This morning I covered the great things that the Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview brought to the Windows Phone platform. The beauty of the third tile row, the new sense features and of course, Cortana. Unfortunately, it isn’t all rosy for the new update. In fact, many of the features that made Windows Phone great are now MIA from the current build of Windows Phone for Developers. This isn’t to say that small patches can’t be made to the final release before carriers push it out, but needless to say, if this is the full RTM release, people will probably find more wrong than right with it.
Bummer #1 – The Me Tile change. I have a feeling this is due to API changes by Facebook more than the changes done by Microsoft in Windows Phone, but losing the ability to update your social status on more than one network at a time stinks. In WP 7/8, a simple tap of the post an update button gave you an entry screen to key in your update for Facebook and Twitter. A tap of the button in WP 8.1 takes you to the Facebook or Twitter App. It will be interesting to see if there is a solution to this via third party App before too much longer.
Bummer #2 – You can no longer share images or save images directly to OneDrive. Now you must access the OneDrive App and send the photos manually to the cloud. Not a huge issue, but yet another place where Microsoft turned one step in to two or three. One great workaround to this problem is to create a room in your People Tile and share photos to that instead. You don't have to grant access to anyone, but it makes for one-touch multi-sharing once again.
Bummer #3 – Games now appear in the App list. Yes, this is a small thing as well, but if you have 20 games on your device, you now have 20 additional Apps to scroll through. Again, taking something that was good and making it not so great. I don't have a work around for this one yet and one doesn't seem likely, but let's see what happens.
Bummer #4 – Moving Bing Vision into the camera lenses and not making it available to pin to the start menu. If they had made one little move to make it possible to pin lenses, I wouldn’t even mention this. As it is though, you can, so I am. Apparently there is a third party App called Lenses that will allow you to pin individual lenses to the start screen which would make it a bit less damaging.
Bummer #5 - This one is tough for me since I don't completely understand how Wi-Fi Sense really works yet. I'm hoping I am completely off base with this one, but where is my "Keep Wi-Fi Alive When Screen Is Locked" selection? If I understand correctly, the Wi-Fi radio is now shut down when the screen sleeps. Then, if you are in range of a network, which Wi-Fi Sense tracks, it will power it up, sync and shut back down. If I have that wrong, I'm pretty upset that they would take away such a data saving feature.
Overall, the update has done pretty well on both the devices that I have placed it on. The HTC 8x is actually running better than it was before. The Lumia 925 seems to be eating battery a bit faster (88% after two hours vs. 95% after the same period before.) This is probably due to the fact that I went from about 10 live tiles to about 40, but who knows for sure. Overall, the small loss of battery is no big deal for me against gaining the 3rd row of tiles. I love the additional information on my home screen and love the fact that I can get all my email accounts in one row of tiles now!
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