Lumia 950 - Day1 THoughts/Bugs List
Was able to order my 950 through ATT online on Monday night (11/16) around 9pm and it was shipped to me next day and I got it Wednesday.
Unboxing, Assembly, & Setup
Quite frankly as a long time Windows Phone User since the inception of Windows Phone 7 was I disappointed at how difficult it was for everything to be setup. The battery came outside of the phone, there were no instruction on how to assemble the device nor was there anything labeling the Nano Sim card slot; It took me forever to find it and to a new user switching from iOS or android or just a novice phone user in general that was a huge problem. After finally turning on the phone the setup process was really simple and what you would expect with any other Windows Phone. However there was no option to setup Windows Hello on device bootup and had to be done by going into the settings manually. Once you finally get to the home screen is where the fun begins.
Software - W10 Mobile
I enjoy the slick look and feel of the software although it is still a little choppy at times and the animations are not as crisp and smooth as 8.1 was. I've found a few quality of life bugs so far and a lot of them are quite annoying to people because of how small the issues they are. For starters the auto brightness always defaults back to 100% when you turn on the phone screen on and off instead of going back to what you set it as previously. This was a huge inconvenience for me because I love to use my phone at night before I go to bed in the dark and having a giant 100% brightness is really bad. There is no option for deleting mass emails, nor an option to keep the black background for the actual mail client when writing emails it turns to default white even though that is not your default.
The biggest issue for me when this build is the lack of double tap to turn on the screen and the settings to remove the navigation bar for certain apps. While I found no setting like in 8.1 to hide the nav bar, I did find that scrolling down while on the home screen got rid of it, but just come right back when opening an app which can make watching a video like Hulu or Netflix a huge issue taking up so much screen real estate; and for a new user might be a really big turnoff. Also where is the option to run audio apps in the background? Pandora does it but for Edge, and other browsers it does not allow continued use of the video audio in the background like iOS.
I also had a weird glitch where I restart my phone and my home screen wouldn't load...it would just continue to say Loading... and never doing anything resulting in me having to hard reset.
App Store
Windows Phone has always been well behind the quality apps of Android and iOS and as someone who has used all three platforms I still prefer Windows Phone. I was using an iPhone 6S for about 6 months before the 950 came out and I will admit having 100% updates on all the main stream apps was really nice and anyone who is considering switching to WP should really think about what they need on a daily basis for apps. Major third party apps are still missing like WWE Network, Hearthstone, PVZ2, Bank Apps Like Chase, or if the app is there, it hasn't been updated in months or even years.
You would think for a brand new flagship device and software launch all of the main stream apps like facebook, Twitter, Hulu, Instagram, Fandago, and Netflix would be updated to universal apps, but sadly that isn't the case. Most of the apps are still the old non-updated versions from 8.1 and some even not updated since Windows Phone 7 like the Blizzard Battle.net authenticator app(but still works). Even when apps did have updates the app store would install the old versions instead thus creating more headaches for new users all together.
Overall
This is a big moment for Microsoft to finally get people to Switch to Windows Mobile and so far with everything I've mentioned I'm sure most users wouldn't not have a very enjoyable experience. In my opinion as much as I love WP it would not have killed them to wait a couple more months to polish this stuff because once people have a bad taste in their mouth it's really hard to get rid of it.
Overall I do like where this is going but if Microsoft doesn't start pushing developers to get those major apps over and keep them updated they are going to continue having the same problems. No matter how good the hardware or platform is, the apps have to be there. For hardcore WP users I say get it now because it's a nice change but for users thinking of switching over from iOS or Android I would say wait a few months, plus the price will go down as well.
rly:
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