Initial thoughts on Windows Phone 8.1?

[antsin3d]

My Icon feels like a whole new phone. Cortana is amazing. Asked for weather on Wednesday back in Maryland. Said "what about thursday" - she didn't miss a beat. Makes Siri look 8-bit. The single best feature for me is how you insert the cursor in text and then move that cursor. It was super annoying before, now its fast and easy.

 

[Jack Janik]

Internet Explorer still sucks. Which makes not being able to change defaults hurt even more.

 

[MicrosoftNorthstar]

What I love:

• Text message search
• Cortana can play music
• InPrivate browsing
• Start Screen with third row
• tabs sync from Windows 8.1, works vice versa
• Reading view in IE

What I hate:

• Photos app shows recent photos not albums. I may not always want it to show my recent pictures...
• Comma has been removed from keyboard
• Screenshot shortcut is different and difficult
• Some apps (i.e. WPCentral) do not respect the picture background
• The new Now Playing screen is horrible. They ruined what was awesome about Zune.
• No social network notifications in Me tile
• It's difficult to figure out how to pin settings to Action Center

 

[Jack Janik]

Also, no scrubbing.

 

[Francesco Savoini]

What I love:

• Text message search
• Cortana can play music
• InPrivate browsing
• Start Screen with third row
• tabs sync from Windows 8.1, works vice versa
• Reading view in IE

What I hate:

• Photos app shows recent photos not albums. I may not always want it to show my recent pictures...
  [*]Comma has been removed from keyboard
• Screenshot shortcut is different and difficult
• Some apps (i.e. WPCentral) do not respect the picture background
• The new Now Playing screen is horrible. They ruined what was awesome about Zune.
• No social network notifications in Me tile
• It's difficult to figure out how to pin settings to Action Center

You can find it in the advanced keyboard options

 

[Scott Boehler]

I live in the US and the phone has all the regional stuff correct, but I still do not have Cortana... (I have a Samsung ATIV Neo).. Any thoughts.

 

[Jack Janik]

I live in the US and the phone has all the regional stuff correct, but I still do not have Cortana... (I have a Samsung ATIV Neo).. Any thoughts.

Turn on location then hit the search button

 

[Scott Boehler]

Location was on and I hit search and still old Bing. Phone is up to date with 8.1 and I just checked settings and everything seems right..

 

[cbreze]

Was going to wait for Verizon's release of 8.1 then I heard all the complaining about issues and figured really should wait. NOT! Man am I glad I took the update plunge. This thing is smoother than ever on my icon. Really digging it. Like having a super tune up with tons of new options. Sweet!

 

[1raks1]

Simply awesome!!!,i am from india mumbai
i updated my lumia 720 and recovered nearly 3gb of other memory.i am also able to transfer my downloaded games to my 32gb san disk memory card and the card is class 4 type and therefore no class 6 or class 10 memory cards are required.

 

[Miska Hietala]

Works very nicely here on 1020. All transitions are faster and snappier. New features rocks and now just waiting for that store and Cortana for EU countries

Sent from my Nokia Lumia 1020 using Tapatalk for wp

 

[Miska Hietala]

Oh and ofc I'm waiting also for Nokia to release next firmware to support 8.1

Sent from my Nokia Lumia 1020 using Tapatalk for wp

 

[Miska Hietala]

Aaandd seems battery runs down slower than it did with 8.0 !

Sent from my Nokia Lumia 1020 using Tapatalk for wp

 

[Zeem Frostmaw]

Initial thoughts... mixed.

Good:
Xbox Music app is much better organised
Podcast app works perfectly, better than expected
Extra tile space and background images look great
Cortana Live Tile looks promising
Notification Center looks great
Overall transition effects make a nice change
Seems faster

Not so good:
Very underwhelming Cortana functionality as a UK user (as expected, but not to this extent)
Lag in Games hub, and clutter of games in App list
Facebook functionality in Messenger hub removed
No mobile data toggle in Notification Center
Not as many transparent-compatible tiles as I'd like...yet.

I'd say the good outweighs the bad, especially since it's clear Microsoft are still working on making Cortana work in the UK, though there's room for improvement all around. =) Removing Facebook from the messenger hub though...damn.

 

[bulls96]

Having a messaging live tile and messages on the action center seems redundant. Who else thinks that?

Sent from my Lumia Icon using Tapatalk

 

[aeschylus]

For those of you who might be interested, WP 8.1 runs rather poorly on my Nokia 520. Navigating the OS is generally quite a bit slower. It can take a few seconds to use apps that were previously more or less instantaneous (search, messaging, other "built in" apps) and being forced to use the new music app also makes playing music quite a pain as well. Although there had been rumors that the resume time for apps on 512 mb devices would be decreased, this does not seem to be the case at all. While all of the new features are nice, they come at the cost of a performance penalty, at least on the 520.

 

[vansiv]

Everything is fine and amazing, but and worried about battery. Just drained so fast. L920.

 

[Zeem Frostmaw]

Having a messaging live tile and messages on the action center seems redundant. Who else thinks that?

Paired with the message counter on the Lock Screen too, you have a fair point. I'll have to just see how things work in actual day-to-day practice once the notifications actually start coming in.

 

[Saksham Sharma]

For those of you who might be interested, WP 8.1 runs rather poorly on my Nokia 520. Navigating the OS is generally quite a bit slower. It can take a few seconds to use apps that were previously more or less instantaneous (search, messaging, other "built in" apps) and being forced to use the new music app also makes playing music quite a pain as well. Although there had been rumors that the resume time for apps on 512 mb devices would be decreased, this does not seem to be the case at all. While all of the new features are nice, they come at the cost of a performance penalty, at least on the 520.

very sad !! i was hoping that those rumours (though they were against common sense) were true. And i already knew the new music app was going to be a pain. But even search/messaging ? Very sad !
Do post after a day too, telling how it is going on, and whether it got faster or not.. (just hoping)

 

[Jack Janik]

The People Hub is useless now.. :'( One of my favorite parts of WP..