We won’t go through all the long and exhausting history of the Windows Phone NoDo update, except to say that we don’t know if Microsoft could have taken the excitement out of a system upgrade any more thoroughly if it tried.

Anyway, the latest we had heard was from Mary Jo Foley, after Microsoft France said to expect the update in the second half of March – she quoted her sources as saying to expect it “the week of March 21” – hey, that’s today!

Obviously we haven’t seen an update yet, but it’s only Monday.  Microsoft will hold us in breathless anticipation for another week, probably, before disappointing us one more time.

We’ve taken to regard this as a long running “soft” launch of Windows Phone.  Microsoft seems to be content to wait for Nokia to jump from the burning platform, and the AT&T / TMobile merger to take Android down a notch and boost Windows Phone a bit, even if it’s only to make the carriers more powerful and Microsoft more of a pawn.  Hey a pawn with market share is better than one without, right?

Let us know if you get NoDo on your phones, oh and the new Sprint Arrive phones which launched yesterday don’t count, they ship with NoDo, the first ones to do so in the US.