A Look At Windows 10 For Phones

Windows 10 phone OS features

Microsoft released the phone version of Windows 10 preview recently, and made it available for free using the Windows Insider app. But don’t get too excited; this is still supported only on a handful of phone models.

One of these is the Lumia 830, and so we tried out the OS on that. First thing checked was the Start screen of course, because there’s no Start button in the Windows 10 phone version. Here everything is pretty much the same as in Windows Phone, except now you have two new tile sizes added to the mix. This makes layout customization a dream, using the single and double height tiles.

The background management has got a few modifications as well. In the older OS, you had a theme color which could be adjusted to transparency settings, and see the parallax scrollable background image. In the new iteration, you have a stationary image and translucent theme colors. It bears noting that the older settings were better to look at.

There are also changes in the All Apps view. The background stays pale to avoid legibility issues, plus you now have a "Recently Installed" area near the top, which lists the newest installations. One problem we noticed – hopefully it’ll be fixed before the final build arrives – hitting "back" at All Apps screen doesn’t take you to Start.

The other change is apparent when you long-press an item inside the app view. You notice that the context menus are different from before, in that they have larger fonts while taking up less of the screen. But frankly it looks ridiculous compared to what they put in Windows Phone 8.

Notifications have a handle which looks like an option to expand them, although this seems to be useless in the Windows 10 preview. The Quick Access area has around five items, but there are glitches in the visuals.

Windows 10 phone OS Preview 

Settings were another point of weakness in Windows Phone 8, with a seemingly indefinite list of items listed in no discernible order. That hasn’t changed here, although they seem to have at least imposed some sort of grouping method.

No matter how good it all looks on the surface, the deeper you go, the more problems you’ll see. Apps have the same type of unrelated options listed close by, and random capitalization among these. Some of the apps use a different visual style, while others seem to have been picked directly off the older OS. This is clearly a very early OS Build version.