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.
A few days ago, Gartner released some depressing numbers for people who have been rooting for Windows 10 Mobile to break out on its own anytime soon. The figures put Windows Phones and Windows 10 Mobile devices at just 0.7% of the global smartphone market share in Q1 2016, dashing hopes of Lumia 950 creating any newfound adoption of the platform. This may not be surprising, given Microsoft isn’t focusing on mobile this year, but landing under 1% market share is never good to hear for Microsoft fans.
According to the discouraging wording of a Microsoft blog post, the Lumia line of phones is likely not going to be continuing any farther. In a press release from Microsoft, the company stated that it “will continue to develop Windows 10 Mobile and support Lumia phones such as the Lumia 650, Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL, and phones from OEM partners like Acer, Alcatel, HP, Trinity and VAIO.” There is no mention or even suggestion of further Lumia phones being manufactured here, which suggests that we may not see first-party Windows 10 Mobile devices until we hear about the Surface Phone.
Windows 10 Mobile Insider build 14342 released to the fast ring a few days ago, fixing several issues with Windows 10 Mobile. Among the addressed problems are app crashes, Groove Music bugs, and Windows Hello problems. The build also brought more Cortana functionality to users in Ireland.
The Wallet app for Windows 10 Mobile is coming back in style, and we found some leaked images to prove it. The new look for Wallet brings it more in line with what Windows 10 Mobile apps tend to look like and is pretty sleek compared to the older version. The new version is also bringing loyalty cards, barcode scanning, the ability assign categories to cards, and color options for marking selections. For an app that was previously criticized for doing essentially nothing, the new facelift is more than welcome.
That’s about it for this week. If you want to stay up to date, you can keep your eye on our Windows 10 Mobile tag for more news as it happens.
