Review of 6 windows mobile phone
Windows 10 Mobile Review: Welcome to the beta test
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It feels like every time we review a new version of Microsoft’s mobile smartphone operating system, we have to use the trite “one step forward, two steps back” phrase. The last time Microsoft really built upon the previous version of its mobile operating system in an exciting way was probably with Windows Phone 7.5. Ever since then, they’ve been adding a few nice features here and there, while taking away a lot of really great features Windows Phone users have known and loved. Windows Phone 8.1 took a lot away in the name of being able to update things more frequently via the Windows Store, and Windows 10 takes that concept even further.
On the other hand, Windows 10 Mobile is well on its way to making the phone operating system behave the same way as the popular Windows 10 desktop operating system, and that could be a very good thing. There’s also one big difference between Windows 10 Mobile and all of the previous versions of Windows Mobile that Microsoft has built since the 1990’s. That difference is update frequency. Windows 10 Mobile has only been officially released for a month or so now and the operating system has already seen 2 full updates while the integrated apps have received numerous upgrades as well. Some have even brought new features already! So to make sure we’re clear here, we’re currently looking at Windows 10 Mobile version 10.0.10586.29.
This frequency of updates makes Windows 10 Mobile (and Windows 10 in general) feel unfinished at all times. However, it also gives you a lot of hope that things will get better really quickly. Welcome to the beta test!
Universal Windows Apps & Continuum
While Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 had kind of tried to bring a consistency between the phone apps and desktop/tablet apps, that didn’t really work so well in practice. Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile bring that to the next level and actually deliver on bringing a consistency between apps that run on large screens and small screen phones.
In fact, if you connect a large screen to a Windows 10 Mobile device (that supports secondary screens), the Universal Windows Apps installed on your phone will adjust to the larger screen size and behave exactly like the same apps would behave on a Windows 10 desktop PC, laptop, or tablet.
Since all Windows phones still use ARM processors though, this version of Windows still won’t be able to run full x86 Win32 programs. It’s the same problem that Windows RT had, where, yes it looked like full Windows and many of the apps behaved like full Windows, but because it was made to work on ARM processors, all of the programs that were made to work on x86 processors wouldn’t work (without a huge amount of software rebuilding.) Universal Windows Apps are designed to be both processor independent and screen size independent, making them much more flexible as far as being able to run on any version of Windows 10. That means UWA’s will be positioned to run on phones, desktops, laptops, tablets, Xbox, giant Surface Hubs, and even HoloLens augmented reality computers of the future. Microsoft’s robust cloud computing platform is the what they intend to use to tie everything together so that your data and your computing experience will follow your user ID between devices, thus giving you a consistent way to work no matter where you go. That’s a really compelling idea.
User interface & core operating system features
In Windows 10 Mobile, the user interface has changed drastically in many ways. In some ways, it’s changed for the better, but in most ways it’s changed for the worse… especially if you were a fan of the gorgeous and innovative design of Windows Phone 7, and especially if you were hoping to use it with one hand as a phone. In fact, many of the complaints about Windows 10 Mobile are due to its interface design changes.
The Start screen still has the awesome live tiles, but it has a lot more options for customizing the appearance. You can make them have solid colors on a black or white background, you can make them have a picture inside with a black or white background, or you can make the whole screen have a background image and the tiles can have a semi-transparent color overlay over that background image, and you can even control the amount of transparency those tiles have. You have much more control over making your Start screen look really good or really bad now!
The notifications and actions center is still accessed via a swipe from the top edge of the screen. It’s very similar to the version in Windows Phone 8.1, but now the quick actions button listing can be expanded to show a lot more than 4 buttons. The WiFi button now toggles WiFi power instead of letting you go to the list of WiFi access points available. This may be frustrating for those who always leave WiFi on and need to choose a new access point to connect to, but you can tap & hold on the WiFi button in the action center to go to the actual settings dialog in order to choose a network instead. That works for all of the action center buttons.
Notifications in this area have seen some new features too. Some of them are now expandable with interaction options. For example, text messages have a reply field right inside the notification.
Cortana has seen some changes in Windows 10 Mobile. It’s much more in line with Cortana on regular Windows 10 and that’s a good thing, except a few awesome features from previous versions of Windows Phone have been removed. For example, Cortana no longer has one-touch music-search capabilities (the button is now deeply hidden) and the Bing Vision support is gone as well. This should be pretty depression for Windows Phone users and embarrassing for Microsoft itself since the Bing Vision feature has recently made its way to Apple’s iOS.
Cortana’s speech UI hasn’t seen any improvements in terms of being able to speak important information to you. It can still announce and read aloud incoming text messages with options to reply using your voice without having to touch or look at the screen. That’s an important feature that has thankfully remained, but it doesn’t support Skype instant messages or Facebook messages like previous versions of Windows Phone did. And unfortunately, the Caller ID names & numbers of incoming calls are no longer read out loud so you have no way of knowing who’s calling while on the motorcycle anymore.
Cortana can still control 3rd party apps that have integration enabled. You can still say, “Hey Cortana, NBC News read the headlines” and it will launch NBC news and read the headlines out loud, but there’s still no way for any app or notification to announce things audibly. Well, you can have vague unintelligible sound effects play, but the really useful thing that we’ve been waiting to come back since the days of Microsoft Voice Command on Windows Mobile 2003 is the ability for the speech interface to actually tell us the stuff we need to know out loud in a language that we can understand. Twelve years ago, if I had a meeting on my calendar that I had to be at in 15 minutes, my Windows Mobile 2003 smartphone would actually speak into my headphones something like, “Get to the meeting in 15 minutes” at which point I would instantly know what I had to do next. Microsoft still hasn’t brought this extremely useful feature back (nor has anyone else really).
Being able to write an email without touching the phone is pretty awesome though. Now you can say, “Hey Cortana, send an email” and she will respond by asking you things like who you want to send it to and what do you want to say. That’s a great feature, but again it only goes one way. Cortana won’t read email notifications to you, even if they’re from your “inner circle” listing or a specific group of people in the people app.
Finally, when you shut down Windows Phone, it beautifully gives you one last reminder about what’s next on your Calendar.
Pros
Cons
Conclusion
Windows 10 Mobile is finally starting to feel like an integrated part of Microsoft’s ecosystem with settings dialogs and apps that match their full Windows 10 counterparts almost exactly. It’s very compelling to have a phone that can run the same programs that you may be using on a desktop PC, laptop, Surface Hub, Xbox, and HoloLens. However, Microsoft’s new way of developing Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile makes everything feel constantly unfinished. Even if you only look at Microsoft’s apps, there are huge gaps in consistency and design. The menus are all over the place. Sometimes they have toolbars at the bottom with an ellipses menu that pops up over the toolbar and labels the icons. That seems to be the most usable design, but even within a single app like Outlook Calendar, if you’re editing an appointment, that toolbar/bottom menu design is completely different. Of course, the differences are all over the place within other Microsoft-made apps as well. Some have ambiguous hamburger buttons at the top, some have pivots with text that you can understand, some have transparent live tiles, some don’t, some correctly pick up the system theme colors, some force an ugly out-of-place color on the user instead. Clearly, Microsoft has not been able to get its own developers to take Windows 10 Mobile seriously and design for a consistent experience. If Microsoft can’t get a cohesive user experience in their own apps on their own platform, how can anyone expect 3rd party developers to even try?
On the other hand, Windows 10 is meant as an operating system that will grow rapidly. It is not intended to be a finished product and probably never will be. That means there’s a lot of hope that things will get better and maybe Microsoft will get their ducks in a row pretty quickly. We can see that the future of Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile is aiming more and more towards a single operating system full of Universal Apps that can modify themselves for every screen size and input/output method. If Microsoft can combine all of the features of Windows 10 desktop with Windows 10 Mobile including the ability to run classic Win32 apps when a phone is connected to a larger screen or supported system requirements, that could be extremely useful.
Hopefully this time, Microsoft will keep taking more steps forward and zero steps back. That’s the only way they’ll be able to succeed
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