Windows 10 Mobile Creators Update - a personal view

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I'm all for data points about how well (or otherwise) Windows 10 Mobile is performing day to day, especially if they're detailed and well written. As here, with developer Liam Westley's experiences of the newish W10M Creators Update on his Lumia 950 XL.

Here's an extract from his longish blog report, firstly looking at the 'good':

It does appear to be a bit faster, and the Edge has new features which I’m enjoying.  There’s still a flurry of updates to all the core apps, some less welcome than others – Groove has taken a step back with some of the layouts, but mainly it’s positive.  The voice recognition seems to definitely be improved – coping much better with wind noise while cycling when replying to a text message through my Bluetooth headset (quite a challenge to voice recognition).

Subjectively there appear to be a few more occasions where the phone hangs at random – although that may be before I tracked some down to continuum.  Windows 10 has always been a bit temperamental about using the camera from the lock screen, often not responding after taking the photo and viewing it, and I don’t think that has changed.

OK, so some of the 'good' wasn't so good after all! Then for the 'bad', basically chatting about Continuum:

As I mentioned above, one of the those more frequent crashes I can now definitely repeat.  It occurs when you phone is connected to the continuum dock, but has locked it’s screen and switched off the screen.  If you disconnect at this point, it is highly likely that the phone will no longer switch on.  If you get it connected back to the dock quickly you can recover, turning on the phone, waiting for the lock screen and then removing from the dock.  If you don’t re-connect to the dock the phone remains blank, and it requires a long power button press reset to get it back.

There is also a further Windows 10 continuum bug.  I suspect that to ‘speed’ up the launching of an app which was running on the phone previously, they are no longer ‘killing’ the original app and restarting but activating straight onto the continuum display.  The issue here, is that the app has no idea that it now has a 24” monitor to play with.  This is especially true with Groove which appears without any sensible master/view layout.  It acts as if it only has a single, albeit, very, very wide display.  To solve this you have to kill the app in the app switcher, and relaunch.  Effectively doing what the phone used to do prior to Creators update.

I saw much of this on the Elite x3 last year, of course, though it was amplified for me by bugs in the Elite x3 Lap Dock's firmware. It does now look like Microsoft isn't planning to do much to Continuum code under the current OS branch (15063) and we'll have to wait until the complete reworking that the front end UI is getting for phone, tablet and laptop (etc.) with Redstone 3, CShell and so on. As to whether any of this will make it to current hardware (Lumia 950 onwards), I'm a little sceptical. I'd give it a 50:50 chance, and even then only as Insiders.

Source / Credit: Liam Westley