Earlier in the month, Microsoft released the Windows 10 technical preview for phones. For the firm, Windows 10 is a big move. It is aiming to bring computers and smartphones closer to each other with Windows 10. The company also hopes that the operating system would change its fortunes on the mobile front.
With Windows 10, Microsoft is bridging the gap between the traditional PC, the Xbox console, internet of things products and the smartphone. For the past few days, we have been testing a Lumia 730, which has the technical preview installed on it. Read on for our initial impressions.
These are early days
With Windows 10, Microsoft has adopted an approach where it offers the early and ever-evolving builds of the operating system to Windows Insiders, so that they can try it and offer feedback and perhaps act like a guiding light for the development of the operating system. While the technical preview for the PC was quite polished and is very usable, the preview for the phone is a different story altogether.
You may even mistake it for Windows Phone 8.1 as right now many things are more or less the same with the technical preview. You will only find changes in the core settings menu, the action centre and the photos app.
You can also put photos as background for the live tiles, which is an enhancement of the functionality found in the Windows 8.1 update. The new backgrounds feature did not work as Microsoft described it, but that could be more of a case of the OS being simply buggy at this point of time.
The new action centre now allows the user to have up to 12 quick toggles of which 4 can be customised. This really makes accessing different functions of the phone faster and it is a welcome change.
On the main app menu, you always get the recently installed or used apps on the top, which makes the system more usable as you don't need to scroll a lot.
The Photos app can be described as the biggest new addition, but it also looks incomplete in terms of both functionality and UI. However, still, it is better than the previous app, and it aggregates images even from the OneDrive cloud locker. Right now, Microsoft has not rolled out the photos functionality, but eventually the plan is to roll it out.
There is a new file explorer in the technical preview, which makes things simpler if you want to manually access your files and not be dependent on some app for access to them.
Microsoft has added a dot in the virtual keyboard, which allows you to move around the cursor. This makes the keyboard significantly more useful especially while editing and composing documents and mails.
The People hub is now well integrated with the respective Facebook and Twitter apps. This means that from the People Hub, you can directly go to the app rather than be stuck in the core Windows UI. This also means, you are not limited to the functionality build in the OS, but rather, you can have access to the full functionality of the social network.
It is slow and buggy
The Lumia 730 is not the fastest phone around, but with its Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 chipset and 1GB RAM, it is quite solid. That all goes out of the window, pun intended and all, with the technical preview, because at this early stage the phone feels painstakingly slow. Of course, as Microsoft warns, this is a very early build, which is far more earlier than the desktop version of the technical preview. It is also very buggy and hangs intermittently, which is quite irritating to be frank.
At the moment, the Windows 10 technical preview feels a lot like a minor feature update, rather than a brand new operating system. Moreover, it lacks many of the features that Microsoft has announced and plans to implement.
So things like the new Outlook experience, the Spartan browser, the enhanced Cortana assistant and overall Office experience are missing. We recommend that you give this a pass at the moment, largely because of bugs in it unless you want bragging rights to be a Windows Insider.
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