Survey: are you satisfied with WP8.1 so far, or is it not what you expected?

[Rahat Jobayar]

YES, YES and YES

 

[Rajat Malhotra]

Wp8.1 is great.... Addresses most of the things people asked for... But the best bits that made 8.0 a hit for me are missing...

 

[Rajat Malhotra]

What do you mean it's absurd, it's a perfectly reasonable comment to make if I'm honest. Something that really sold WP7 to me back in the day way undoubtably the design and the general UI. Metro was utterly stunning, so simple pure and clean, with its sold blocks of colour, tasteful use of white space, beautifully huge titles, gorgeous transparency in the hubs, and the animation of the xbox tile and the beautifully slow transitions sold it for me. It was a UI that put style beyond anything, but with every update, I feel the essence that made me love windows phone is slowly diminishing. I tolerated the move to wp7.8 with the loss of the gorgeous white space in the home screen for I could now resize tiles, but the new tree across layout with the images in the background is an atrocity. The beautiffly simple info bar at the top that would hide away is gone, making it look very fussy now, the transitions are far to fast, the carousal when you flick through photos quickly, i remember very fondly is gone too. The peoples hub is a shadow of what it was, even design wise with the new ugly title, ams with the marketplace. We used to have a decent people hub, music hub, a working games hub, a photo hub and they're all gone now.
One great thing about wp was that it didn't need apps to work, it introduced a concept of a os having all the functionality you need, and what you get in return is an experience that cannot be matched with apps. That is clearly seen in the xbox/ music hubs, where they used to open instantly, even in wp7, they now take an eternity. We tolerated the silly long list of apps, because we had hubs to sort them with, but now that's gone, and even the games show up there, making it stupidly unusable. WP was never about apps, and just because we have them now doesn't mean that we should loose our once beloved os features.
The new notification centre is also undermining the notion of live tiles, i mean, once you got your social updates very reliably through the me tile, but since we now have a notification centre, ms went, what's the point? and got rid of it. In this case, why have live tiles at all since we now have the "action centre."
Basicially, windows phone is slowly becoming android. The OS is now extremely buggy (l know it's a beta but still), slow, extremely ugly and is reliant on substandard apps to deliver a substandard experience. Sound similar.
The removal of the nokia name is the last nail in the coffin as far as i'm concerned, and unless they can bring a 1020 competitor with a one inch sensor, dedicated imaging chip and a more powerful xenon flash, I'm buying the iPhone 6 when it comes out, which ironically, with it's clean beautiful ui, gorgeous transitions, combined messaging experience, represents metro far better than what 8.1 does.
I'm with u on this one
Yours sincerely, dennis

 

[yaron zeevik]

I really like the new features and I understand that the dev version bugs will take Time to go away ..although I'm using the notification center alot I would like to have an option to disable it because from the designing perspective I think it hurts the simplicity and the "clean" vibe the OS always had

 

[timppa_k]

A mono button for audio would be nice. Pining anything to action center would be a dream.

Haa haa.! And half screen view for blinds.


From Timppa_K / L920

 

[Christopher Lindsay]

Haa haa.! And half screen view for blinds.


From Timppa_K / L920

I'm serious. It's good for hearing impaired people. I'm shocked it's actually not already in the phone since hearing impaired people do buy phones. plus music people like me prefer to listen in mono at times for mixing and referencing.

 

[yehuda92]

Honestly, I am a little dissatisfied. On one hand all the new features are great, and for the most part work well. On the other hand, things that used to work great are no suffering. I used to rely on the battery of my phone getting a solid 21 hours, now 14 if I'm lucky. I used to rely on the music hub to open instantly and play all my songs, now it takes forever to open, and is limited to 100 songs in a single play (not to mention the awful new UI). I used to enjoy being able to post to twitter and facebook at the same time, but now facebook takes forever to open. So yes, while its great that we have cortana, and the notification center, and the third row of tiles, its a shame how much of the rest of the OS they left out in the rain.

 

[Chregu]

Honestly, I am a little dissatisfied. On one hand all the new features are great, and for the most part work well. On the other hand, things that used to work great are no suffering. I used to rely on the battery of my phone getting a solid 21 hours, now 14 if I'm lucky. I used to rely on the music hub to open instantly and play all my songs, now it takes forever to open, and is limited to 100 songs in a single play (not to mention the awful new UI). I used to enjoy being able to post to twitter and facebook at the same time, but now facebook takes forever to open. So yes, while its great that we have cortana, and the notification center, and the third row of tiles, its a shame how much of the rest of the OS they left out in the rain.

Are you having these battery issues with the battery fix? When I updated my 8X to WP8.1 my battery was terrible too. Really terrible. But after the second update it's now better than ever.

And now that you mention it, I don't think I had a loading screen on the old calendar app, now there's one. But maybe it was already there, I'm not sure.

 

[yehuda92]

nope, battery still awful after the latest fix, I am burning between 5-7% an hour when idle, compared to wp8, which was at around 1-3%

 

[Chregu]

nope, battery still awful after the latest fix, I am burning between 5-7% an hour when idle, compared to wp8, which was at around 1-3%

Sorry to hear that :-/

 

[oseansaditya]

nope, battery still awful after the latest fix, I am burning between 5-7% an hour when idle, compared to wp8, which was at around 1-3%

Microsoft working on it..

 

[yaron zeevik]

Microsoft working on it..

It's a solid statement or a guess?

 

[NachiketS]

I like the windows phone 8.1, but the Visual Studio 2013 with 8.1 emulators and SDK killed my VS 2012 express for windows phone 8. :angry:

 

[NachiketS]

and yes, forgot to mention my 920's battery life sucks on windows phone 8.1. Drains about 7-10 % on an average everyday. I don't use the phone heavily.


I am glad that the WhatsApp has been pulled off market, I hope they fix the problems and tune up the application. It burns my battery about 20-25% per hour on Lumia 920.

 

[coolraoul]

My battery life has become rather poor, we still can't properly enclose documents to an email, and there is no cell/data toggle in the action center.

Apart from that, 8.1 is awesome. Miles better than 8 with the action and notification center, and more gorgeous looking than ever with those transparent tiles.

I'm very happy with the direction WP is taking so far.

 

[pasteltiara]

So far, all is good with 8.1. I do have a problem with the sharing feature. For some reason, it doesn't work at all. For example, if I want to share a news link in Engadget or even Bing News, using the share-->Email-->Email Account Name, or even Share-->Social Networks-->Email,it kicks me back to the news source. SO I have never been able to share anything via email. However, the Share-->Social Networks-->Messaging works (this is SMS).

My device is an 1320 with Win 8.1 May 2014 Update (the update to 8.1 preview). Anyone may have suggestion to have this sharing fixed? Really appeciate this help.

Other than that, it's a fantastic upgrade, no issues with battery life. It appear to be more smoother in scrolling.

Cheers.

 

[paulxxwall]

Screen reload is buggy ,WiFi is buggy ,camera randomly turns one, random reboot ,cool features but......buggy

 

[Lu520]

To be frank, cant say too far away from my expectations but definitely still far away from my expectations. Need lot of improvements/options/apps. Basically i hate Android and cant buy a I phone(not affordable for me). So came to WP platform and enjoying but need more options(customizations)/Apps etc etc...

Wont leave the WP platform but would be happy if they work around for apps/customizations/providing more options

 

[jfa1]

Well I wad expecting a bit more than what we have in 8.1

Please elaborate on what more you are/were expecting to see in 8.1

 

[b23h]

b23h, what's new? You still rocking that AT&T 920? Good to see you haven't lost that sharp wit.

Personally, I think MSFT made intelligent compromises as they added some features people wanted from other OSes to 8.1 while retaining their own individual design and OS principles. Hard to be the #3 OS, especially when you're trying to straddle the line of choice between the unstoppable force (Android) and the immovable object (iSheep, sorry, iOS).

Hey MSFTisMIA! Yea, I still love it. I am hoping that 'Goldfinger' is going to be a variant of the 930, but with a SD Card Slot and with luck Glance as well. If that's true there's a fair chance I will get it in November or soon after.

Yup, when people say silly things, I just want to poke them with a sharp stick. His comment probably mostly comes down to the de-emphasis on the hubs in favor of applications that can be updated more frequently. Overall I think it is wise for the OS and I hope that a lot of the features we lost in the hubs may be replaced via hooks in updated social programs and such. Certainly there's things that need to be done with 8.1, however I see it as a huge step forward. Other GDR's will fix the mistakes and add new features...

Overall I am quite happy with 8.1 despite the problems. So yes, I definitely agree with you.