My Note 5 went in for service and I'be been on my M8 again for a week...

[waazzupppp]

So, my Note 5's charging port to a crap last week and I had to send it into Sammy for service. The only other Verizon phone I own is my M8 for Win, which I've been running as a Win 10 phone since the rollout was available for it. I never trusted the software enough to use it as a daily driver, but I have to admit that over the past week, there's been far more good than bad in build 10586.420... I thought I would take a few minutes and put my thoughts out there for anyone that is thinking that the M8 or Win 10 is DOA right now...

First and foremost, communications - This is the most important part of a phone, and MS almost has the communications features back to where they were with Windows 7.5. In my mind, this was still the BEST version of Windows for communicating with people. Remember when Facebook was integrated into the OS? Yea, that was nice, but this is close. It seems like Outlook has been patched well enough to get by for now, and the separate inboxes as live tiles made up for the loss of the original email program that did the same thing. Overall, I don't think they can get much closer to great on this one without rolling everything back into the OS again - which would just be stupid to do at this point.

Next up, Apps - Yikes... Seems like the more I look for, the more I old ones aren't there any more. That said, with the basic services that Microsoft offers, I can easily replace most of the things I did with my Note as far as Apps go. Instead of a news reader, I have MS News. Instead of the Sports App I used, I have MS Sports. It's not terrible, but I can tell you I am not evolving my Pokemon right now, and that does hurt a bit. The good news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are all sharp as a tack, well at least Facebook opens most of the time - the others are really good though.

Settings and Usage - Is there anything better than a streamlined phone? Seriously, everything I need is one click away on the home screen! When you bury yourself in Android for a few months, you forget about how powerful Live Tiles are and why they were the "phone to save us from our phones" back in the day. The notifications are clean and simple, the tiles tell me what I missed and the lock screen lets me know what important Apps are trying to tell me something. It's quite perfect. The scary part is that yesterday, after a full day of use, my battery sat at 71% - 71%!!!! That's with Facebooking, Tweeting, Instagramming and everything else! My Note would be at 90% before I even left the house in the mornings! I'd be lucky to get to lunch before I needed to pop it on the charger.

Overall, I have to admit to being pleasantly surprised with how smooth the system is running. Very few bugs at this point in this build and very stable as far as overall operations go. Now if HTC would just step up and fix a few minor compatibility issues, I think it's fully ready to be added to the Win 10 Ready list...

 

[Chintan Gohel]

Nice to hear a post such as yours, a user experience post.

By the way, the latest update available in 10586.490 - check to see if that update is there

 

[waazzupppp]

Thanks for the heads up!

Not sure that I want to download an update with how smooth everything is going, but who doesn't want the latest right?

Downloading now...

 

[Euell Gibbons]

It drives me a little crazy when people complain about losing the integration of Facebook, Twitter, etc into the OS. I understand why people are upset, but they shouldn't get mad at MS; they are not to blame here. Facebook, Twitter, etc all make money off of ads, and when those services were nicely woven in the OS the user was never seeing those ads. That's why we lost the integration. It's a shame, but was ultimately unavoidable.

 

[Chintan Gohel]

It drives me a little crazy when people complain about losing the integration of Facebook, Twitter, etc into the OS. I understand why people are upset, but they shouldn't get mad at MS; they are not to blame here. Facebook, Twitter, etc all make money off of ads, and when those services were nicely woven in the OS the user was never seeing those ads. That's why we lost the integration. It's a shame, but was ultimately unavoidable.

you have a unique point of view on this, I like your theory. Thanks for sharing

 

[waazzupppp]

Actually, the loss of advertising dollars had nothing to do with pulling it from the core OS. The issue was FB/Twitter/Linked In were doing so many API changes so often that MS was having to release a full "Windows Update" to fix it when it was in the core OS. By pulling those out of the core OS, they were able to just update the Apps to change the API instead of the entire OS. Now the whole YouTube thing, you have that one nailed.

And it wasn't so much of a gripe at MS, just a statement of how good Win 7.5 was before all the 'changes' had to happen. My old Titan with 7.5 was a beast of a phone with an amazing battery life, killer camera and gorgeous OS. The M8 for Windows has plenty of strengths to it, but overall, the Titan's user experience was practically flawless. PS - Still waiting on Windows 7.8 for that one... lol

 

[fatclue_98]

PS - Still waiting on Windows 7.8 for that one... lol

seveneighter - If it's still available and/or working.

 

[Loriquero]

The scary part is that yesterday, after a full day of use, my battery sat at 71% - 71%!!!! That's with Facebooking, Tweeting, Instagramming and everything else! My Note would be at 90% before I even left the house in the mornings! I'd be lucky to get to lunch before I needed to pop it on the charger.

I'm in 10586.494 on my One M8 and I have to charge it twice a day.

But I could get almost two days of battery life when I was in wp 8.1

I just can't get back there though... I'm already used to W10M looks.

I have two bugs that bother me a little bit but I can live with them, the first one is the HTC camera app, I usually have to tap twice the shoot "button" in the screen if I want it to take a picture. Every time I open the app it has to be like that.

The second bug is inside Wechat (I work with chinese, so I use it a lot) when I open a picture inside a conversation it usually crashes the app 30% of the time.

I was really looking forward and update that fix the battery and the camera thing. But now I know is useless. If I keep living in China, my next phone will be Android. There are so many chinese apps that don't work properly and are practically useless (Didi Taxi), lack many useful features (wechat payment, Alipay don't have QR payments, really hot feature right now in China) or simply don't have a windows version (China Construction Bank... It happens to be my main bank account). I'm not talking about Pok?mon crap. I'm talking about really useful and productivity stuff that WP is lacking in the most important Smartphone market in the world.

I can live without this things outside of China. My bank app works great, Easy Taxi also and we don't have this mobile wallet thing well developed yet. But in China I presume Microsoft executives all use iphones and haven't heard about these issues.

As an anecdotical memory to compensate a little my China based Windows mobile rant, last time I tried using the Android Bank of China app on my backup Xiaomi 3 to transfer money to another account and it crashed every single time I wanted to do so. Then I downloaded the app on my One M8 for windows (I didn't try that before because my lack of faith in the system) And it worked perfectly.

 

[badelhas]

So, my Note 5's charging port to a crap last week and I had to send it into Sammy for service. The only other Verizon phone I own is my M8 for Win, which I've been running as a Win 10 phone since the rollout was available for it. I never trusted the software enough to use it as a daily driver, but I have to admit that over the past week, there's been far more good than bad in build 10586.420... I thought I would take a few minutes and put my thoughts out there for anyone that is thinking that the M8 or Win 10 is DOA right now...

First and foremost, communications - This is the most important part of a phone, and MS almost has the communications features back to where they were with Windows 7.5. In my mind, this was still the BEST version of Windows for communicating with people. Remember when Facebook was integrated into the OS? Yea, that was nice, but this is close. It seems like Outlook has been patched well enough to get by for now, and the separate inboxes as live tiles made up for the loss of the original email program that did the same thing. Overall, I don't think they can get much closer to great on this one without rolling everything back into the OS again - which would just be stupid to do at this point.

Next up, Apps - Yikes... Seems like the more I look for, the more I old ones aren't there any more. That said, with the basic services that Microsoft offers, I can easily replace most of the things I did with my Note as far as Apps go. Instead of a news reader, I have MS News. Instead of the Sports App I used, I have MS Sports. It's not terrible, but I can tell you I am not evolving my Pokemon right now, and that does hurt a bit. The good news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are all sharp as a tack, well at least Facebook opens most of the time - the others are really good though.

Settings and Usage - Is there anything better than a streamlined phone? Seriously, everything I need is one click away on the home screen! When you bury yourself in Android for a few months, you forget about how powerful Live Tiles are and why they were the "phone to save us from our phones" back in the day. The notifications are clean and simple, the tiles tell me what I missed and the lock screen lets me know what important Apps are trying to tell me something. It's quite perfect. The scary part is that yesterday, after a full day of use, my battery sat at 71% - 71%!!!! That's with Facebooking, Tweeting, Instagramming and everything else! My Note would be at 90% before I even left the house in the mornings! I'd be lucky to get to lunch before I needed to pop it on the charger.

Overall, I have to admit to being pleasantly surprised with how smooth the system is running. Very few bugs at this point in this build and very stable as far as overall operations go. Now if HTC would just step up and fix a few minor compatibility issues, I think it's fully ready to be added to the Win 10 Ready list...

Thanks for sharing your input and comparison between the two

 

[ski200345]

I miss my note 5 a lot. I switched over to a windows unlocked lumnia and have been happy with it. Only problem is there is no fast charging like there is on the galaxy phones so now I have to wait a long time just to charge my phone. I liked samsung fast charging