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Microsoft Windows Mobile 10: Uphill battle with 'work in progress'

Build 10581 on the block

Other positives

Power drain is now close to Windows 8.1 levels.

Note that to make full use of the much vaunted ‘Continuum’ feature, allowing the phone to serve as a surrogate PC, it is only available on new hardware; existing devices only permit display mirroring.

The Bad ... and The Ugly

Messaging and PIM: The collapse of BlackBerry and successful commoditisation of Exchange as a standard should have given Microsoft a significant advantage, but it’s failed to grasp it.

The Windows Phone 8.1 email client was rudimentary, but in real life use performs far better than the Windows 10 Mobile application tested here. The current WP8.1 version allows the rapid processing of multiple messages across accounts, whiled unread or flagged messages could be isolated using a simple sideways swipe gesture.

The current Windows Phone allows accounts to be aggregated in a unified inbox. It enabled richer workflows by specifying the synchronisation of an Exchange or IMAP folder. All this has been lost in the move to a “unified” email client across Windows 10, which on Mobile represents a significant step backwards.

Strangely, this build allows you to pin individual accounts to the Start screen, but these don't “resolve” to the specific account. The live tile for a pinned account will show email from any of the accounts. It’s a cosmetic trick that fails to convince.

More worryingly, Exchange failed to deliver mail for hours until being prodded to do so via the manual sync button.

For some 900 million Exchange users worldwide, iOS, Blackberry and Android offer much more mature third-party clients than either Microsoft’s own Windows 10 mobile client, or its clients on other platforms. The rapid rise in adoption of Slack suggests that businesses are keen to try alternatives to email, and Microsoft is experimenting with innovative “garage” messaging alternatives of its own such as Send.

But Microsoft can’t afford to continue supplying a third-rate experience. The company has not bought wisely, a third-rate experience is now standard across all its mobile platforms.

Bugs: The current build significantly accelerates some of the transition effects that have plagued Windows 10 Mobile testers all year, giving the impression of a more mature product.

However even after a full wipe and restore, the system feels far from finished. The start screen consistently crashes (blanking and then restoring its contents) a couple of times a minute. Transitions also seem haphazard: the smooth resizing of tiles has been replaced by a laggy and jerky experience.

More worryingly, key apps such as Messaging appear half finished.

Imaging: Even after a full wipe and restore, imaging was a poor experience. Eventually (see Store section) the phone replaced the Lumia camera with a new camera app. The results were muddy, and shortcuts failed to open any camera app at all. The Photo app is more ambitious, defaulting to the OneDrive camera roll in the cloud. It will be harder for novices to find images taken on the phone.

Store: The test device took almost two days to complete the installation of requested applications. Some inexplicably were never installed, but the Store server replaced them with an alternative. This represents an improvement over earlier builds which never completed installing key applications at all.

Visual Coherence: Windows 10 Mobile appears a work-in-progress, riddled with visual inconsistencies and strange choices. The typography-inspired Windows Phone 7 design uses text labels as buttons, and this still applies throughout Windows 10 too. However, there are many situations where it isn’t apparent that the text is “actionable”. Conversely there are “actionable” items which because of bugs, don’t perform any actions.

The most criticised of the design choices is “Hamburger menus”, which put important menu items out of reach, with no swipe option as on Android. On practice many small details have been changed for no apparent reason.

Many of the metaphors have been broken; apps “zoom” in when started, rather than flip, implying that there’s a depth layer. The use of circles instead of squares is also odd, when the system is largely defined by rectangular furniture. Windows 10 Mobile adopts the wireframe icons of the “full fat” version in many places (the Action Centre) but not others (Tiles and Icons).

Build 10581: the Verdict

Windows 10 Mobile is not only a work in progress, and a rough one, but a surprisingly amateurish experience. Microsoft has set very ambitious goal of converging upon a universal code base and a universal API. But it has compromised its user experience because the needs of users, on mobile and PC, remain very different.

Microsoft has pushed Windows 10 very aggressively at PC users, even apologising for being heavy handed. If it attempts such tactics with mobile users it may regret it. Mobile devices, more than desktops, are expected to “just work”, and the bugs here such as failing to fetch email fall into the show-stopper category.

Microsoft has been pushing "Mobile First and Cloud First" as its corporate mantra for some 18 months. Only part of that commitment has borne fruit. If rapid improvements are not made then Microsoft, which is already far behind iOS and Android, risks falling even further behind.

It's hard to see that happening; with code of this quality, the company should seriously consider whether it needs to be developing a Mobile version of Windows at all. ®

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