Now that I have my Nokia Lumia 822 in working condition, I was waiting for the official GDR3 update. It seems that Verizon will probably take quite some time to approve GDR3 before I can officially update to the same. For people like me, want to update now, there is an alternate way.
I managed to update to GDR3 thanks to this post. It did take a couple of hours to figure out a bug on the Microsoft site related to my ID and then update. The Microsoft site kept showing an email ID that does not exist anymore and was not in my profile. I finally found that it was the first one in my own contact. Even after removing the same, resetting the account, the bug was persistent. I gave up trying to fix it after a while and went ahead with the update.
The update download was flawless. Then it started preparing for installation. The progress went up to 99%, rolled back to 95% and then finally went to 100% and was stuck there for some time. This time around, the “clueless” update did go through and I finally landed up with a working update.
GDR3 now asks for connections before prompting for the Microsoft Account ID. YouTube videos also play, but, the free app opens videos in the browser. The contacts and calendar sync on adding the Microsoft ID now. Still need to find a way to get my current contacts into the Microsoft ID account. The UI/UX remains as pathetic and unusable as earlier.
In case you change any language, or add a keyboard, the phone will require a re-boot and will insist on migrating your data for 5-10 minutes every time.
Just to be on the safe side, I reset the phone right after the update to make sure it was still functional. To get updates for the stock applications (and betas), you would need to install a 3rd party application which would check for the stock application updates.
Nitin Chandra's Blog 