Hands on: Windows 10 Mobile Build 10080 leaps forward in productivity, fun - michaelslanxim

Microsoft's Windows 10 Build 10080 for phones finally feels more look-alike a phone, rather than a development platform.

Unlike Build 10051, Windows 10 feels much snappier. Once you download the apps you want (Bureau! Xbox! Music!) from the Windows Store, the experience actually feels rather welcoming. Not all of your apps carry over, and there are some rather minatory bugs. But otherwise, Build 10080 reassures you that Windows 10 for phones—sorry, Windows 10 Mobile!—precisely power work later on all.

As Microsoft same originally on Thursday, the make supports the new worldwide Government agency apps: Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. (The "OneNote" app available in the Computer memory is actually the Prevue reading of the app.)

After work, you can relax with the Music Preview and Video Preview apps, then join with your Xbox Live friends via the Xbox app. Microsoft has also added a new Photographic camera app, using the Lumia Camera overlay that can be found in some Lumia phones. You send away download them all from a new beta app of the Microsoft Store.

We downloaded the new shape onto a Lumia 830. As ever, be wary of using your primary phone: One of the known bugs involves losing text messages if your living thing data is inside-out off.

The new app stack away: Reasonably lacking

Microsoft's new frame adds a new app store, known as Fund (Beta). It's a universal app, meaning Microsoft designed it to flow crossways the obtainable blank of phones and PCs.

I'm not a fan. The store positions a play up app along high and so provides several slippy menus that allow you to scroll through various app categories, personalized picks, and overstep apps. While the app's design rewards exploration (you can slide across and down to reveal more content) at that place's very little to guide the middle toward the most important features. There's also no context given to what the spotlighted app, Monument Vale,is: a game? A travel app?

Mark Hachman

A bit much circumstance would meliorate the Store (Beta) app greatly.

The store offers and so little explanation, you're left to wander through a magic-square puzzle of sliding app icon tiles, without even the barest indication of what they are. At this point, Microsoft's early Store app does a importantly better lin of promoting app discovery.

The new Office Preview apps: Utile, simply awkward

With limitations along how you could open and edit documents, Microsoft's Office Mobile apps are a bit of a pain. The new Office Preview apps depict the potential, simply at that place's a ways to fit.

The Position preview apps launch later on a short series of introductory sideswipe screens, demonstrating, for example, how to set an embedded figure happening the page. Pay attention: I rushed through and through them, and as a result I struggled with adjusting the images. Spell the preview apps ask for an Office 365 subscription, they'll allow you to make up and edit documents without one, seamlessly connecting to your OneDrive to draw ou recent documents.

Mark Hachman

Certain elements of the apps need about work, but they're standing better than the Office Mobile found on Windows Phone 8.

Having used Office for the iPad (or Humanoid), I still prefer that experience. On the Lumia 830, basic redaction worked well. But when I time-tested to readapt an image on the page, I either ended upwards distorting it or misaligning it in such a way that I simply gave up after a few tries. And like the iPad app, school tex editing can feel clumsy: To replace a word, for example takes six stairs: Play up it, pull up a bottom "eclipsis" card, click Find, go equal to the top of the covert, dawn the gear icon (the settings menu),then match the word (or case, or even homonyms). Whew!

If you don't want to type A transition, you can always dictate it using the speech recognition that was baked into an earlier version of the Windows 10 OS. It seemed to work better in Build 10054, though.

Combined distinction about OneNote: you buns replay recordings that you've made antecedently, but only through with the Music Preview app. Other, you can creates lists or other notes, Beaver State edit present versions.

Would I desire to usance the Preview apps to make a final-minute change in a presentation? Only information technology involved text, I'm afraid.

Xbox app: Quite an polished

If you've used the Xbox app in the desktop version of Windows 10, you'll feel right at home. The app defaults to a list of clips, posts, and achievements posted by your friends, although you can also dig through your recent list of Xbox Live Achievements. About the exclusive matter I had trouble doing was connecting to the Xbox One itself, seated few feet away connected the synoptic wireless network.

Scrape Hachman

The Xbox app feels like a finished intersection.

The Television camera app: Lumia Camera, repurposed

With the various photographic camera apps that Microsoft and Nokia have thrown at consumers over the years, you'd be forgiven if they blurred together. But the new Camera app you can download is the quick-launching code that's in the new Denim/Lumia Camera combination, with that overlay as well. Clicking the wand image shifts the camera into HDR musical mode.

Mark Hachman

Microsoft's Tv camera app is a pleasure to use.

Music Preview shows fewer seams than Video Preview

Most streaming media aficionados already have their favourite services and have stuck with them for a year or 2. The same goes for downloadable movie services like Amazon Prime. With its cardinal Trailer apps, even so, Microsoft does a plausible job of luring customers back.

Medicine Preview allows you to upload your own music into a dedicated Music folder in OneDrive. That calm seamlessly meshes with songs you bought via the Xbox Euphony religious service or downloaded for disentangled. Once you open the app, your music begins syncing. I detected the app wouldn't react to button presses on occasion, especially when information technology was syncing music in the background.

Mark Hachman

Microsoft's Music Preview for Windows 10 Mobile.

The only John Roy Major bug I encountered in this fles was the Lumia 830's flat refusal to play back any audio with the phone's built-in speakers. When headphones were siamese, audio played back as expected. I don't recall disagreeable to replay music with previous builds, so I can't say for certain whether the new build introduced a pester.

As reader Viacheslav Shargorodskyi asks below: no, there's still no Calendar app, and Cortana is only present as a search tool. The The great unwashe app remains unchanged from the last build, overly.

What I saw of Video Preview didn't feel A seamless and flexible as Music Preview. Extraordinary feature I'd equal to assure, for instance, is the power to pull down videos I've personally listed and stored in OneDrive. The app too gently prods you to visit the online Xbox TV store, whose blah layout still feels like an uncaring 16-class-old is manning the till. Still, at to the lowest degree it feels a little more directed than the build's beta app store.

Build 10080 is a important, sure, but the differences in look and feel across its parts make information technology feel even more patchworked. Three vividness schemes wend their means through Windows 10 Mobile: the vibrant, tiled approach of the Start screen; the generally minimalist, dark default settings of the app screens, and the stark plainness of the app depot. My advice is to go into the settings menu and alter the "dark" connive to the "light" backclot. The phone feels a bit more cheery afterward, and there's a visual bridge to the app fund layout. But we still need greater body between the Start screen and the rest of the sound. Microsoft should at least consider using the Start screen's background image crossways the settings and apps menus—or failing that, at the least take into account colored backgrounds.

Nevertheless, the most recent build felt much enjoyable to use than any previous version. With build 10080, you keister begin to construe Microsoft pushing Windows 10 Nomadic closer to the launch digs.

Edited at 1:16 PM connected May 15 to note that the OneNote app available in the Windows Store is actually the Prevue version of the app.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/427468/hands-on-windows-10-mobile-build-10080-leaps-forward-in-productivity-fun.html

Posted by: michaelslanxim.blogspot.com

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