Welcome back to our weekly “Windows 10 Mobile news recap” series where we go over the top stories of the past week in the world of Microsoft’s mobile operating system. Let’s get started.
Microsoft is set to roll out a bunch of new emojis with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. “These new emoji are designed to be detailed, expressive, and playful. Their larger size takes full advantage of every pixel and the two-pixel outline allows for emoji to appear on any color background without loss of fidelity,” Microsoft explained. The company has also added several ninja-cat emojis too! Read this story here.
At the start of last week, Microsoft released Windows 10 Mobile build 10586.218 to Release Preview ring and retail devices. A full changelog for the update is listed below for your reading pleasure:
- Reliability, performance and stability improvements.
- Support for Visual Voicemail on Dual SIM phones.
- Improvements for Bluetooth connectivity, including the reliability of connecting to and staying connected with Bluetooth devices.
- Fix for a problem that caused audio playback to get occasionally interrupted in Groove Music and other music apps when phone display was turned off.
- Improvements for Microsoft Edge browser, including support for configuring a prompt before a file download occurs, support for background downloads, and a fix for a problem where opening a link from an another app wouldn’t load the web page.
- Reliability improvements for Cortana reading text messages aloud and usability improvements for Quiet Hours feature.
- Improvements for Store reliability, including a fix for a problem that prevented some apps from being updated and installed.
- Fix for a problem that occasionally caused some apps to show blank tiles after upgrading from Windows Phone 8.1.
Improvements for PC connectivity via USB on some phones that were upgraded from Windows Phone 8.1.
Microsoft is bringing more customization options to quick actions found in the Action Center on Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile, with latest internal builds allowing the user to drag-n-drop actions into any order they please, making for a much more personalized and customizable quick action bar. You can read that story here.
Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview build 14322 was made available to Insiders this past week, adding new improvements to the Action Center, Settings app, Cortana and more. You can watch us go hands-on with this new build below.
Microsoft recently announced that a preview of Messaging Everwhere would be arriving soon for Insiders, but here at WinBeta we’ve managed to get an early first look at how the feature works. Unsurprisingly, it works exactly like Skype integration used to work, except instead of using Skype, it uses your cellular connection instead. You can watch it in action below.
At the end of the week, Microsoft News published a story extolling the virtues of engineer Dave Cutler, who’s decade-long career had a profound impact on the technology industry and on Microsoft specifically. Buried in that story was a tidbit about how “phones will soon have a 64-bit operating system.” Hmm?
Apparently, app update notifications have returned in the latest internal Windows 10 Mobile build. This means that, if you get an update to your apps, you’re going to get a notification informing you of this. While this might not be an incredibly important thing for a lot of Windows 10 users, the fact that Microsoft took a second to implement this feature again means a whole lot to a select portion of people. With any luck, this feature is brought back into the fold for every Windows 10 Mobile user sooner than later and isn’t removed (yet again) at the very last minute.
Stay tuned for another exciting week of Windows 10 Mobile news.
