Shrinking everything down allows this to happen.Ĭalendar – Before 8.1, the calendar wasn’t great. To me, Windows Phone 8 works best when you’ve got a single front screen that both shows you everything you want to see at a glance with live tiles, as well as having all your commonly launched apps. I’m a big fan of this change, as now it feels similar to the Nokia Lumia 1520’s giant 6″ screen in terms of space used. Turning this ‘On’ then gives you a lot more tile space, which I haven’t even managed to fill yet: First is having a photo background for your tiles, which will probably make your tiles unreadable (unless you pick the right photo that’s not very detailed), and more interestingly the ‘Show more Tiles’ option. Start Screen – At first glance this is no different, but under Settings > System > start+theme, there are two things you can do. Now you can control it once you’re in an app, as I usually have it off for lying in bed where gravity is going the wrong way for the accelerometer, meaning my screen orientation is sideways. It also can take you to the settings page, which for me means one less tile on the start screen.Īnother handy part of the Notification Center is the ability to turn screen rotation on and off. Yes, mine’s a bit blank but it shows you unread emails, SMSes and so on. I see this as a standard requirement for a smart phone now, and this notification screen gives you enough information. Notification Center – Yes, Microsoft has followed Apple who followed Google. They nicely tell you this when you try to take your first screenshot (say if you were writing an article): Screenshots – The button combination used to be Power and Start, but it’s now Power and Volume Up. 8.1 is a BIG update, and here’s some of the more interesting bits I found: Overcoming this, I was looking at a phone that had many obvious improvements. A very smooth process but don’t do this when you’re expecting a call.Īfter upgrading I had a headache, but that was unrelated.
On my Nokia Lumia 1020, there was a small 2mb update which took about 10 minutes to install, before the big 8.1 (of unknown size) update which took about 25 minutes.
The upgrade process isn’t very exciting, but can take a while. This is actually a decent way to let people who are happy to play with an update do so, before released to the general public. In this case, a developer is anyone who downloads and briefly sets up the Preview for Developers app and then runs a phone update. The ABC News app is available now in the Windows Phone Store - you can download it here.The Windows Phone 8.1 OS update is now available to ‘Developers’.
In comparison, the iPhone has 850,000 apps and the Google Play Android store is said to be nearing the 1 million app count.
The Windows Phone app marketplace has 160,000 applications and sees 200 million monthly downloads, Microsoft announced on Wednesday. It features a Trending Stories section, which showcases the most popular articles and videos people are looking at and sharing on Twitter and Facebook. If you are reading this article on your Windows Phone device and want to share it with someone else who has a Windows Phone you can tap the phones together.īeyond all those tricks, the app just provides ABC News content, including live video streams and live blogs during breaking news situations. The app also supports Microsoft's tap-to-share feature.
More Apps for Windows: Flipboard and Facebook Head to Windows 8 You can also set the app as a your lock screen so you can see headlines when you wake up your phone. Pin the technology section and it will refresh with headlines and bring you right to our tech articles and videos.
For instance, you can pin specific section tiles to the home screen. Once installed, the ABC News live tile on your home screen will update with the latest headlines, tap into it and you'll have access to all our articles and videos in a tile-based interface that closely matches the operating system's look and feel.īut there are also a few extra features. The app's design is similar to our Windows 8 app, which launched in October.