A first look at the Windows 10 Technical Preview for phones

Microsoft released the first preview of Windows 10 for phones a few hours ago. A lot of Windows Phone users won't be able to try it out, though, because the preview is only supported on a limited number of devices right now.

Fortunately, we have some suitable phones to hand—I was using a Lumia 830—and have been taking a look at the preview.

We start with the Start screen. It presents a mix of the old and the new. The concept remains the same as ever, but we've got two new tile sizes, the large square and the single width double height tile, to create even more scope for flexible layouts. The handling of background images has changed, too. In Windows Phone 8.1, tiles that use the theme color can be made transparent, punching through to a background image, which has a subtle parallax scrolling effect. In 10, theme-colored tiles merely go slightly translucent, with a conventional background image behind them all. Sadly, the old approach is no longer an option, which I think is a pity, as it was far more visually striking.

The all apps view has a couple of changes. First, to ensure legibility against the new style backgrounds, it has a pale background. Second, it has a new "Recently Installed" area at the top that automatically shows newly-installed apps. Annoyingly, and I hope it's just an oversight at the moment, pressing "back" from the all apps view doesn't return to the Start screen.

Long pressing items on the all apps view shows another change; context menus look different. Their fonts are larger, and the menus no longer fill the full width of the screen. To my eye, they look rather uglier than they do in Windows Phone 8.

The notification and quick access area has been slightly revised. Notifications in general seem to have a handle to expand them (though I'm not sure this does anything at the moment), and the quick access area in the notification center can now be expanded to show more than four (or five, for large screen phones) items at a time. I saw some visual glitching, with fragments of the quick access buttons showing up when they shouldn't.

Windows 10 and Windows 10 for phones make Microsoft's Universal Apps—programs that run with minimal modifications on tablets, smartphones, PCs, and one day even the Xbox—an essential part of the platform, with even core operating system features now being written as Universal Apps. We're still waiting for many of them to materialize, one of the most important ones that we can use is Settings.

Settings were a weak point of Windows Phone, with a long list of options presented in no particular order. In the new app, they're still in no particular order, but there is at least an attempt to impose a grouping structure on them, with a two-level hierarchy.

At the moment, however, this is very much a work in progress. While the app's top level is clear enough, drill down, and you're left with the same old random lists of unrelated options (with random variations in capitalization, too). Drill into an actual setting applet and it's even more inconsistent. Some settings applets are lifted directly from Windows Phone 8, with its traditional large white text on black background presentation. Others use the new style, with smaller type and white backgrounds (regardless of the phone's theme colors). But some of these, such as the Cortana settings, are plainly unfinished, with ugly layouts and faulty type sizes.

It's a little concerning. While Microsoft hopes to have all settings using the new style by the time of release, the company has always had something of a problem with control panel applets. Desktop Windows 10 has no fewer than three different styles of applet ("classic" tabbed dialog boxes, the Explorer-integrated settings used for things like networking, and the new Settings app), and I'd hate to see that same mess of variations come to Windows Phone.

Cortana is another Universal App. Her functionality seems to be largely the same as it is in Windows Phone 8. The presentation, however, is different. She's a little more proactive: search for a thing she understands, such as a flight number, and she'll immediately offer a structured result. The information she shows you is also easier to customize: each entry has a little "..." to allow you to customize it or tell her that you're not interested.

Her entire presentation is a little unsatisfactory. As with other parts of the operating system, she no longer respects the theme color (she's always a black-on-white app) and her buttons are all a little ugly.

We can't see all the new keyboard features on the currently supported hardware. But we can see the stylistic updates—keys like shift and backspace are now a different color from the main alphanumeric buttons—and the new cursor feature. Press and hold the dot and arrows to control the position of the insertion point appear. It's a very neat addition.

 

File Explorer is a new built-in app for browsing the files you have on the phone. I suspect this app would really come into its own with an SD card installed, allowing files to be copied to and from the removable media.

The other notable Universal App is Photos. This is extremely similar to the Photos app in the Windows 10 preview (indeed, that's rather the point of Universal Apps), just laid out for the phone. It includes some simple editing features and shows basic image metadata. It also, for no good reason, has a settings pane that looks quite unlike anything else on the operating system. Why we need a new style of toggle switch isn't clear to me, but there certainly shouldn't be two different styles.

This preview is clearly quite early, with many parts unfinished and un-updated. We don't have the new Office apps, or the new integrated Skype and SMS app, for example. I think it's rather too early to use this on a daily driver phone. Picking up a cheap Lumia 635 at the Microsoft store is, for the time being, perhaps the best way to kick the tires of the preview.