As promised in the Cyan tracker thread, I am posting my experience after 5 days.
Some data:
Location: India
Phone: Lumia Red 1520 Unlocked India
Never on Developer Preview
Positive Experiences:
1) Feels smoother and faster
2) Camera is quicker (You will need to really look out for the difference)
3) Miracast works remarkably well with my LG 42LA6910
4) The data and wifi arrows are sensible and useful. However, Daniel had mentioned in his article that they are probably enabled by Data Sense. I do not believe so as I used Data Sense in Windows Phone 8.0 but never saw it.
5) The Wifi sense also shows whether the wifi network that you have connected to has Internet access or not. This was not there before. Also, if the network doesn't have Internet access, the wifi signal is not displayed on the top bar with the data signal. This really helps.
6) Cortana is good. Works well but it can improve a lot. Voice recognition is almost a non issue. It recognizes what I say almost 95% of the time.
7) Action Center is useful from the context of the shortcut buttons.
8) IE is much much improved. Page rendering speed and quality have improved by a huge margin. UX is also better with the tabs and read mode. However, the font size is smaller and can be worrisome.
9) Quiet Hours is good.
10) Motion data is awesome and I use it with Bing Health and Fitness. Awesome!!!
11) While on auto brightness, and if you switch on the phone, sometimes, it takes a while before the screen lights up completely. This has not occurred until now. Fingers Crossed.
12) Parallax effect is awesome!
Negatives:
1) Touch is still a problem. I had hoped that Cyan would fix the touch but it didn't. It can be very irritating.
2) While unlocking the phone and providing the pin, it automatically takes a single tap as multiple taps and you cannot unlock the phone. Still not fixed. Very Very Irritating!
3) Battery backup
has reduced. Earlier it used to give me around 29 to 30 hours of backup but I used to re-charge at around 30% charge remaining. Now total it gives around 25 hours and I have to re-charge again at around 30 - 40%.
Things to note: Wifi, Bluetooth, NFC, 3G always on. Data network has to be searched for all the time, as not all towers are in range and it keeps searching and changing from 2g to 3g accordingly. About 1 hour of gaming, 1 hour of calling, 1 hour of music and around 3 hours of fiddling on average.
4) Action Center: Can access only one item at a time from the action center. Let me explain:
A couple of mails come to one mail id and the notifications are listed in the action center. I tap on them and the mail is opened which I tapped upon. If I tap the back button, it goes back to the start screen. I either have to go to the specific tile or visit the action center again. They could have just kept an option that let the user choose the behaviour.
Edit: Just found out that if you tap on the mail account name, it takes you to the email inbox screen and not the individual mails. So this negative doesn't count.
5) If you have a pin to unlock the screen, you still have to enter it to open Kid's Corner. That is just stupid. In fact I know that Microsoft already had this solved but never released to the public. I have a friend who works in Microsoft and had a HTC 8X. He could open Kid's Corner without entering the pin even if he had a pin for the normal view. I myself have used his phone to try that out and wondered why they never released it.
6) Not the OS itself but Lockscreen Beta doesn't work with Kid's Corner.
Neutral:
1) Action Center is useful for only from the point of view of the shortcuts. Most of the time I check the tiles anyways for updates and the most important ones are on the start screen. Again this is just me.
As of now this is the list. If I notice any more, I will report back. Thanks for reading and if you have any negative feedback about this post, I request you to please be kind about it and I will try to improve.
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