After months of delays and conflicting news finally 10 Windows Mobile was officially released for native devices as well Windows Phone 8.1 (not all of them, however, take a look at the article below to find out the list of supported terminals).
Preliminary information
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Windows 10 Mobile was born as yet another revolution Microsoft in the mobile sector, this time the goal is to effectively unify computers, smartphones and tablets with a mobile system that not only shares the name and graphic elements of its desktop brother, but that is able to run the new generation of multi-platform apps, the Universal App, which are already beginning to populate the Microsoft store.
There are many innovations introduced in this system, which seeks to reverse the course of the American company in the smartphone sector, where up to now there have been more flops than successes.
But what are the real potential of this system? Can Microsoft truly hope that Windows 10 Mobile can hook in numbers Android o iOS or is it now clear how its ecosystem is condemned to a minimal role in the mobile sector?
Let's take an overview of what Windows 10 Mobile offers the user.
Windows 10 Mobile: What's new
It was made to wait, it was made to be desired by many owners of older generation Lumia devices who were anxiously waiting for it, but now it is finally here among us for everyone, officially. So no longer a beta but a stable and complete release of everything, at least according to Microsoft's claims. But let's see what are the main novelties of this OS compared to the previous WP 8.1
1 - Notification Center
The notification center is the biggest news and improvement of this system, Microsoft finally gives up and follows the footprint traced by Android and taken up a couple of years ago even by Apple.
A notification center, in the form of a menu that descends from the top with a swipe, capable of keeping track of the alerts of the various applications and providing you with quick commands for Settings, Brightness, WiFi, Energy Saving and much more.
Yes, if you are thinking that it is a relative novelty, because in fact it is an exact re-proposal of the Android action bar, you are not wrong. But although not original, it remains a great and useful novelty.
2 – iOS Universal App & Porting
We have already talked about it in part before, but further investigation is necessary. Microsoft has finally figured out how the real Achilles heel of its mobile system is the poor quality of applications in its Store, and the small number of them. The choice (sensible in my personal opinion) was to create a new application design system that was unique to Windows 10 on the desktop and to Windows 10 Mobile.
In doing so, while waiting for the numbers of Windows 10 Mobile to go up, it is possible take advantage of the enormous popularity of Windows on desktops and laptops to market your application.
In addition, to further convince developers to consider its platform, Microsoft has launched the Project Islandwood, a system that allows you to easily and with few changes the porting of applications designed for iPhone directly on Windows 10 Mobile. Microsoft initially thought of doing the same thing with Android apps thanks to Project Astoria, however the latter was abruptly discontinued and seems to have no follow-up.
3 - Customizations
It took three editions of its mobile system to convince Microsoft that the interface Modern Design yes, it has its merits and its aesthetic values, but that a little customization does not hurt. And so here comes the live tile trasparenti but not only: from the settings, the Personalization section will allow you to act on the font size, on the basic system color (light or dark theme) and on the main colors to be assigned to the objects.
A series of small adjustments which, however, significantly improves the aesthetic impact of the system and which on the whole manage to make the use of the system more pleasant.
4 – Cortana
It has been present on PC for months, but now it officially arrives also on smartphones in a stable version. Cortana is the voice assistant who aims to fight against Crab and to beat it in its soil. The premises are excellent, the integration with the system is very good and Cortana also seems capable of responding to a good number of requests.
It will not change anyone's life, but it is a step forward in modernity also for the Microsoft system.
5 - Edge
This too you will have already known on PC, and also on Windows 10 Mobile it comes to take the place of the old one Internet Explorer. There isn't much to say about this browser, which is actually still quite bare and with few (none?) Interesting features. As on PC it is not free from bugs and serious shortcomings, but we will discuss these things in detail in the next section.
6 - New apps: Outlook, Calendar and Groove Music
Microsoft finally decided to develop a new email client that could keep up with its opponents. The new Outlook is a beautiful application, very versatile and professional. It is appreciated for its speed of use and for being one of the few applications to manage the animations of the live tile in a truly effective way.
At the same time, the Calendar was also updated, graphically improved and in the management of appointments.
Also appears Groove Music, the new pre-installed multimedia player. Graphically it has been renewed, however losing in part the originality of its predecessors and getting very close to its Android and iOS rivals.
7 – Continuum
We talk about it last because if you don't have a Lumia 950 or an alternative top of the range, you will not be able to try it. A device with Windows 10 Mobile can easily be transformed into a desktop computer: just use the supplied base, which will be used to make USB and HDMI ports available for output and input, connect it to keyboard, mouse and screen, and you will have a reduced version of Windows 10 .
Unfortunately the x86 and x64 apps do not run yet, so no .exe files, but only the applications on the Store. However, the future is outlined and many are betting on the imminent arrival of a Surface Phone with processor Intel also capable of running these applications.
Windows 10: Pros and Cons
We talked about the news, but now it's time to really get to the heart of this "review".
Windows 10 Mobile is a breakthrough for Microsoft in its approach to mobile, and the benefits that users will be able to reap from this new revolution are several.
Universal Apps and Project Islandwood are two great possibilities to finally put the Microsoft Store in line with that of its competitors. Furthermore, the various improvements have definitively made Windows 10 Mobile a complete and alternative system to its competitors, no longer a particular system with serious shortcomings and few advantages.
News like Continuum are true revolutions in the mobile sector, albeit still under development, while the improvements made to the system in general make it much more efficient in daily use. The super performance of Windows 8.1 has been lost a bit, and thegraphic inconsistency reigns supreme - including apps designed for the old system, new apps for Windows 10 Mobile and others that derive from iOS - but this is the least of the problems.
Because we must also talk about the against: Microsoft has worked hard to make this operating system available and stable, but the results on many fronts are truly staggering.
The aforementioned Notification Center could only be defined as a bad copy of the one for android, not only reduced in the available options and customizations, but still with serious flaws. The apps designed for the previous version of the OS (the absolute majority) do not get along well with the notification center, so you will happen to receive multiple notifications from the same application and having to remove them one by one, because opening one will not cancel the others.
The integration of system apps such as Groove Music with the Notification Center is practically non-existent, Microsoft has chosen to integrate music apps with the volume control, however, making access to them much more inconvenient and in fact impossible to quickly terminate an application. multimedia except from the app itself.
Staying on Groove Music I can say that in my decades of experience with smartphones and presumed such I did not have never seen a worse integrated music player. Groove Music has bugs that make you regret the built-in player on my old Motorola V1075.
It is useless to make the graphical interface modern and beautiful if then at startup you have to wait seconds before the app is available to play a song, if the download of the covers is practically wrong, if there is no integrated iD3 Tag editor and if the app happily crashes when clicking on certain songs. Fortunately, there is no shortage of alternatives!
Widely insufficient too Edge: it was supposed to be the turning point browser, but if Explorer was paying for a bad name and a few too many slowdowns, Edge is not doing any better. It often happens that on certain pages the rendering suddenly goes crazy making it impossible to scroll or read.
The management of the cards is not at all comfortable e opening incognito mode takes too many steps. In general, it is by no means a browser up to the rivals' stock alternatives, and it is Microsoft itself to admit it implicitly, since Edge is practically presented as a beta still under development even on desktop.
The performance we have already said has deteriorated, but the real problem is the applications.
Those designed for WP 8.1 in fact do not give the best on this system at all, discounting longer startup and execution times (classic message "I am loading" of Whatsapp). Furthermore, having lost almost a year in the introduction of this system has only increased the qualitative and quantitative gap between the Microsoft Store and that of Google and Apple.
Conclusions
If you have a Windows 8.1 smartphone and are thinking of upgrading to Windows 10 Mobile, the advice is to to do it, the flaws are many but Microsoft is finally figuring out how to move to give its customers a basic system that matches its rivals.
If you are an Android or Apple user undecided whether to take the plunge, the advice is do not do it. To date, Windows 10 Mobile is far behind the two systems already mentioned, the vaunted speed of the Microsoft system even on low-end terminals has been defeated by the arrival of new truly exceptional Android terminals (the various Moto E, Moto G and again Huawei , Honor ...), and if among the top of the range the Galaxy S7 are also struggling against the giant iPhone, for Microsoft devices the game is lost at the start.
What is missing is above all good support from third-party developers, the conditions for a change of course are there, the arrival in recent weeks of Instagram Beta (which looks more like an Alpha version) and the beautiful new client Twitter give hope on the platform, but the absence of apps like Facebook (there are apps designed by Microsoft, which are not comparable to the official apps for other OSes) and good browsers in the long run makes itself felt.
The problem of the Windows 10 Mobile platform is Microsoft itself, the continuous changes of direction (from Mobile 6.5 to Windows 7, the break with Windows Phone 8 and then this revolution with W10M) do not create the ideal conditions for the development of this platform. The absence of killer app o killer features it is then evident, there is no real reason to prefer Microsoft to Google or Apple, even if the company's future strategies with the rumored Surface Phone could upset the market as Microsoft itself did on the tablet segment with the successful 2-in-1 revolution that began with the Surface.
To date, Windows 10 Mobile is therefore a good system us many gaps and few or no reasons to be preferred to opponents. But the future prospects are there, we just have to wait and see if the many new features of this OS will actually be able to reverse the course of the Microsoft boat on mobile, or not.
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