Since I upgraded from 8.1 Denim, (ATT) on a Lumia 1020, to b10581. it has been mostly reliable and I love the graphical transitions, but here is what I have noticed, being new to the Insider program this week:
1) What happened to the "Maps" application? My icon for this application is no longer in app list (the Lumia Camera app disappeared as well - more on this below). All of my favorite place pins on my start screen were broken as a result of this application vanishing. Did MSFT remove it? Was it in previous builds and what is the plan for the RTM and the Maps app? My biggest concern is that there is no "Default Apps" menu which would allow me to set a particular application (like Navigon or HERE) as my map app. Also of major concern to me is that I had to start using HERE Maps which does not see all of my favorite places so I'd love for someone to answer these questions (bring me up to speed) on this one!
2) The Lumia Camera is gone and the new built-in app apparently has integrated Lumia Camera features. This app is definitely buggy and bracketing mode needs to be switchable on the main app screen instead of within settings. Once you are in bracketing mode, you have to leave the app and re0enter it to reset the camera which is silly. It does start quicker now than it did in 8.1 but it is definitely beta software as it crashed on me twice while trying to take photos last night.
3) The Photos App is pretty slick but needs more refinement, starting with the Page heading fonts - "COLLECTION", "ALBUMS" and "FOLDERS" - they need to find something nicer than the fonts they are currently using. Next, there is no way that I can see to share an album. I can share individual photos from an album but not the whole thing. I envision being able to share a link to an album on Onedrive but see no way to do this at present.
4) Alarms - Wow, what happened to this app? It has degraded into really unreliable software. Monday I had duplicates of every single alarm on my 1020 and the app would not respond to the delete command, then yesterday every single alarm (none of which were working anyway) disappeared on its own so this morning, I created a new one and tested it - it worked! But, when I tried to change the ringtone for my alarm to something other than Default, it crashed. The other additions to this app are mind-blowingly cool - I look forward to the stability improvements in the alarm app but the other components (stopwatch, timer, world clock) are GRAAVVYY!
5) Lockscreen issues - when I receive a notification and my phone is locked, W10M almost always forgets about the notification and takes me to the Start screen instead. It actually was pretty funny at first but became pretty annoying after several occurrences. I use a pin to unlock my phone and disabling this is a dealbreaker for me so I just hope that MSFT fixes it soon but for now, I can live with it.
6) General app responsiveness seems to be GREAT! I have a couple of games that I've tried and battery life seems much greatly improved while running those games.
7) I love the new Outlook mobile email and calendar! They are true love BUT...I really wish there was a way to see ALL email in one inbox with this version of Windows Phone. I have 8 email accounts.....nuff said. If anyone can point me to the option that turns this on! Thank you in advance!!! Also, what happened to tasks? If this is truly an Outlook application, where did the Tasks go? This is a rhetorical question because as I see it, this is not a true "Outlook" client experience because my categories are not there, either. I think MSFT meant to say "Outlook.com" Mobile when they marketed this one. /end-rant
8) The new SETTINGS menu is missing the applications section - I touched on this earlier with the missing "Default Apps" page for settings apps like Mapping, music & PDF. I was also kind of expecting to see printing capability as well. Does anyone know if this was ever discussed for W10M?
9) Messaging - Looks good and has nice options to switch between Skype and text on the fly. The arrangement of the command buttons seem pretty good to me, I like way you can load different language packs for the keyboard on the fly. I'm still not crazy about that arrow pointer thing, I play with it just to try to get comfortable with it but it still seems easier to tap on the text to get where I need to go. I'm just glad that the old cursor drag function was NOT removed for this build and I hope it stays. Most importantly though I hoped that MSFT would implement a webOS style conversation thread that used image thumbnails. Is this not desired in the user community?
This build so far has definitely been good enough to be my daily driver despite the issues encountered thus far and I am very excited about this release of Windows Mobile to the masses. I just hope MSFT can iron out all of the inconsistent bugs that are plaguing so many insiders right now.
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