WASHINGTON: According to a newly leaked version of Microsoft’s upcoming program, the company is improving the touch experience in Windows 10.
According to the Verge, on enabling tablet mode, any apps on the taskbar are removed and the user is thrown into a user interface that only has access to the Start screen, virtual desktops, and the Cortana digital assistant.
Let’s say that again: Some aspects of the new build are slow. Even after a botched rollout earlier on Friday, Microsoft’s new software took seemingly forever to download and install. Now that the initial rush has been exhausted, your mileage may vary. But sometimes using the new OS build is literally a labor of love.
The new update adds support for the Project Spartan browser, plus new versions of several apps: Outlook Mail, Outlook Calendar, Phone, Messaging, People, and Maps. You’ll also find an improved basic Camera app, which pulls in some of the functions from the recent Lumia Camera update. Most are slow to load and use, especially Spartan and even parts of the core OS, at least on my Lumia 830.
Why this matters: The slow performance of the new build, and the delays preceding the rollout, raise questions about the state of the software. We all understand this is alpha code. At a time when Microsoft’s struggling for viability in the phone space, however, it’s taking a risk in drawing attention to subpar performance rather than Windows 10’s new functionality.
Spartan, especially, is agonizing to use. It can take seconds before a page appears to load, and seconds more until the page actually becomes responsive. Part of that has to be due to how the browser handles all of the processes and code attached to modern Web pages, which is disconcerting given that Spartan was built from the ground up to handle such content. Reading a page in the the browser’s built-in reading mode speeds up the process, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to open a link directly in the reading mode—you can only reload an existing page.
Still, using Spartan feels natural and intuitive. About the only element that feels out of place is burying the additional tabs behind a menu at the bottom of the screen, although Windows Phone 8.1 also does this. I still like Android’s choice of placing the tabs icon at the top of the screen.
Microsoft has said it will replace Internet Explorer with Project Spartan in Windows 10 phones. At this point, that news seems daunting. But if Microsoft can give Spartan a kick in the pants, I think users will be happy.
From the ridiculous to the sublime: The new Outlook Mail and Calendar apps, meanwhile, are superb. Microsoft seemingly has dozens of variations on its core mail apps: there’s the basic Mail app in Windows 8.1, the Mail app on Windows, Outlook 2013, Outlook.com—the list goes on. On Windows 10 for phones, Outlook Mail ties your various inboxes into one nice package, and then integrates it with the Outlook Calendar app. (You can launch each app separately, but you don’t need to.)
Email is minimally presented. Your inbox is presented as a list of tiles: Swipe left to delete, swipe right to flag. By default, your emails are saved in conversation view, which you can expand by tapping on a tile. Once you open an email, all the options you’d want are listed in a row of icons at the top.
You can quickly jump to the calendar by digging through the menu at the upper left. Once in calendar mode, Outlook presents a rather nifty weekly view at the top, and an endless column of your appointments at the bottom. Hardly any tapping’s needed to navigate through your calendar; instead, it’s largely predicated on swiping right and left and down and up.
