Windows 10 Mobile: An update

Even though my previous post was only published 6 days ago, it was written a week before that so I’ve now got 3 weeks of usage under my belt and felt the need to post an update. The biggest issue I’ve encountered over the last few weeks, and which I forgot to incude in the previous post, was battery life. This was suffering quite a bit in diaily use to the point where regular use of email, Readit, Facebook and Twitter was rendering the battery dead before dinner time. To combat this, I reduced the telemtry levels down which seemed to have no effect. I was on the verge of quitting my bold experiment and retreating back to WP8.1 when Readit released an update with improved performance which also seems to have solved my battery problems, so it seems the issues weren’t with the OS itself, just a single app. It’s a poignant lesson about how a single regularly used app can uniwttingly completely alter your perspective of a platform.

My other issue, which I did highlight in my prevous post is performance. I’m glad to say that shortly after that post, this seemed to spontaneously improve dramatically. There were no new builds in this time period, I don’t know if there was some indexing going on that was taking an age to complete and was chomping CPU cycles, but all seems well now. I think the aforementioned performance issues in Readit may have also played a part in my negative impressions.

I am still loving the ability to reply to a text without unlocking. My security concerns aside, it is really convenient!

I’ve just started working on my first app, a basic music/podcast playing app with Band control integration (as MS have deemed to only update Band 2 with music controls, not Band 1, I’m doing my own!) While the model is quite different to what I am used to as a Win32 desktop and Web developer, it is quite consistent and I’m slowly starting to get my head around things. Debugging my app on the physical phone has been completely painless, although I wish I could say the same about using the emulator!

Just 3 days ago, I was seriously contemplating going back to 8.1. I am glad to say that I am now pretty happy with WM10. It’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft keep the same pace of development with WM10 after release as they have with Windows 10 desktop, of if they repeat their previous mistake of releasing a new version and then dropping focus and putting their efforts in somewhere else.

Realistically, MIcrosoft are never going to unseat Android and IOS from the 1 and 2 spots, but there is still a chance of carving a decent market share as a third-player, but only if they don’t screw it up again. This is their chance to waste, I hope they don’t.

About Alan Parr