First Impressions using Windows 10 Technical Preview for phones

Windows 10 Technical Preview for phones was released two days ago and today I decided to give it a try. The installation process on my Nokia 630 was very smooth and completed for about 30 minutes including the migration of the old data. Finally, I ended up with WP10 OS version 9941.12498.

After I used WP10 for about 6 hours I can say that this build is quite stable. The UI and all animations are very responsive. So far I didn’t experience any crashes. The only glitch I found is that the brightness setting is not preserved after restart and it is set automatically to HIGH. All my data including photos, music and documents were preserved during the upgrade.

There are many productivity improvements in WP10. Action Center and Settings menu are much better organized. It seems that IE can render some sites better than before though I am not sure if it is the new IE rendering engine or just the site’s html has been optimized.

I checked to see whether there are changes in Chakra JavaScript engine but it seem the list of exported JsRT functions is the same as before. The actual version of jscript9.dll is 11.0.9941.0 (fbl_awesome1501.150206-2235).

I tested all of my previously installed apps (around 60) and they all work great. The perceived performance is the same, except for Lumia Panorama which I find slower and Minecraft PE which I find faster.

There are many new things for the developers as well. I guess one of the most interesting changes in WP10 is the improved speech support API. Using the speech API is really simple.

using Windows.Phone.Speech.Synthesis;

var s = new SpeechSynthesizer();
s.SpeakTextAsync("Hello world");

WP10 comes with two predefined voice profiles.

using using Windows.Phone.Speech.Synthesis;

foreach (var vi in InstalledVoices.All)
{
    var si = new SpeechSynthesizer();
    si.SetVoice(vi);
    await si.SpeakTextAsync(vi.Description);
}

The actual values of vi.Description are as follows.

Microsoft Zira Mobile - English (United States)
Microsoft Mark Mobile - English (United States)

You can hear how Zira and Mark actually sound below.

I find Mark’s voice a little bit more realistic.

This is all I got for today. In closing I would say it seems that WP10 has much more to offer. Stay tuned.