management related bug and the crash is only possible, because native applications can crash the OS, while third party ones cannot. IE9 is of course, native. Note that other complex websites can also crash the OS.

The video below demonstrates this problem nicely, but WP Central did some investigations of their own and discovered that not all phones will crash, “Update: To make things even more confusing, it’s not all devices. Our Lumia 900 with Tango is okay, but reports at XDA of the Radar, Omnia 7, Lumia 800 and our Focus 2 do have the crash.”