Have used 10136 for a day on a 1020. Thoughts:
* Initially, I missed the part about not touching the phone when it finally got to the lock screen sans time/date. I can say things did appear very funky, hence my getting on the internet and looking around and then finding the statement by MS about that. So, I reverted to 8.1 and did the install a second time.
* The install, from a freshly restored to 8.1 phone, on my 1020, took about 5 hours (I'm not including the first attempt). Now, hold your horses, let me explain. What that 5 hours consisted of was the downloading and installing of 10136, the downloading and updating of all my apps, the downloading and installing of another phone update about 3 hours into this process (no number/more info/etc attached to that update), and the downloading and updating of a number of apps again, and then finally, deleting several apps that didn't work, which then worked when downloaded and installed again. I'm on a 100 MB/s internet connection with Data Usage showing 809 MB when I was done, so I'm fairly certain the bottleneck here was more on the side of the phone itself. 5 hours later, my phone was ready for use, with no more app installs and updates to run. This was, by several hours, the longest I ever spent updating a phone; Windows, Android, or iOS. I think anyone who owns a metal Lumia knows how hot they can get. My living room, in which I was doing this while watching TV...literally got hot. My 1020 was like a mini solar flare for those 5 hours.
I think that was the single longest stretch it's ever worked that hard without a break.
* Unlike many others, I've always been happy to see where they're going with the aesthetic. I do agree that hamburger menus should be on the bottom of the screen and scroll up, rather than in the top left corner, but outside of that, UIs-regardless of which design philosophy they adhere to, rarely bug me. From a purely aesthetic concern, it's simply nice to see some modern aesthetics to replace much of the very basic starkness of WP 8/8.1. Everyone's tastes are different, obviously.
* I love the new transparency, wherever it can be found. I HATE non transparent start tiles now.
At the moment, the only transparent ones are from Microsoft apps (and not all of them). Hopefully, that'll change, but with how few developers took advantage of live tiles, I'm a bit pessimistic.
* I actually have a layout now where I relegated most of those non-transparent apps to the "edges" (mostly top and bottom), trumping aesthetics over practicality, because the non-transparent blocks on the Start screen are so damn ugly now. This is one of those things I never realized I wanted so badly until I saw it.
* The new Onedrive app is almost completely broken for me. Nor can I uninstall it and reinstall it, which has fixed most other "broken" apps in this build. When I go into Onedrive, despite several GBs worth of files, it simply says I have no files, no pictures, nothing shared, nothing. If I create something, it also vanishes into the air the second I navigate away from it. Those files/folders I create in the phone app will show up in Onedrive if I access it via the web on my computer, tablet, etc. They just join everything else that vanished in the Windows Phone 10 app. Very strange. Meanwhile, other apps (like photos) that pull from Onedrive, see my Onedrive files just fine.
* Outlook Mail finally has functional notifications. Lack of working email notifications was the primary reason I always almost immediately rolled back in previous builds. They're too critical for me, and I don't have multiple Windows Phones to play around with. The unfortunate part of the notifications is that they don't segregate by "inbox" like they do in WP 8/8.1. Fingers crossed that it'll come down the pipe.
* The bad about notifications is no way to change sound, and clicking on one doesn't bring you to the email in question.
* Outlook Mail and Calendar performance is still pretty bad in terms of speed/smoothness. Lots of UI cleaning still needed as well, with cut off icons/text/etc.
* I do see comments from others about hating the new mail experience in Windows Phone 10, because it doesn't let you pin your inboxes separately to the Start screen, and while there's absolutely nothing intuitive about how it's done, you CAN pin your inboxes separately through Outlook. From the list of accounts, you long press one. The pop up window to pin to start will only show up after you release, rather than when you press. This is not to be confused with the list of accounts under settings.
* Store (beta) is an ugly, slow, mess. But, that's mostly true on the desktop as well. I'm 100% certain that's going to get a lot of polish eventually, so I'm not too concerned. A lot of my apps under "My Apps" in the normal Store app weren't found in the Store (beta) app (via search or history), so I had to do a lot of app installs through the old Store app instead. The current way of listing your apps, by date, so the same app shows up multiple times, is a design choice that I do hope they re-think.
* Store (beta) gives no indication that you an app is actually installed or not. It will tell you if you own it or not, but when you go to the actual apps' page, it'll show you the install button regardless of whether it is actually installed, and will gladly let you push the button. I installed multiple apps several times over before realizing this. That was incredibly annoying, and I have to wonder at the so called one app for all versions of Windows 10 mantra, since the Store (beta) on the desktop (which, ostensibly, should be the same app), clearly differentiates this, and until I ran into this problem, the app did appear to be the same app as the one on the desktop.
* Store (beta) keeps trying to, and failing to, download Internet Explorer automatically. I can delete it from the downloads queue, but the next time it checks for updates, it shows up again.
* This morning, when I woke, I had to restart my phone in order to get Store (beta) to successfully open again. No amount of freeing up memory appeared to resolve it without resorting to restarting.
* On the subject of restarting a phone, this is the slowest restart I've ever experienced on any phone in the last 5 years. I actually started to think the phone had shut down, instead of gone into a restart, the first time I did it. It takes that long. Most of that is due to what seems like a real long stretch of time from powering off to actually starting back up again. It's not that much slower than normal if you're just looking at powering it up from an off state. That lag time between shutting down and starting back up during a restart is kind of weird.
* Most times, when I restart the phone, the first time I enter a pin on my lock screen, there is a black bar at the top of the pin/number pad part of the interface. That black bar doesn't show up in subsequent uses of the pin pad/lock screen.
* The OS, as a whole, is still far too slow to be considered "smooth", but it's usable.
* Make sure you switch out the pinned phone app for the updated phone app. Why they have the same name...to confuse the hell out of people, I suppose.
The old phone app, for me at least, is completely non-functional.
* The old Lumia "beta" app, Glance Backgrounds, installs and runs just fine, but doesn't actually apply images anymore to my Glance screen. Which makes me a kind of sad panda.
* My call audio quality...is just horrible. It's never been fantastic on a 1020, from my perspective, but it's been a noticeable downgrade for me now, compared to 8.1. I rarely make actual phone calls on my phone anymore (it's all about text messages/emails/etc, these days)...but damn.
* I tried playing some music to see if it was a general audio thing, and the music played just fine with nothing out of the ordinary (Mix Radio). On the other hand, the new notification sounds are incredibly crackly and sound horrible with "static" and cracking noises. So, I don't know.
All in all, while it's slow (especially the modern windows 10 apps like outlook, new people app, store (beta), etc), it's usable, so I'll likely try sticking with it as long as I can to give it a fair shake (lack of email notifications meant I never lasted longer than a few hours on the two previous builds).
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