New Operating System for Windows : Microsoft’s officially launches Windows 10 Build 10051 comes with Spartan browser and a lot of Apps for Windows Phones.
As promised by Microsoft a week ago, it has started exhibiting the second form (10051) of the Windows 10 technical preview for phones. It has been exhibited to the Windows Insider users and as anticipated it comes with an early version of the Spartan browser for phones.
This now supports almost all Lumia phones. Do browse through the list of the phones supported here. However, it doesn’t support the Lumia Icon, 930 and even the 640XL due to scaling problem.
Microsoft has explained in its blogpost, “You’ll see that the list has remained largely unchanged with one exception – the Lumia Icon. Unfortunately there is an issue with scaling on certain devices (930, Icon, and 640XL) which makes the UI too small to be usable, and we need to add code to support new scaling thresholds for these devices.”
However, it still doesn’t back Microsoft phones that are built by OEMs. It also brings a lot of new features like the early version of Project Spartan that uses the new rendering engine and promises to give greater interoperability with the modern mobile web. It also includes early versions of Reading View and Reading List. It is not the default browser, for now, and exists side-by-side with IE11.
Besides other features, there is Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar – the new built-in mail and calendar universal apps respectively for Windows 10. These new apps intend to bring an updated UI, with a button to freely move between your email and calendar without having to return to the Start screen. Outlook Mail also includes customized swipe gestures along with new email authoring experience. Outlook Mail has some of the similar features of Word. It supports formatting like inserting tables, adding pictures, using bullets and more.
One can add or delete accounts in Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar within these apps. As a result, the Email + accounts page has been removed from the Settings app.
The new Phone and Messaging apps included in this model bring a new visual design. The new universal People app also has a new visual design. It ‘will continue to be the comprehensive list of all your contacts across the services you care about such as Exchange, Outlook.com, Gmail, Facebook, etc’, claims the company.
Microsoft has also shown the first preview of the new universal Maps app on phone. “This includes the best maps, aerial imagery, rich local search data, and voice guided navigation experiences from both Bing Maps and HERE maps, integrated together for the first time into a single app for Windows,” Microsoft writes in its blogpost.
It also comes with an updated App Switcher. Microsoft has also pointed out some known issues that one may experience while using this build, for example, one percent of the time the phone may not ring for an incoming call, or auto-upload of your Camera Roll to OneDrive may not work, all Bluetooth-based interactions with Cortana may not work and more.
How to set up Windows 10 build on your Lumia and other Windows Phones
Instructions on how to join the Windows Insider Program and get your phone set up are available on the Windows Insider website. Be sure to read the instructions very carefully so you can upgrade easily and comfortably.
If your phone is already on the Windows 10 Technical Preview, all you need to do is go to Settings apps > Update & recovery > Phone update > and check for updates. We’re pushing out this build only to the Fast ring today. If you’d like to change from the Fast ring to the Slow ring, just go into the Windows Insider app on your phone and login with your MSA and change rings.
