Windows Phone 8's full-res photo backup to SkyDrive now available globally

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Writing on the official Windows Phone Blog, Aaron Sauvé, a senior program manager on the Windows Phone camera and photos team, has announced the ability to upload full-resolution backup copies of your pictures and videos from your Windows Phone device to SkyDrive is now available globally. Previously the setting that activated this feature (Photos -> More -> Settings -> SkyDrive) was only available in select markets.

Some of the countries benefiting from this change include Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Korea, Latvia, Litthuania, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Philippines, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam, but there are also many others (150+ in total).

From the blog post:

One great feature of Windows Phone 8 is its ability to save full-resolution backup copies of your pictures and videos on SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage service. It’s an option that both helps protect your best shots and also makes them easier to share. But as some of you have noted, that feature wasn’t available in all markets.

Until now. Today I am pleased to announce that we’re making the ability to back up full-res photos and videos available everywhere. (We just started to light this up, so be patient if you don’t see it right away. The change could take a few days to roll out around the globe.)

Photo uploadPhoto upload

It's actually far easier to list the countries that already had this feature enabled: Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Monaco, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Microsoft has gradually been improving support for features with select regional availability, but some are still very narrowly supported. For example, the downloading of podcasts from the Windows Phone (Music) Store is only supported in the US. For a relatively mainstream user experience that's a very poor situation, even if it has led to a flourishing trade in third party podcasting apps. Other example of poor support include Bing Vision product search (8 countries), voice search (10 countries), music search (6 countries), Local Scout (5 countries), and voice to text for SMS (6 countries).

Source / Credit: Windows Phone Blog