Back in February we took a look at the first preview release of Windows 10 for phones and deemed it to be quite a mess. Mostly we had to forgive Microsoft for the awful design, inconsistencies, usability problems, and lack of features because it was an early preview release and they’re still working on it. Well, if you thought that was bad, wait until you see the latest version that was just released on April 10th! (You can read about the known issues in Microsoft’s blog.) Again, it’s a preview release so we have to give some forgiveness for the unfinished state still, but things are supposed to get better not worse as you move through the development cycle preparing for release. We installed this build on a Nokia Lumia 635 and the biggest problem is that initially Cortana was nowhere to be found (requiring a hard reset), but we’ve also seen an increase in stability problems. There are a lot of other changes though, most of which involve replacing the nicely-integrated Windows Phone 8 versions of apps with segregated “universal apps” that should match up with full desktop Windows 10 apps. So in this article we’re going to take a look at what’s new and give you a good look at some of the feedback we think Microsoft should be considering as they develop this new mobile operating system. We’ll also point out how many of the great Windows Phone features that you know and love may be getting thrown out.
Outlook Mail
Instead of the old fully-integrated beautifully-designed easy-to-understand email system that Windows Phone 7-8.1 included, Windows 10 has a new “universal app” version of Outlook. All of the awesome features of Windows Phone’s email app are now gone. There are no more live tiles at all. Live tiles for separate email accounts are gone, live tiles for specific email folders are gone, grouping of email accounts is gone. You can no longer link email accounts into a universal inbox if you wanted to. All of the things that made Windows Phone’s email experience really innovative, unique and useful have been removed.
The new Outlook Mail app’s interface is very inconsistent too… even within itself. When you open an email by tapping it, you get a series of unintelligible icons at the top. The design of these icons is not consistent with anything Microsoft has done on any of its other platforms nor competing platforms, so you can expect a learning curve. They’re not labeled either, so you won’t be able to instantly understand them. (The best icon is a text label.) I can imagine my mom staring at all those curly arrows for 15 minutes trying to find the word “reply” and still having no idea what they mean. Microsoft did implement a hidden “tool tip” feature where if you hold your thumb down on an icon, a text label will pop-up under the icon so that you can read what it is. Unfortunately, the text only shows up if your finger is pressing down on the screen thereby completely covering the text and blocking your ability to see and read the potentially helpful information. User interface designs don’t get much worse than that.
Now if you make a new email, there’s a completely different set of completely different icons at the bottom. Even the trashcan icon is different even though it should probably have the same function. Luckily there’s a familiar ellipses button in the bottom right. Normally this would pop-up a menu that shows labels for those icons so that you can easily figure out what they mean. That would be the smart way to do it at least. Unfortunately, the ellipses “…” button in Outlook Mail does not behave consistently with the rest of the operating system and apps. Instead it pops-up a different kind of menu that has a secondary pop-up menu at the upper left for switching between “ribbon” categories. The buttons that were there before actually disappear. Confused yet?
It gets worse, the back button doesn’t work within Outlook Mail. If you open an email, navigate to a different program momentarily, and then go back to Outlook Mail, you will have no way to get back to the main listing of emails or do anything other than look at that email. Sometimes there’s a back button at the top left though, which makes no sense because: A. you can’t reach it there, and B. the phone already has a back button at the bottom. Speaking of bad button placement, the “new email” button is in the upper right corner of the interface. It’s not labeled, so you won’t know this right away either, and it’s about the furthest away from you fingers that it could possibly be while holding the phone. If using email on a mobile device wasn’t already difficult enough, this adds insult to injury. By the way, draft emails still don’t sync to/from email servers, nor do reply/forward status tags sync properly on IMAP servers. Yeah, Microsoft still doesn’t have the basics down after making mobile email programs for over 15 years. There isn’t an option to turn off conversation view either, and it doesn’t combine threads properly. The app doesn’t even use the phone’s theme color/background settings. It’s all white with blue accents instead of my preferred phone-wide colors and it looks horrible especially when the keyboard is visible (which does adhere to my system theme colors). Maybe this is Outlook’s new “branding”, but listen Microsoft, my phone should use the colors that I chose.
It’s not all bad though, there are some awesome new features we’ve been waiting years to see. Outlook Mail finally includes extensive rich text formatting capabilities that uses the Microsoft Word rendering engine. While HTML email designers may consider that horrible news (due to Word’s unpredictable behavior when it comes to rendering HTML), it’s pretty awesome news for anyone who has ever wanted to add a hyperlink to some text, add a table, create a real list, or make headings that actually look like headings in an email.
Horizontal swiping gestures no longer switch between email list sorting options (unread, flagged, etc.) Now they can be set to have specific functions applied to the email message you’re swiping. This gives you one quick action to quickly delete, flag, move, or read/unread toggle individual emails. I appreciate the faster flagging capability, but we’re missing the ability to flag with reminders that sync with Exchange. Flagged emails don’t show up in the task list like they do on the desktop because there is no task list. I don’t care about the swipe-to-delete feature because if I have to delete emails manually, that means my email management rules are not working as well as they should. If I get an email in my Inbox that I want to delete, I’ll edit one of my server-side rules to accommodate it automatically in the future. Outlook Mail on Windows Phone doesn’t allow me to edit rules like that though. There isn’t even a “mark as junk” button.
Outlook Calendar
The old Calendar app from Windows Phone 8.1 has been replaced, too. It’s actually accessible from within Outlook Mail now too if you can find it. Unfortunately, it’s integration with the operating system is almost completely broken. Appointments don’t show on the live tile anymore, they don’t show on the lock screen, and I don’t know if it works with Cortana anymore because Cortana is completely absent on my Lumia 635 after the upgrade. (Post-hard-reset-update: It doesn’t work with Cortana.) My Facebook calendar is gone too. That’s a huge disappointment, but not as much of a disappointment as the fact that the location field for appointments no longer links to maps. It doesn’t autocomplete locations with addresses anymore, too. Addresses typed into the notes fields don’t link to maps either. Nor do phone numbers link to the phone dialer!
Oddly, there are only two views; Day and Agenda. No more week or month or year views. This makes trying to quickly navigate to a specific date sometime in the future extremely difficult. What once took a few taps now takes an endless amount of scrolling through the days. Tasks are gone again by the way. We fought to get those into Windows Phone 7 so that we could have some minor ability to manage personal & work projects on the go, but that ability might be gone in Windows 10.
Appointment notifications are different now. They’re no longer the unique ones that were in Windows Phone 8, they’re more consistent with the notifications for all other apps. That could be a good thing except for the fact that the notifications are no longer persistent (they disappear after a few seconds), and you can no longer snooze, dismiss, or edit them with one tap. You have to tap the notification, wait for the calendar app to load, and then you can modify the appointment with a few more taps into the menu. It’s quite a bit more difficult than it used to be.
People
For some reason, the new People app is not part of Outlook like you would think it should be. It’s a totally new design that removes the nice panoramic pivots and goes with three tabs at the top that you can swipe through. The display area for your contacts listing has been reduced to only showing about 4 names at a time and everybody’s contact photo has been cropped in a circle! This is ridiculous since people don’t post circular photos of themselves on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or anywhere else. Okay, maybe they do it on Google Plus, but that doesn’t make it right. Microsoft’s insisting on the circular crops often cuts out important parts of my friends’ profile photos too. It looks horrible. Opening a contact card sometimes works and when it does it uses the phone’s theme foreground color as the background and the circular profile image becomes larger and even-more obviously a poor design decision. On the bright side, if you pin a contact to the start screen, their profile picture returns to the proper square shape and you can see it again! Woo hoo!
The “What’s New” social networking aspect of the people hub is still there and the 3rd pivot tab is groups. Previous groups that you may have made in Windows Phone 8 don’t seem to show up here, nor do people groups created in Exchange 2013, nor do people group rooms created in Office 365. Contact sorting and organization hasn’t been improved either; the people app still doesn’t recognize contact categories in Exchange, you can’t sort by company name, or location. The alphabetical letters for jumping to different sections are now centered but they no longer work. You can’t tap the letter A and then tap the letter P to jump to that point in the list. That’s probably something that hasn’t been implemented yet, just as the “showing” filter hasn’t been implemented yet.
Messaging
The app used for text messaging is being replaced now too. Right now, it doesn’t have any new functions besides simple SMS conversations, although the call contact function has become much more prominent as a button at the bottom. It loses a very important feature though… integration with Cortana for 100% hands-free SMS conversations. Incoming text messages can no longer be read out loud by the speech UI and you can’t tell it to “read it” and subsequently tell it to “reply” and dictate your response. Hopefully that feature is being rebuilt as something that can work with ALL types of notifications. In Windows Phone 8.1, the 100% hands-free UI only worked with SMS messaging, but in earlier versions of the messaging app it also worked with Facebook chat and MSN Messenger. That was a hugely important feature for me. This new messaging app should eventually include support for extensibility that would enable the integration of Skype instant messaging. We can hope that other instant messaging apps might be able to integrate with it as well. And we can also hope that the new messaging app will sync SMS conversations with other Windows 10 desktop PCs and tablets associated with your account.
Maps
The new maps app has been completely redesigned as a Universal App as well. It’s meant to include voice guided GPS navigation along with offline maps and all of the other functions you might need a mapping app for. It does use my preferred theme accent color, but not its background color… until I switch to “aerial” map view! In aerial map view, the app switches to a dark background. That’s pretty odd… it should just use my theme settings all the time. The whole reason we have theme settings is for user experience consistency. (They’re the best thing to happen to Android, too.) Hopefully this gets fixed and they can add an automatic night mode because that bright white background and bright map is going to be very distracting while driving at night.
The awesome “Local Scout” feature is gone, so if you want an easy way to find things that are close to you, you’re out of luck. The awesome Facebook integration which would tell you which of your friends actually like or have been to specific locations near you is nowhere to be found either. You’ll have to type search terms in order to find anything. Locations still appear with ratings from Yelp though and tapping a location name gives you extra photos, Yelp reviews, a directions button, and a phone call button. You can’t Copy/Paste a location address/phone number, but there is a “share” command in the ellipses menu. Yes, the app has both a hamburger menu and an ellipses menu which is awfully confusing. Why can’t we put all of the “more” commands in one place? That made so much more sense on Windows Phone 7-8. You’ll see some mystery icons in location contact cards too; a star, three sperm swimming in a circle, and an Oscar award statue. The Oscar award statue icon brings up a pop-up menu where you can select a number of other location category names such as “Eat+Drink, Shop, Banks, etc.” What do those have to do with Pizzaria Unos? Confused yet? Turns out that button will generate a new list of locations that are near the currently selected location.
Project Spartan
While Internet Explorer is still part of this preview build, a new web browser is also available. Project Spartan is the intended successor to Internet Explorer and it’s being built as a Universal Windows App. It launches quick enough and loads web pages nicely, though it doesn’t remember open tabs between sessions and its new user interface design is a huge step backwards compared to Internet Explorer.
Most importantly, the URL address bar, refresh button, and reading mode commands are now at the top of the screen… completely out-of-reach for one-handed usability. The bottom bar has nothing but the ellipses menu icon and a large grey area that simply blocks your view of the website. In fact, the readable area of the website has been greatly reduced with this new UI. Another new UI problem is the lack of a “Copy” button when selecting text. There is a “Share” button in the ellipses menu, but it doesn’t work at the moment. You can also tap & hold images to “share picture”, but it only sends a link to the image. You can’t save the images anymore. Yes, it’s still a work in progress, but so far it feels like a major step back.
Cortana
When I first upgraded the Lumia 635 to this build of Windows 10, Cortana was nowhere to be found. The search button did nothing, there was nothing in the app list, and the settings would not launch. After a hard reset, all was well though. Cortana hasn’t changed much at all since February’s build other than losing the SMS read-aloud and reply support. So that’s a bit disconcerting. It still uses a bright white background and blue links (it should use my theme preferences), and it still doesn’t perform phone-related searches properly. In fact, it barely does any kind of searching as I often couldn’t get the listening mode to understand anything. Windows Phone 8.1’s version of Cortana is much more feature-rich and useful at this point.
Camera
Microsoft’s camera app brings some more Lumia-camera-like features such as the cool radial sliders for manual controls, but it loses the most innovative and useful feature ever; touch to capture. Now touching the screen ONLY sets the focus point instead of also taking a picture, which was such a genius and simple feature. The awesome swipe gesture for accessing the camera roll and the ability to zoom out into the camera roll view is also gone and the switchable software-based camera lenses are buried in the settings. So yeah, we’re gaining nice manual controls for the Pros, but losing everything that was great about the old one. The camera app does launch much more quickly than the Lumia Camera though, but I can’t find the old settings area where you could specify the default camera app.
The photos app hasn’t been improved much since the last preview build in February. We still have a mainly useless hamburger button in the upper left, and the ellipses menu in the upper right that does not behave like a normal ellipses menu. It still does not show “favorite” photos which used to recognize star ranking metadata in photos copied from your desktop PC. OneDrive integration is sort of there, except you can’t access different folders anymore. Facebook and Twitter integration has been completely removed.
Phone
The phone dialer hasn’t been improved or fixed since the February preview build. Goofy looking tabs are still at the top of the screen which makes one-handed dialing extremely frustrating and difficult. There’s no smart dialing like Microsoft had back in 2003 either, though we heard some rumors that that might be coming back.
Office
If you read Microsoft’s blog post linked to in the first paragraph here, you’ll notice that going into this build of the Windows 10 for phones preview that there is no more Office hub or OneNote app. Those are presumably going to be replaced with Universal Windows app versions of the Office programs.
Conclusion
This latest build of Windows 10 for phones is the next step in a progression towards rebuilding all of the integrated features of Windows Phone as segregated apps that can run on phones as well as larger tablets, desktop PCs, and even the Xbox. That sounds great and all, but we’re losing just about all of the award winning design aspects and beautifully innovative features that differentiated Windows Phone from the other smartphone operating systems out there. Are universal Windows apps that work across such a large variety of Microsoft devices really going to be that great if they’re universally difficult to use and even lacking in functionality?
By the way, if you’ve got the Windows 10 for phones preview installed, be sure to use the “Windows Feedback” app that comes preinstalled to send your concerns and issues to Microsoft. If you don’t have the preview installed, you can also add your comments to the Windows Phone User Voice site.
Originally published on Pocketnow on April 13, 2015. More from the Pocketnow archive.