Windows 10 Mobile Anniversary Update: half Rant half Review (subjective!)
Hi at all,
It would be nice if you all leaved a similar comment like my sum up, that would be really interesting to see different opinions summed up!
I want to give you my experience with the windows 10 Anniversary update and it's flaws (Windows 10s flaws). My Device is a Lumia 640 DS, but with only one Sim inserted and a 128gb SD card.
Updating Win 10 to Win 10 AU went faster than suspected. That was nice. After installing, everything was kinda buggy, but that wasn't the problem, since I wanted to do a hard reset with formating the SD card anyway. So I made a hard reset. It took quiet some time and I decided to leave my backups alone, to obtain a view as a first time Lumia user. So when the basic install stuff was finished, which partially had the old WP8.1 UI, I was finally on my start screen.
The first thing I did was to go to standby, and put it on again, to see if the visual artifacts when turning the phone on are still there. And like i imagined, they did not get rid of it (things like the clock shows after background & co. and sometimes it flashes shortly in white). But hey, it's just one thing, so let's dig deeper. The next thing I did was downloading maps. So I put about 6 countries on the download list and went on to do something else, since I thought the maps would download in the background.... which was a bad assumption. I don't know if they completely paused or are just slow to the ultimate, but leaving the screen in the map-download-screen surely downloads the maps faster. And be careful, your screen has to stay on or the download will slow (pause?) again.
So after actively watching the download bar progress to the finish, I went to start screen and watched swipes to "all app lists" carefully, since the icons always loaded after the swipe, before the update. Of course, it was still the same after the update, but not so often as before. Sadly, on the all Apps list I realized how many ad-apps (bloatware) were installed. So I uninstalled them. It was very funny, that Apps like: Here Drive, here Maps, Lumia Camera, Storyteller, Moments installed. In short: There were Apps installed which weren't usable from the start (srsly???). After uninstalling them I was curious and found they were downloadable and installable from the store. But way they don't work either.
Since I have an SD-Card installed, new apps have installed themselves on SD card. A few Apps, like Whatsapp are not installable on SD card, and you get a message and install it simply on device storage. Other Apps, even from MS like glance, install themselves on SD card. I don't know when it did install itselfs to SD card, but here it was, and from the beginning it was updateable. In my case, there was the same problem which was on the previous Windows Version. If you have certain system Apps installed on SD, they seem updateable on store, but always get an error message when installing. So you need to switch the location of the App to storage device and everythings fine again.
So now my device was at a similar state as before the update. It took quiet some time. So i went to the new stuff of the AU update. I arranged the icons in my action center to my personal taste and removed the once I never used. It worked well. And is a really nice feature and looks cleaner than before. So as other improvements mostly are cortana, developer stuff or stuff not usable on 640, it felt like I tested every new feature of the update.
But that's not all. I already used the update for 2 days and there are two further problems which occured. The first thing is, my contacts tile doesn't load up images of my contacts, so it only has blank circles in two different colours. And the next thing is rather stupid. MS implemented glance settings (finally!) to personalization. And hey, that doesn't mean the settings in extras is gone, it only means that the settings in extras are unusable (W...T...F???). And to raise this even higher, I can't turn off glance while loading my device and every time a minute's passed, it updates itself in an unaesthetic way (talking bout removed features... again?). While the new settings look a bit better, a few pages, like lockscreen settings kinda load slow and adjusting the short status infos on lockscreen has an odd behaviour.
Unaesthetic updates are all over Windows 10 mobile. A few further examples are: 1) opening Groove sometimes updates itself shortly and you have to press back more than one time to go out of the app 2) hiding/unhiding navigation bar (bottom) in maps results in a really ugly black reloading of the maps 3) the late-updated parallax effect, when you open an app (scrolled quiete far down in startscreen) and instantly press the back button again.
sum up:
Is the update
- more stable?: No, it's the same.
- more bugfree (visual artifacts)?: No, it's the same.
- more feature rich?: Objectively yes! Subjectively for me it's trade one - gain one, as I don't use glance anymore.
Has Windows 10 in general
- fullfilled my needs: Yes, a low cost smartphone which is capable of many things except for "luxury" features like high-end gaming, fingerprint scanner etc..
- been a pain in the ***: Sometimes. Subjective updates, 3rd party Apps and stupid unaesthetically bugs are the cause.
Are the 3rd party Apps
- fulfilling my needs: Yes, I don't need Snapchat and many more apps.
- reliable: no: Spotify & facebook are examples. Yes: Manga Blaze is really worth investing to. So it depends.
Do I recommend Win 10:
- No. See my pseudo first use experience.
....Shame but i really do think dev's gave up on it
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