After about 2 weeks now on the Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview, I am pretty much frustrated with a few of the improvements in the system. Well, I won’t call them improvements, rather, horrible changes to functionality that Microsoft has laid into the new OS version. Let me just get rolling on them and you can beat me up via email and comments later if you want.
First up, WHAT DID YOU DO TO THE ME TILE? Yes, I am yelling about this one! At first, it was a bad, but now it’s an ugly. As a matter of fact, most of this post is going to be centered on the debacle that is now known as the Me Tile. If, and this is a big IF, the features aren’t restored to this tile when the OS is officially released, it will be a devastating blow to the overall functionality of the social networking aspects of Windows Phone.
The old Me Tile (right) had the option to update your photo by tapping on it. You also had the option to post an update to MSN, Facebook and Twitter all at the same time. The old tile also linked to Facebook messenger and MSN Chat, so you could message your contacts via Wi-Fi when your signal was down. You could also check in at a location on Facebook as well. The new Me Tile (left) strips so many of these options away from the tile, that it is practically useless.
First, you only get single network update posting. New Apps like Multishare are trying to bridge the gap, but so far, I have not had much success with them. They seem to authenticate to Twitter just fine, but only one of my shared Facebook status updates has appeared.
Next, you can no longer set chat status in the new Me Tile, meaning you need to go to third party Apps for chatting. I know that this was part of the “Facebook Messenger” App move, but seriously, why do I want a tile that just shows the updates that my live tiles for Facebook and Twitter already told me about anyways?
Moving on from there, and continuing down the communications thread, by de-linking messaging from the Me Tile, it now no longer appears in the messaging tile as well. Messaging is now just SMS and MMS messages. There’s no more Facebook Chat included in there, nor is there MSN chat either. While I don’t blame the Me Tile for this, it seems like Microsoft gutted the social networking features completely from the core of the OS and that is why it doesn’t work throughout the system – as well as the Me Tile.
Finally, and probably the second biggest issue with this update in my opinion, is that you can no longer update your MSN and Facebook profile image from the Me Tile. As a matter of fact, I still haven’t found out how I can do it without going to the mobile site. I haven’t found an option to do it in the Facebook App. The Me Tile no longer has support for updating it. The only way I was able to do it was via the mobile web site for Facebook. This goes along way to showing how much was built in to Windows Phone 8 as far as Facebook went. With the 8.1 Preview, it’s all gone.
Hopefully, as I said, Microsoft will install some of this back in when the OS is released by the carriers and hardware partners. If not, I’m not sure adding a third row of tiles and a notification area was worth losing all my social networking abilities. If Microsoft was going for game changing on this one, they did change their game. I’m just not sure it was for the better in this case.
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