Ars Technica's Peter Bright Reviews Windows Phone 8.1 ...
... which is a very big (huge) leap forward for a point release. Peter's one of the better smart phone reviewers and this piece is very good. I've left out most of the excellent graphics and videos contained in the original which can be accessed at the link below.
>> Windows Phone 8.1 review: A magnificent smartphone platform
It's a 0.1 update that feels like a 2.0 update.
Peter Bright
Ars Technica
April 14 2014
arstechnica.com
For the growing number of Windows Phone users, Windows Phone 8 was a frustrating release. The major difference between Windows Phone 7.5 and Windows Phone 8 was invisible to end users: merely a kernel swap, going from Windows CE to Windows NT.
Strategically, this was tremendously important for Microsoft. The company is on a trajectory to have a common operating system core across phones, tablets, desktops, and TVs (with the Xbox One console), enabling developers to have substantially the same code running across all these different systems.
But being strategically important doesn't really matter a whole lot to end users. As we noted at the time, Windows Phone 8 was a solid and usable smartphone platform, but it lacked any big headline features. It made lots of things a bit better, but didn't do anything to really convince people to give the platform a second look.
Moreover, Windows Phone 8 was but a stepping stone toward this future vision. Although it offered a few APIs in common with Windows 8—and there were techniques for sharing code between the two—for the most part, developers had to write two substantially different applications if they wanted to run on both platforms. Back then, Microsoft wasn't really talking much about the future, but even so it was clear that Windows Phone 8 wasn't ready to be a part of it.
While iOS and Android remain dominant in the smartphone space, a few things have changed since the release of Windows Phone 8. To start, Microsoft's operating system has started to carve out a niche for itself with a market share above 10 percent in a number of markets.
This success has often been on the back of low-end phones. Nokia's great value Lumia 520, for example, has proven popular, offering a full smartphone experience on a device that sells sometimes for as little as $60 without a contract. Windows Phone has proven to be consistently robust even on low-end hardware, with good performance and features ensuring the user experience remains solid even when the hardware is highly affordable.
Conversely, the experience on high-end devices with large, high-resolution screens was quite lackluster. Here, Microsoft offered an inconsistent approach that sometimes allowed apps to take advantage of the extra screen real estate, but most of the time left them comically large.
The enormous screen of the Lumia 1520 wasn't ideal with Windows Phone 8.0.
Windows Phone 8.1, therefore, has a lot of work to do. It needs to take further steps along the path toward Microsoft's vision of a unified operating system. It needs to work better on a wider range of hardware to both strengthen its position at the low end and give it a chance of making inroads at the high end. It needs to also offer features: it needs to do things to get people talking about the platform while attracting both users and developers.
Remarkably, Windows Phone 8.1 delivers on all fronts.
A ton of new features
After the Windows Phone 8 release that didn't really add any big user-facing features, it's about time that Microsoft had a real feature release. Windows Phone, while livable day-to-day, still has gaps compared to iOS and Android. And while it does have some striking features (most notably its eye-catching appearance), it hasn't really had anything to make people who don't follow smartphones or Microsoft take notice.
Cor blimey, it's Cortana
Sure, Skynet seems friendly enough to start with. But just you wait. This is how it starts.
If anything will get people talking about and taking notice of Windows Phone, it's Cortana. Cortana is a name that will be familiar to Halo players (which I am not). In those games, she is an AI assistant that aids the protagonist in his quest to kill aliens, or whatever it is he does. Naming it after a thing in Halo is cute enough (though, spoilers, Cortana apparently dies in Halo 4), but in practice, it's not a name that means a whole lot to most people. Microsoft can't count on immediate recognition when people hear about it. (Personally, I would have called it Holly -- [the ship's computer on the science fiction situation comedy Red Dwarf])
Microsoft describes Cortana as a "more personal personal assistant." What is she actually? Cortana is a combination of Siri's smart, contextual, voice-driven (or text-driven; anything you can say to Cortana you can also type to her) interactive helper and Google Now's proactive, data- and location-driven assistant.
This means that Cortana can do Siri-like things—create appointments, set reminders, send messages, find local restaurants that have at least four stars but which won't break the bank—while also doing Google Now-type things—tell you when you need to leave for your next appointment given current traffic, warn you that your flight is late, show you the exchange rate for your trip abroad.
Cortana's Little Red Book
The big difference between Cortana and comparable features on other platforms is the setup and control. The first time you use her—when enabled, she replaces the Bing search invoked from the search button—you're asked a few questions about your interests, and you give her permission to look at your data. You don't have to let her look at your e-mails if you don't want to, but features like flight tracking depend on it.
All this information gets stored in the Notebook, where Cortana is controlled and configured. Interests can be added and removed, and some of them offer finer control. For example, if "traffic" is one of your interests, you can choose to have active alerts whenever you need to leave your current location to reach a meeting, given the prevailing conditions. Some, though not all, of the interests can also be pinned directly to the Start screen.
The Notebook also lets you see all the reminders you've set. Cortana's reminders are pretty neat. As well as the obvious temporal reminders, she has location-based and person-based reminders. With these, Cortana can remind you to do something when you go somewhere or when you talk to someone. For example, you can ask for a reminder to buy Coca Cola Vanilla Zero (highly recommended) next time you're at the store or for Cortana to tell you to ask your sister about her new kitten next time you call her.
Cortana also drives a "quiet hours" feature of the kind we've seen on other platforms. Again configured through the Notebook, she can automatically suppress notifications at certain times of day or when you're busy in meetings. Your "inner circle" of contacts is allowed to break through quiet hours.
Some of the things I've told Cortana I care about. The little bell means that she can send me alerts to tell me when to leave the house to get to work. Fortunately for me, I don't actually have to leave the house to get to work.
The Notebook seems like a sensible way of keeping Cortana on-topic and focused. Last year we asked Microsoft's Bing team why they didn't yet have a system comparable to Google Now, and they said that creating a system with this kind of control was one of the things they wanted to do before deploying such a feature.
With Google Now, if you perform a few searches to find out results for a particular sports team, Google figures out you probably care about that team's performance. Google Now will start to show those results without asking. Cortana does know about sports teams and lets a user manually specify teams as "interests," but she doesn't seem able to infer that if searching for a team regularly, the user probably cares about them.
Thanks to the Notebook, Cortana could, and should, be similarly aggressive about learning about a user. The Notebook provides a good system for fixing mistakes—you could be searching for a team to answer a friend's question and not actually care—so it would make sense for Cortana to be a little more speculative. That is, after all, one of the things that real personal assistants do: they figure out what you like and dislike without having to be explicitly told.
There are also a few things that, surprisingly, Cortana doesn't seem to have as interests. For instance, you can search for stock ticker symbols, and Cortana will give nice structured results when you do, but there doesn't appear to be any capability to remember that you follow certain stocks and tell you about them automatically.
Journalists who work from home aren't the best Cortana users
In testing, we found Cortana's speech recognition was surprisingly consistent. My British English accent and reasonably clear enunciation generally posed no problems for Microsoft's speech-to-text processing. We didn't really have an opportunity to give Cortana a real-world test (the Ars Orbital HQ doesn't always involve a lot of running around), but using her for setting reminders, creating appointments, and so on and so forth, worked correctly for the most part. Her interactions are reasonably fluent, and she seems able to do a respectable number of tasks.
(And if you feel like a jerk talking to a computer, you're in good company. But you can type to her, too, and she'll work the same way).
Cortana's capabilities will grow in the future, too, as there are various third-party extension points enabling apps to integrate with Windows Phone's speech capabilities. Prior versions had limited speech extension points, but built around canned phrases rather than arbitrary speech-to-text processing. It's not immediately clear how effective this extensibility will be, and no apps seem to be able to take advantage of it yet.
Still, consider your day-to-day before jumping to a phone solely for the assistant. The unfortunate fact is that my lifestyle is not conducive to testing this kind of software. I work from home, I sit in front of a computer most of the day, and I don't drive. I recognize that Cortana can do lots of clever things, but my habits don't really give it the opportunity to shine.
This isn't meant as a knock against Cortana; I had a similar experience when using Google Now. Google Now didn't do a whole lot for me—mainly just show me the local weather, as Cortana does. But when I had a trip abroad, it sprung into life with flight info, currency details, reminders to me to leave for my appointments, and so on. The change in circumstances let it prove its worth.
While the speech and interaction capabilities are the ones that immediately turn heads, it's the proactive capabilities that are more interesting. While I can't use Google Now all the time due to my lifestyle, I've found that when I do use it, it's much more useful and less gimmicky than Siri. Cortana's capable of doing all the right things, the things that I would expect this kind of intelligent agent to be able to do. I'm confident that given the right circumstances, Cortana would prove her worth to me—I just haven't yet seen it, which is my fault more than it is hers.
Powered by Bing, still in Beta
Behind the scenes, Cortana is substantially powered by Bing. It's combined with a few new platform features such as geofencing, which alerts apps whenever you reach a certain location. There's a lot of technology involved, and it's going to need real-world testing, especially for things like the conversational speech recognition, before Microsoft is willing to call it "stable."
As such, just as was the case with Siri, Cortana is going to ship initially with a "beta" label. She will be available only in very limited markets, with the US being the first. In spite of the beta label, we didn't find anything egregiously wrong with the system and hope the rollout happens sooner rather than later.
If you're in a non-Cortana market—or if you elect not to enable her at all—the system sticks with the old Bing search app. This has been enhanced a little. As well as the local, images, videos, and Web results of the old version, there's a new "phone" context, which will find e-mails, calendar items, apps, contacts, music, and text messages. (Cortana-based searches work similarly; generally, if Bing can do something, Cortana can do it too.)
The right kind of feature for showing off
The biggest thing that Cortana gives Windows Phone is a flashy feature to show off. Surely she will prove useful, but that's almost beside the point; like Siri before her, Cortana makes great demoware. She's equipped with various jokes and easter eggs. Ask her to open the pod bay doors, and she'll tell you she's sorry, Dave, she's afraid she can't do that. Tell her to sing a song, and she'll regale you with Daisy, Daisy.
A place to clear out all your notifications
When Windows Phone launched, it had a number of important functional gaps. Over the years, many of them have been addressed, but one user interface gripe has continued to annoy people: the lack of any kind of notification center.
Windows Phone 8.1 at last ticks that box with Action Center. Swipe down from the top of the screen, and you've got a historical view of all your notifications and four (configurable) quick access buttons which by default give access to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, airplane mode, and orientation lock.
More important, but less exciting, Microsoft has overhauled the notification capabilities more generally. There's now a central settings screen for configuring how notifications work: for each notification source, you can choose whether a banner is shown, a sound is played, or the phone vibrates and whether they show up within Action Center at all. This control seems even more important than the Action Center itself.
A sexier Start screen
Even with Cortana, the defining, most striking feature of Windows Phone has always been its tile-based Start screen. The Start screen in 8.1 still has the same basic design as before with a couple of nice changes.
First, the triple column view, initially permitted only on a high-resolution large-screen phone such the Lumia 1520, is now available for all screen sizes. On phones which already have the three column view, it'll be compulsory, but phones that currently have the two-column view will be able to switch.
Second, there's a fancy new background image capability. Rather than showing the background image behind the tiles, when a background image is set, any portions of any tiles that use the accent color will instead punch through to show the background. This is coupled with a parallax scrolling effect, and it looks pretty cool.
A smart swiping keyboard
We've always liked the Windows Phone keyboard. It has always been a good example of a touch keyboard, with decent accuracy and easy access to symbols.
Its upgrades in 8.1 are likely to prove popular. It now supports swipe-based typing, so you can drag your finger between letters rather than having to tap individually. This style of typing was first popularized by Swype on Android, and it's now a feature of the standard Android keyboard.
It works astonishingly well. The precision is uncannily accurate, even for sloppy swiping. Note that it takes a little getting used to, as it makes you think about the keyboard in a different way (it makes me think about where the letters are). Still, even with minimal practice, it becomes very fast and effective.
It does, however, highlight a long-standing problem of almost all software keyboards. I'm a grown adult. I use swear words. While swear words are generally in the dictionaries of these keyboards, so they don't get red underlined, they're normally blocked from autocompleting. The autocomplete will always assume I meant ducking instead of another word, one that sounds like ducking but has a very different meaning.
For regular non-swipe keyboards, this behavior, while not ideal, is perhaps tolerable; you can just type what you want without having to depend on the autocomplete. For the swipe keyboard, however, it's much more problematic. When swiping, every single word is autocompleted. It's the nature of the beast: it has to heuristically figure out what word you mean even though you're not precisely tapping any of the letters the word uses.
This means that the swipe keyboard will never produce a swear word, even when that's the only desired word. To use the English language in all its variety and richness, you have to revert to traditional letter-at-a-time tapping. This is strangely jarring, really detracting from the value of the swipe keyboard. I really like the swipe keyboard, but every time I have to tap a word out letter by letter, I scowl.
It's high time that Microsoft—along with Apple and everyone else—acknowledged that most of its customers are grown ups and don't require their phones to protect them from rude words. Even if it's not the default, an option to make the keyboard R-rated, instead of its usual PG-13, would be extremely welcome.
That's not to say that the autocomplete hasn't been changed. Rather enjoyably, there's now support for autocompleting emoji. If you type a word that has a good emoji equivalent, the autocomplete bar will suggest the emoji character. So type "cat" and it will suggest a little picture of a cat. This beats the hell out of hunting through the endless screens of emoji characters. We expect it will result in about a tenfold increase in the amount of emoji use (you may even see me abandon actual words entirely).
Senses and savers
Windows Phone's Battery Saver, the feature that stops background tasks and reduces data usage whenever the phone's battery is low, is one of the most sensible things ever. However, Windows Phone tends to make it hard to figure out exactly which app is responsible for your battery usage.
Enlarge / See which apps are gobbling up your disk space with Storage Sense.
In 8.1, that gap is addressed. Battery Saver has a usage panel that shows which apps are responsible for using the battery. It lets you select on an app-by-app basis which apps can run in the background and which can run even when in low-power mode. Both are sensible improvements.
What Battery Saver does for the battery, Data Sense does for data: when you near the end of your data allowance, it can cut back on the level of data usage to make those last few megabytes go further. It's not clear to me why one is "Saver" and the other is "Sense." Their design and concept seem very similar.
Data Sense also includes a facility to proxy browser traffic to compress images to reduce data usage. In 8.1 this has been joined by a high savings mode. Not only does this compress images, it also enables partial loading of long pages, and Microsoft says that "some ads" will not load. There's also an automatic mode that uses the normal savings most of the time and switches to the high savings mode when nearing the end of your data allowance.
Unfortunately, Data Sense remains a feature that carriers can opt out of. Many AT&T models, for example, do not include Data Sense. AT&T has its own data tracking feature, but it's much less capable than the built-in feature, as it lacks the ability to cut data usage as you get near the monthly limit. This is one of the frustrating ways in which carriers make Windows Phone less compelling than it should be.
These two have been joined by Storage Sense. Storage Sense isn't new; it's just a new name. The storage management facility is now a Sense. It hasn't changed much in function, though it now lets you drill to see how much space each app is taking up. On phones with microSD storage, some things can be stored on the SD card. In 8.0 this was restricted to music, videos, and pictures, with everything else being stored on the internal storage.
In 8.1, this has been extended in an important way: apps can now be installed on microSD, as can downloaded files. You can also move apps between internal storage and microSD as necessary. This will be very welcome on devices with limited internal storage.
The final sense is another new one: Wi-Fi Sense. This covers two things. The first is that it improves support of those annoying captive Web portals that make you click through a license (and possibly enter some personal information) before you can get online. Wi-Fi Sense will attempt to detect these portals and will automatically tick the box and enter dummy user information. That way, a lot of the time, you'll be able to get online without interruption.
The second is an automated credential sharing facility. With Wi-Fi Sense sharing enabled, your phone will automatically share Wi-Fi passwords with any of your contacts that are also using Wi-Fi Sense. This is enabled on a per-network basis. While we like the idea of being able to easily send friends the password for a home network, the lack of granularity makes the utility of the feature questionable. You can only share with entire address books of people, specifically all of your Hotmail/Outlook.com contacts, and/or all of your Skype contacts, and/or all of your Facebook contacts.
For each of those categories, there are likely some you would like to share with and some you would not. So while the idea is appreciated, the reality seems lacking.
Core applications
Many of the built-in applications have been revised and refreshed, some of them drastically. One important one, however, has been removed: the old Music + Video hub no longer exists.
That's because it's been replaced by the standalone apps Xbox Music and Xbox Video (or, sometimes, just Music and Video; they're called different things in different places). From what we can tell, these apps aren't significantly altered from the existing incarnations for Windows Phone 8.
They've been joined by a new standalone Podcast app. It's simple but appears to offer the main features for subscribing and listening to podcasts, including accelerated playback and a selection of download options.
Many of the core applications are now, in some sense, "regular apps." Although they'll be preinstalled by default, the platform treats them as conventional applications that can be updated by the Store, rather than requiring major firmware updates.
An almost unrecognizable store
The app that has changed most is probably the Store app, which is almost unrecognizable. This is a good thing. The new app has important functional improvements—for instance, it'll automatically update apps and lets you see which apps you've previously bought—and should be more effective both at promoting apps and finding ones that are relevant.
Though the basic categorized view remains, there's now easy access to top free and paid apps, new free and paid apps, and personalized suggestions.
A better browser
Windows Phone 8.1 updates the integrated browser to bring near-total parity with Internet Explorer 11 on the desktop. Microsoft also seems to have (finally) given the browser a sensible user interface. Virtually every major update to Windows Phone has seen Redmond rejig the buttons on the address bar in an attempt to figure out how to include the most important buttons. This has forced awkward compromises: in 8.0, you're forced to choose between instant access to the stop/refresh button and the tabs button. Obviously, you want both.
Luckily 8.1 sorts this out with both a tabs button and a stop/refresh button available simultaneously. It seems Microsoft has acknowledged that including extra buttons is more useful than maximizing the amount of address that's visible, a decision perhaps forced by one of Internet Explorer 11's new features: reading view. Whenever visiting a suitable content-based page, the reading view button will appear. As with reading views on other browsers and platforms, this strips away most of the page author's formatting, ads, and so on, replacing it with a barebones view designed for higher readability.
It's good that the tab button is on by default, because those tabs are a lot more capable than they were. There's no more six tab limit, tabs are now synced with PCs running Internet Explorer 11, and InPrivate tabs are supported for stealthy browsing. There's also a list of recently visited tabs, so if you close one by accident, you can recover.
Navigation is also a lot slicker, with swiping from the left and right edges used to go backward and forward.
The browser's rendering of pages may change quite a bit between 10 and 11. Mobile browsers have a habit of resizing text to try to improve legibility on small screens. Internet Explorer 11's rendering (and font sizing) is much closer to that of the desktop browser than Internet Explorer 10's was. This can result in much smaller text sizes—although not so small as to render them illegible, at least on the phone we've been using—but that reading view would be the "solution" should this be a problem.
The performance of the browser in JavaScript seems essentially unchanged in our testing. Microsoft claims that SunSpider is 200 percent faster, but on identical handsets, we've found no significant difference. The new browser is meant to load pages faster, with support for pre-fetching and pre-rendering. In practice, it's hard to see what the difference amounts to. While the new browser's progress bar fills and disappears faster, indicating that it is doing something faster, it doesn't appear to be presenting users with a usable page any sooner.
Update: Microsoft tells us that the 200 percent is a typo, and it's meant to be 20 percent. That's still bigger than the difference we saw, but much more plausible.
Pinning webpages is also a bit smarter than it was. Instead of static snapshots of the page, the tiles of pinned apps will use some kind of magic (presumably sniffing RSS feeds or something) to show up-to-date, relevant imagery and headlines.
Internet Explorer tends to be pretty basic on Windows Phone. Upgrading the core engine to Internet Explorer 10 in Windows Phone 8 did a lot to improve the rendering of the Web, but it did relatively little to improve the experience of using the browser itself. The work done in this version is a big step forward; it feels less like a showcase of the rendering engine and much more like a proper browser. There are still things we wish Microsoft had—Chrome-style syncing of form data between platforms, for example—but the core functionality is now very solid.
Calendaring and e-mail
Even though smartphones have become mass-market consumer devices, two of the very oldest smartphone apps remain critical: e-mail and calendaring. Windows Phone always offered a strong mail client, and the new version appears to make no major changes to core functionality aside from somewhat superior attachment handling: Internet images can now be downloaded automatically by default, and attachments appear slightly differently within mails. There's also an adaptive sync setting that will pick the sync frequency according to how often you actually get e-mails.
The calendar has seen a more substantial overhaul, insofar as the old app has been entirely replaced with a new app. The old app offered a selection of views: today, agenda, to-do, but it lacked, for example, a weekly view, even though this is the view that many people want much of the time.
The new app offers daily, weekly, monthly, and year-at-a-time views. Instead of swiping left and right to switch between views, it switches between days/weeks/months/years (as appropriate), making it much easier to browse your calendar.
The actual presentation of appointments is essentially the same as in the old app, but there's nothing wrong with that. The biggest change is that, like Outlook 2013 on the desktop, there's now a weather indicator on each day.
The one major omission is the loss of Agenda view, which gives a rundown of all the events you have on a given day. To some extent Cortana can replace it, as she has a daily update feature that will tell you everything you have to do each morning. Still, we found Agenda view useful in 8.0 and will be a little disappointed that it's been removed.
Built-in camera
Although many of us probably use Nokia's camera apps instead of the built-in one, the integrated app has nonetheless been spruced up.
As well as a polished user interface, offering quick access to five (selectable) functions down the left, it now has a built-in burst mode feature which seems to work as expected. A single press of the button will take 15 shots in quick succession, or you can hold the button down to take a continuous burst.
With burst mode, pressing the button isn't the end of the process. You then have to choose which picture or pictures to keep; any that you don't want will be deleted automatically after a week. We're not sure if this will be enough to make anyone switch away from Nokia's camera app, but it's good to see the built-in app improved. The burst feature is a sensible addition.
De-integrated hubs
When it launched, one of the central concepts that Microsoft wanted to promote was hubs. The people hub was perhaps the most important: it would be a repository for all your contacts, whether they be from Exchange, Outlook.com, Gmail, Twitter, or Facebook.
That's still the model Microsoft intends for the people hub, but in Windows Phone 8.1, it's implemented very differently. Rather than having the integration performed by Microsoft, there are now APIs so that apps on the phone can expose their contacts to the hub. In tandem with that, the company has removed the built-in Facebook and Twitter integration.
This makes the hub a little peculiar. Right now it's less capable than the one in 8.0. Although the Facebook and Skype apps have already been updated to support this new API, the Twitter app hasn't. In turn, the built-in check-in and status update features have been neutered, as they simply send you to the relevant app.
More frustratingly, this de-integration has totally gutted the messaging app. The old messaging app supported both Facebook chat and Windows Messenger/Skype chat in addition to SMS/MMS. The new one is strictly SMS/MMS only.
This is a tremendous step backward. In general, I prefer to message contacts using either Facebook or Skype/Windows Messenger (depending on who I'm talking to). However, there are situations when I want to fall back to SMS—when I'm abroad without data or when my battery is very low, for example. In the new model, all of those chats will be split up between a bunch of different apps.
While we can understand that Microsoft might want to encourage third-party developers to produce messaging apps that are equally integrated as the first party solutions, this feels like a huge regression in terms of convenience and ease of use.
Worse, it's a regression compared to both iOS and Android. The Messaging app on iOS weaves together both SMS and iMessage messages, and similarly, the current Google Hangouts app on Android is a one-stop shop for both SMS and Google Talk. If Microsoft didn't have its own messaging platform, then we could understand designing the Windows Phone app this way, but it does, and it's a pretty big one. While almost every other aspect of Windows Phone 8.1 is a marked improvement over its predecessor, this is a substantial and infuriating backward step.
It's hard to understand why this change has been made. It takes one of the things Windows Phone did well and makes it unambiguously worse.
Miscellaneous modifications
When Windows Phone 8.1 was revealed in public for the first time at the Build conference earlier this month, one of the things that Microsoft's Joe Belfiore was most pleased with was apps that customize the lock screen—because not even the merest hint of their existence had been leaked.
Windows Phone apps can already inject periodically updated static data onto the lock screen, but the apps showed off at Build included both animations and interactions, suggesting a much richer lock screen customization capability. However, the apps shown at Build aren't yet available, so it's not clear yet just how much these apps will be able to do.
The volume slider is now a double volume slider: one for the ringer/notifications, the other for media and apps. We've been asking for this since day one or thereabouts.
Another small but welcome change: in full-screen apps, such as games, pressing the Search button will not take you out of the app and into Bing or Cortana. You'll have to press the button twice to do that. It's a nice bid to reduce the number of accidental task switches.
The Photos hub hasn't changed how it works significantly, but it has been reorganized to be more... pictographic. Although, weirdly, it no longer seems to be possible to save screenshots to OneDrive. The upload to OneDrive menu option is simply gone now, which doesn't make an iota of sense. Overall, I think I preferred the old one.
And as a feature that's incredibly useful for a narrow set of people, Windows Phone 8.1 has screen broadcasting capabilities. It can Miracast to suitable network hardware, and there's also a Windows app that will mirror the screen over USB. For anyone wanting to make videos of the phone's interface, this is excellent news.
Making a play for the enterprise
Of all the things about Windows Phone 7 that surprised Windows Mobile users, it was the weak enterprise support that probably surprised most. Windows Mobile, for all its clunkiness and horrible handsets, was the enterprise's friend. Windows Phone 7 really wasn't. Although it had good Exchange support, it gave administrators very little control over the device. They couldn't block apps, there was no VPN support, it was, for enterprises, a big step back.
While various management features have been added incrementally, the platform has still been lacking in enterprise features. 8.1 addresses some important concerns. It has integrated support for IPSec VPNs, and downloadable apps will extend this to support SSL VPNs. There aren't any apps at the moment, and we're not entirely sure why SSL VPNs aren't built in (since Windows itself supports them), but this should close one of the big enterprise holes.
The e-mail client has also been updated to support S/MIME signing and encryption, allowing certificates and private keys to be stored on the phone so that it can be used to send mail that only the recipient can decrypt.
With a suitable mobile device management app, Windows Phone 8.1 will give administrators many of the controls they expect: deploying corporate apps, pushing out configuration, and restricting access to games or other undesirable content. Administrators will also be able to stop administrating phones, securely deleting any corporate content and derestricting the phone.
There is also an ultra-locked down mode, called "Assigned Access," that can create phones with almost kiosk-like simplicity. With Assigned Access, administrators can go so far as to preconfigure and lock down Start screen, or even boot directly into a specific app to make single-purpose devices.
A better platform
Windows Phone 8 moved Windows Phone to the Windows NT kernel, shared by Windows on the PC, but there was precious little payoff for both end users and developers alike.
That's because Windows Phone apps were still, for the most part, developed in a derivative of the Silverlight platform first used for Windows Phone 7, not the WinRT API used for developing Metro-style apps on Windows 8 and 8.1. Developers could share some pieces of code between PC and phone, using a system called portable class libraries, and some pieces of WinRT were also available to both PC and phone apps, but they were very much two different platforms.
With Windows Phone 8.1, Microsoft has taken an enormous step toward having one platform. The new operating system supports two broad families of application. Existing Silverlight-derived Windows Phone 8 (and even 7.x) apps will continue to run on 8.1. Developers will be able to continue to update and improve those apps, using a set of APIs that Microsoft is calling Silverlight 8.1.
Alongside this is a new feature called Universal Apps. Instead of Silverlight 8.1, these apps will run on essentially the same WinRT API as is found on PC Windows. Universal Apps will enable not just sharing of some low-level components of applications, but complete codebases. If constructed appropriately, even user interfaces will be portable between phone and tablet/PC.
There's also storefront-level integration. Universal Apps get a special icon in the Store, and developers will be able to enable, for example, application purchasing and in-app purchases that span both stores and device types. So you'll be able to buy an app on the phone and use that purchase to get entitlement to a tablet version if the developer chooses.
This has been a long time coming. Microsoft's smartphone platform has always been anomalous since, unlike both iOS and Android, it has offered no ability to "upsize" apps to run on tablets. For developers, this has been a gaping hole in the Windows and Windows Phone development story. With Universal Apps, that hole is filled.
In 8.1, the APIs are not completely identical; although 8.1 is a big step, Microsoft's platforms aren't entirely unified just yet. Part of this is because of different device capabilities. For example, there are somewhat different rules for background processing due to batteries: PCs and even tablets have power in relative abundance, whereas phones are much more constrained. Part of it is due to the platform still being, to some extent, a work in progress.
There is also currently a handful of scenarios that mandates the use of Silverlight 8.1.
The one awkwardness of this is that of the two platforms, it's Windows Phone that has found the most traction among developers, and pretty much all extant Windows Phone apps are built using the Silverlight model. While porting from Windows 8.1 WinRT to Windows 8.1 + Windows Phone 8.1 Universal is relatively straightforward, moving from Silverlight 8.1 to Universal is much more involved and will require some amount of redevelopment.
In the longer term, this is an issue that should shake itself out, but in the short term it may limit the number of cross-platform apps we actually see. This should be the last platform transition that devs have to make, but there will still be some pain involved.
One encouraging aspect of the new platform is that Microsoft is using it itself. This may seem peculiar, but an unfortunate and recurring theme among many of Microsoft's developers is that they don't use the platform features they expect third-party developers to use, instead inventing their own libraries for internal use.
This leads to some unfortunate consequences. For example, the WPF windowing API that Microsoft promoted to third parties for building user interfaces initially had problems with poor performance that Microsoft never addressed, because Microsoft never actually used WPF for anything important itself. It wasn't until Visual Studio was updated to use WPF that Redmond saw fit to tackle these issues.
The built-in applications that come with Windows Phone have traditionally been in a similar boat, using private internal toolkits for their interfaces, rather than the APIs that are offered to third parties. There are signs that this is starting to change, however, as the new Calendar app is built on the same APIs that everyone else uses. Longer term, this should mean that the public APIs are better designed and better equipped to handle the demands that developers place on them.
New hardware options
With each release of Windows Phone, the range of acceptable hardware becomes broader, with new systems-on-chips, screen resolutions, and other hardware capabilities made available. Windows Phone 8.1 is the broadest yet. While it's OEMs who'll benefit most from this work, the results will soon trickle down to users.
The most visible change is that the hardware buttons on the front—back, Windows, search—and camera button will all become optional. The only compulsory buttons will be the volume rocker and the power button. Phones without the hardware buttons will show on-screen replacements instead. The immediate consequence of this is that a single hardware platform will support both Android and Windows Phone unmodified.
No, this doesn't mean that we'll see dual boot phones, but it does mean that it will be much easier for OEMs to bring products to market. This is one of the reasons that Microsoft has been able to announce that many more OEMs are planning to produce Windows Phone hardware.
This change has also caused Microsoft to change the screenshot combination; instead of Windows key plus power, it's now power plus volume up.
Similarly, the range of acceptable screen resolutions is being expanded. Windows Phone will support 480×800, 480×854, 540×960, 720×1280, 768×1280 (or something around that), and 1080×1920 resolutions.
Less visible, but tremendously important in some markets, is support for dual-SIM phones. These are important in markets where, for example, one provider may offer cheap voice calls, but another provider may offer cheap data, or where people may work on one side of an international border, but live on the other.
Most of this hardware work is designed to make it easier for Windows Phone to reach lower price points. However, it's not all bad news for those who care about high-end hardware; the support for the large screens is somewhat improved in 8.1 compared to 8.0. At the moment, apps that are sensibly finger-sized on phones with 4-5 inch screens tend to be hilariously huge on giant phones like the 6 inch Lumia 1520. Software that has been updated for Windows Phone 8.1 should be able to do a better job of taking advantage of physically large screens without simply making everything enormous.
This change has also caused Microsoft to change the screenshot combination; instead of Windows key plus power, it's now power plus volume up.
Similarly, the range of acceptable screen resolutions is being expanded. Windows Phone will support 480×800, 480×854, 540×960, 720×1280, 768×1280 (or something around that), and 1080×1920 resolutions.
Less visible, but tremendously important in some markets, is support for dual-SIM phones. These are important in markets where, for example, one provider may offer cheap voice calls, but another provider may offer cheap data, or where people may work on one side of an international border, but live on the other.
Most of this hardware work is designed to make it easier for Windows Phone to reach lower price points. However, it's not all bad news for those who care about high-end hardware; the support for the large screens is somewhat improved in 8.1 compared to 8.0. At the moment, apps that are sensibly finger-sized on phones with 4-5 inch screens tend to be hilariously huge on giant phones like the 6 inch Lumia 1520. Software that has been updated for Windows Phone 8.1 should be able to do a better job of taking advantage of physically large screens without simply making everything enormous.
Arguably, the bigger challenge for Microsoft will be expanding the reach not of Windows Phone itself, but the service parts, both Bing and Cortana. I still regularly receive complaints from people around the world who say that Bing in their country struggles to find useful results and that mapping has major gaps. This is something that Microsoft needs to fix.
Getting Cortana more widely available will also be important. I recognize that there may be variations in the maturity of speech recognition engines, and that this isn't a trivial problem to solve, but if Windows Phone is selling well in, for example, Italy (and it is) then it really ought to support the highest profile new feature in Italy.
This really should be Windows Phone 9
At the start of this, I said that Windows Phone needed to do a few things: enable OEMs to go after the growth markets and growth price points in emerging markets, do more to appeal to high-end buyers, give developers a better platform, and get people talking.
I think Windows Phone 8.1 delivers on all these fronts. With Cortana, it has a splashy, highly demonstrable feature—though one I hope will deliver genuine value too. With the new hardware support, we should see more phones at more price points in more markets than ever before. With Universal Apps, we have a platform that can (almost) seamlessly span the phone, the tablet, the PC, and before too long, the console/TV, too.
The result feels a whole lot more mature and a whole lot more capable than its predecessor. The 0.1 version bump, chosen to align the phone platform with its desktop sibling, belies the true nature of this upgrade. It is substantial, and makes Windows Phone tremendously better.
We might still wish that there were a few more apps, and that developers spoke of the platform in the same breath as iOS and Android, but even in spite of this, Windows Phone 8.1 is a polished, fun, clever, and personal smartphone platform that's just about everyone can enjoy. It's a magnificent smartphone platform. ###
- Eric L. - |
