Windows Phone 8.1 review

Windows Phone 8.1 is the newest version of Microsoft’s mobile operating system. It comes as standard on all new Windows Phone devices, starting with the Nokia Lumia 630 and Nokia Lumia 930, and is currently being rolled out across Nokia’s entire Lumia range of Windows Phone 8 devices as part of Microsoft’s Lumia Cyan update programme. All Lumia devices with Windows Phone 8 should have the update within the next few weeks, but we’ve been spending some time with both the current consumer version of Windows Phone 8.1 and the Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview to see what’s new and what’s changed for the better.

LIVE TILE CUSTOMISATION

At first, the operating system looks exactly the same as Windows Phone 8. The home screen is still dominated by the Live Tiles which bring in information from your apps, but now you can customise the tiles to show a background image of your choice. Just go into the Settings menu and select Start + Theme and you’ll find an option to choose an image alongside the usual accent and background colour options.

Three columns instead of two leaves more space for Live Tiles, and they can now show a background image rather than just a solid colour

Once you’ve selected an image, the picture will permeate through almost every Live Tile on your home screen, giving the previously block colour icons a lot more personality. Admittedly, this does make some tiles a little harder to see at first glance, particularly those that don’t have a large icon in the middle to help differentiate them from the rest of the tiles on your home screen.

A handful of tiles have kept the traditional block colour background, such as Xbox Music, Office and Photos, making them much easier to pick out when you first look at your phone. Whether you’ll like the mix of solid colour and background image is down to personal taste, but it does give you the opportunity to mix and match the various different styles of Live Tile to create a home screen that feels much more personal and unique.

Windows Phone 8.1 also allows all handsets to show up to three columns of tiles instead of two. Previously, this feature was only available on larger, Full HD handsets such as the 6in Nokia Lumia 1520 and Lumia 1320, so it’s great to see this making its way to lower resolution phones as well – especially if you like to have a large number of tiles on your home screen.

The latest update to the Developer Preview has also introduced Live Folders, which allows you to organise apps into folders. As its name suggests, the live tiles of apps appear in the tile of the folder, making it easier to pack more apps onto the home screen without having to scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen.

ACTION CENTRE

One of the biggest changes to Windows Phone 8.1 comes in the form of the new Action Centre. This is a drop-down notification bar that appears when you swipe down from the top of your phone. It’s very similar to Android’s notification bar and behaves in much the same way, making Windows Phones a lot less alienating for would-be users who were thinking of switching over from Android. You’ll get email and app notifications here as well as more detailed information about your remaining battery life, the date and your current network.

The new Action Centre will be familiar to those coming over from Android

There are also four customisable icons across the top of the Action Centre, and these can be changed in the Notifications + Actions tab in the Settings menu. You only get a choice of ten options, so you won’t be able to put any of your favourite apps here, but all the important settings are there to help make using your phone more practical, including brightness, flight mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and camera shortcuts.

INTERNET EXPLORER

One of our biggest complaints with Windows Phone 8 was how Internet Explorer never remembered your previous browsing history once you’d returned to the home screen. Instead, when you went back into the browser and hit the back button, you’d simply be returned to the home screen rather than your previous web page. This has been fixed for Windows Phone 8.1, so you can now go back through your internet history regardless of whether you visit the home screen between browsing sessions.

Bing’s search engine has also been improved. Instead of simply searching the web, Bing will also search for anything local that’s related to your search term, such as shop locations and maps, as well as dig through images, video and anything on your phone’s internal storage. This means you won’t have to dive into your photo gallery or look through Xbox Video every time you want to fish out a file to show your friends and family. If anything, it finally justifies having a dedicated search button next to the main home button at the bottom of your handset, as you can now search your phone much more thoroughly than before.

CALENDAR

Another problem we had with Windows Phone 8 was its impractical Calendar app. There was no week view available and the month view only showed when you had appointments, rather than when the appointments were. Even the individual day view didn’t really show very much information, as the day was split into hours and only showed a small proportion of the day unless you scrolled up and down. The Agenda was by far the most useful aspect of the Calendar app, as it listed every event coming up during the week, but one of the most important things a calendar can do is show you when you’re actually free, rather than simply showing you the appointments you have coming up.

There’s finally a week view in the calendar app, among some other much-needed improvements

It was so unhelpful that we ended up buying the excellent Chronos Calendar app from the Windows Phone Store. Much to our relief, though, all this has been rectified for Windows Phone 8.1. There’s now a much more useful week view to replace the Agenda, and tapping on individual events in the week view brings up a description of the event in the middle of the calendar, without switching to a different screen.

This also works in month view. Organising multiple meetings and appointments is far simpler, as everything is done on the same screen. The hour-by-hour day view is still not particularly useful, but on the whole this is a huge and long-overdue improvement to the calendar.

SENSE APPS

Windows Phone 8.1 also has some new apps to help you see how your phone’s storage and internet data is being used. Alongside Data Sense, which was introduced in Windows 8 and which details your overall internet usage and helps you spot nearby Wi-Fi hotspots, Windows Phone 8.1 has Storage Sense.

This app shows you how much space is being taken up on your phone’s internal storage and gives you a breakdown of where those files are being stored. You can also choose where to store your music, photos and apps if you have an SD card installed. This is particularly handy if you like to download a lot of music or large video files, as these can automatically be set to download onto your SD card without taking up space on your phone’s internal storage. If you’d rather keep an eye on how much storage you have left, you can pin Storage Sense to your Start menu as a Live Tile, which will keep track of how much space you have on both your phone and SD card.

There’s also Wi-Fi Sense, which will automatically connect you to any available Wi-Fi hotspots to save on your mobile data usage. It’s not technically an app like Storage and Data Sense, but it can be accessed through the main Wi-Fi settings. When you connect to a hotspot, Wi-Fi Sense can automatically accept any terms of use for you, or provide your name, location, email address and phone number if the hotspot requires these details to log in.

Wi-Fi Sense also lets you share Wi-Fi networks with your contacts, so they can get online without having to enter a password. However, this only works if they have Wi-Fi Sense enabled on their Windows Phone, so friends with Android and iPhone users won’t be able to take advantage of this.

WINDOWS PHONE STORE

The Windows Phone Store has been redesigned, too. The Store’s live tile now displays important updates about all the latest releases available in the Store and popular apps are now much more prominent when you first land on the Store’s home page. On the first page alone, there was a huge range of apps on show, including games, entertainment apps, live tile showcases and several featured collections.

This is a huge improvement on the Windows Phone 8 storefront and really shows off the available apps, but the best thing about the new Windows Phone Store is just how easy it is to find additional apps to download. Instead of just three main categories – apps, games and music – Windows Phone 8.1 has many categories to choose from to help you narrow down the choice of apps before you dive into alphabetical lists.

The latest version of the Windows Phone Store makes a much better job of showing off the apps available

The categories are very similar to those in Android’s Google Play Store, but we think Windows Phone 8.1 goes one better by including another list of simple, sensibly named categories covering more specific topics. These include Games, Lifestyle, Children + Family, Travel + Navigation, Sport, Business and Photos to name just a few, and they mirror the same kind of categories you’ll find on the PC version of the Windows Store. There’s also a personalised app page that uses your Microsoft and Facebook accounts to recommend apps relevant to your interests.

Of course, a good-looking Store is nothing if it doesn’t have anything good to buy or download, but the Windows Phone Store has come on leaps and bounds since Microsoft first launched it. It still has a way to go before its range of apps are as extensive as the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store, but it has all the essentials, including BBC iPlayer, 4oD, Netflix, Spotify, TuneIn Radio, BBC News and Google Maps.

XBOX MUSIC & XBOX VIDEO

The Windows Phone Store isn’t the only app to take some design cues from its PC counterpart, as the Xbox Music and Video app has also been refreshed to look more like its PC equivalent. Whereas Windows Phone 8 combined the two services into one, Windows Phone 8.1 gives each service its own app, and both have much cleaner interfaces.

Xbox Music is largely the same, as you can still organise your music files by artist, album, song, genre, playlist or listen to the radio. This time, though, the Xbox Music Store has been fully integrated into the app, and you can browse by top music, genre or featured songs without leaving Xbox Music. We were a little disappointed it couldn’t pick up any music in our cloud-based OneDrive, but at least there’s the dedicated OneDrive app for this instead. The latest Developer Preview update also lets you see what’s currently playing straight from the Xbox Music live tile and lets you swipe the screen to advance the track.

Videos, on the other hand, are now handled by the new Xbox Video app. On top of being able to play video files from your phone, you’ll also find a Film and TV store where you can buy or stream content directly to your phone. This essentially mirrors the Xbox Video Store on PC, so you can buy or rent movies, check out the cast, read reviews or browse through related content. This was completely absent on Windows Phone 8, so it’s great to see Microsoft extending its storefront to make it just as versatile as on a PC or laptop.

CORTANA

One of Windows Phone 8.1’s more interesting new apps is Cortana. Microsoft describes Cortana as a “personal digital assistant”, but it’s essentially the company’s answer to Apple’s voice-recognition app Siri. It can make calendar appointments for you when you use voice commands, tell you the weather and fetch the latest news from the web. It’s not available by default to UK users, though, as it’s currently only being trialled in the US as a beta app. The UK Developer Preview of Windows Phone 8.1 should be getting Cortana this week.

If you’re prepared to mess around with your phone’s language settings, you can get Cortana – Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s Siri – on your Windows Phone 8.1 handset

If you can’t wait that long, there are a few things you can do to trick your phone into thinking it’s in the US, involving switching your phone’s language, region and speech settings to United States English. Your phone will need to restart multiple times to apply all the changes, but once these settings have been altered, Cortana should appear automatically in the general app menu. Read our full guide on how to get the Developer Preview here.

On the whole, Cortana worked well and was almost as good as its Apple rival. It’s nowhere near as stable as Siri yet as it was quite prone to crashing mid-request when we tried it out, but when we spoke to Cortana ourselves, it was able to recognise smaller British towns and cities, accurately perform search requests and correctly make calendar appointments for us. It also had a few witty and intelligent remarks for Halo-themed questions (Cortana is an AI in the Halo games), but not all questions produce such specific and intelligent responses. Often, we simply got a Bing search about our question, which wasn’t particularly useful or helpful in most circumstances.

Cortana was reasonably efficient at responding to voice commands to organise our life

To see how it performed against Siri, we compiled a list of questions and played them to Cortana and Siri at the same time using the Acapela online speech synthesiser, set to American English to eliminate any problems with speech or accent. Both produced answers with similar speed and simple questions such as “Where am I?” and “What’s the weather like in London today?” produced smart, personalised responses from both assistants. “Who’s the current president?” resulted in web searches rather than a specific answer, but whereas Siri listed sensible web entries such as the Wikipedia entry on the Presidents of the United States, Cortana’s first hit on Bing was a link about the president of the WHO.

When we tried making a doctor’s appointment for “Tuesday morning”, Cortana asked us whether its default option of 8am was correct and whether it should add it to my diary, but when we tried to change the time, she didn’t understand. Siri simply asked me what time my appointment was, making it much easier to schedule the correct information.

Neither assistant could tell us when our reminders conflicted with any appointments, though. For instance, when we tried to make another appointment for “5 tomorrow”, Cortana and Siri both made the appointment correctly, but when we asked them to “remind us to pick up our kids at 5 tomorrow” as well, they both created a reminder rather than a calendar appointment, so neither picked up the conflict. The result was the same even when we phrased the question differently to try and make it sound like a calendar appointment. Luckily, Cortana did recognise conflicting calendar appointments, but a lot will depend on how you phrase your request.

Cortana still clearly has a way to go before it’s as stable and efficient as Siri, but we like what we see so far and we’ll be testing the UK version as soon as it’s available.

CONCLUSION

Windows Phone 8.1 is a huge improvement on Windows Phone 8. It fixes nearly every problem we had with the previous operating system and finally makes Windows Phones almost as easy to use as iOS and Android devices. Cortana and the Windows Phone Store still have room for improvement before they’re as versatile as Siri and the Google Play Store, but with a huge range of improved on-board apps and a greater focus on personal customisation, this is easily the best version of Microsoft’s mobile OS so far.