After teasing its release earlier on Thursday, Microsoft has made the Windows 10 technical preview for phones available to download for all Windows Insiders. If you’ve been itching to see how Microsoft has adapted its latest operating system to mobile platforms, you’re probably going to want to check this one out.
DON’T MISS: Download the latest Windows 10 preview right now
Before you do, you’ll have to follow a few steps that Microsoft has conveniently outlined on the Windows Blog:
- Join the Windows Insider Program
- Register your device to receive builds as over the air updates
- Builds will come to you automatically as they are ready, after being validated by engineers at Microsoft and used on their own phones
- Use the built-in Windows Feedback app to send us problem reports and suggestions
- Updates will continue all the way up to the final build that goes out to all customers
- You can roll your phone back to the previous OS any time you’d like
But before you dive in, there are a few things worth considering. First of all, Microsoft says that this is the earliest preview build it’s ever released. It’s in a significantly less refined state than Windows 10 on PC, but improvements should be anything but few and far between.
The preview is also currently available on just 6 Lumia devices: the Lumia 630, Lumia 635, Lumia 636, Lumia 638, Lumia 730 and Lumia 830. Unless you own one of these device, you won’t be able to participate in this early preview.
But if you do use one of those phone, here are some of the features you’ll be able to test out:
- Full-size Background Image for Start: We believe phones should be intensely personal – so we’ve added another option to customize the start screen with a full-size background image.
- More Quick Actions in Action Center: We’ve increased the number of quick actions available to you. Windows Phone 8.1 has four programmable quick actions – but with Windows 10 you also get an expanded view that can now have up to three rows.
- Interactive Notifications: Notifications are now interactive, allowing you to take action directly like dismissing an alarm, or seeing images for maps. For example, for text messages, when the toast pops, you can quickly reply inline via text or voice.
- Significantly enhanced speech-to-text capability: You can talk to virtually any data field you choose. Your words show up as you speak them – and punctuation appears automatically. This feature is smart enough to understand when to use ‘two’ – the number — instead of ‘too’ as in ‘also’.
- More powerful Photos app: From your very first launch, Photos will show the aggregated set of all your local photos and all your OneDrive photos
Hopefully Microsoft will expand the number of eligible devices sooner than later — the more people that get their hands on the preview, the more feedback Microsoft will have to work with. But until then, you can see the preview in action in the video below:
