Microsoft’s new Windows 10 build for phones features Spartan browser

As promised a week ago, Microsoft has started rolling out the second build (10051) of the Windows 10 technical preview for phones. It is being rolled out to Windows Insider users and as expected comes with an early version of the Spartan browser for phones.

It now supports almost all Lumia phones. Take a look at 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 support Microsoft phones that are built by OEMs. It also brings hordes 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.

Then there’s Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar – the new built-in mail and calendar universal apps for Windows 10. These new apps aim to bring a revamped UI, with a toggle to freely move between your email and calendar without returning to the Start screen. Outlook Mail also includes customisable swipe gestures along with new email authoring experience. Outlook Mail leverages the familiar capabilities of Word. It supports formatting like inserting tables, adding pictures, using bullets and more.

One can add or remove accounts in Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar within these apps. The Email + accounts page has been removed from the Settings app.

The new Phone and Messaging apps included in this build 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 updated App Switcher. Microsoft has also listed some known issues that one may face while using this build like  one percent of the time the phone may not ring for an incoming call, auto-upload of your Camera Roll to OneDrive may not work, all Bluetooth-based interactions with Cortana may not work and more.

Posted by : Gizmeon