Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1 (Developer Preview)

• PROS
  Appealing home-screen customization. Cortana voice-based digital assistant combines Siri's personality with Google Now's intelligence. Helpful Action Center. "Senses" help you conserve data and battery life. Excellent Swype-style shaped-text input. Quiet hours.
• CONSWeak mail and browser interfaces. App selection still trails the competition. Keyboard doesn't have voice entry.
• BOTTOM LINE
  With its new digital assistant, Cortana, Action Center, and slick home screen options, Windows Phone is ready to challenge the bigger names in mobile operating systems.

You could say that Microsoft is playing catch-up with its mobile operating system, and in some ways you'd be right. But the company has gone the extra mile to improve and innovate beyond what's offered in Apple's iOS 7 and Google's Android 4.4 with Windows Phone 8.1. Its new Cortana voice-activated digital assistant blends the personality of Siri with the behavioral learning of Google Now. The OS's unique home screen with its live updated app tiles gets even more appealing, and things like Wi-Fi Sense and Storage Sense are helpful innovations. With this release, Microsoft has removed nearly all barriers to Windows Phone's widespread adoption, and with slick new features that could pull users into the platform's fold.

Microsoft showed the newest phone OS version at its Build 2014 conference at the start of April. The Developer Preview, launched April 14, is the first time a wider audience gets to spend any real time with all the new features. Instructions for getting the Preview are on this Windows Phone Preview for Developers page. The update will roll out to existing Windows Phone 8 users over the coming months—Microsoft hasn't given a firm date, but the word on the street is that this will happen this June. Nokia chief Stephen Elop has stated that all Nokia Windows Phone 8's will be upgraded, but aside from that it's up to the mobile carriers and phone makers to make it happen. And of course it will come preinstalled on new Windows Phones after release.

Though Windows Phone 8.1 has a lot of big new features such as Cortana and a pull-down Action Center notification panel, it doesn't break existing apps the way the move from 7.x to 8 did. That said, it is a Preview, so not everything works perfectly. I was able to run its new features and existing apps, such as At Bat and Words With Friends, with very few hiccups.

Cortana

The aim of Cortana, Microsoft's digital-assistant answer to Apple's Siri and Google Now, is to incorportate only the best features of both. Cortana also replaces the woefully limited search features of Windows Phone 8. The previous search functionality was just a Bing Web search, whereas, Cortana can actually search within the phone for settings and apps (and run them). But Cortana is so much more than just phone search.

Cortana will also (with your permission) scan your email to, for example, find flight reservations and notify you if there's traffic or a flight delay. Cortana is (not unexpectedly) more respectful of privacy than Google Now. With Cortana, you know exactly what your reminders are based on, because you enter them in her "notebook." Microsoft got this idea of the personal assistant keeping a notebook from actual human personal assistant professionals.

You can invoke Cortana by touching and holding the magnifying-glass icon at the lower right of any screen or by tapping her tile. If you do the latter, you'll see her daily summary for you, with the news, sports, weather, and other topics in which you've expressed interest. I only wish I could specify the order of the sections on this page. For some reason, Weather appeared all the way at the bottom.

Your Notebook includes sections for interests, remind me, quiet hours, inner circle, places, and music searches. You choose what to include on first-use setup, but also as you ask her things. For example, when I asked who the Mets were playing tonight, the page showing the evening's schedule also offered to add the team to my notebook as an interest.

You can tell Siri to create a reminder, but with Cortana, I could actually say, "Remind me to buy Ziploc bags when I'm near Costco." I could choose a particular Costco or any Costco. Without fail, when I showed up at the bulk warehouse, the message popped up. This ability to use "geo-fencing" tied to web and personal information is limited in Siri, though it is well supported in Google Now.

One of the coolest things in Cortana—and it's something not available in iOS or Android—is the ability to remind you about something based on events and conditions, sort of like IFTTT.com. For example, you can say "remind me to ask my sister about her new beau," and she'll pop up text with the reminder the next time your sibling calls or messages. She can automatically notify you about a flight change, and let you know when a good time to leave would be, based on traffic.

Unlike Siri, Cortana only comes in the one voice. On the other hand, one advantage Windows Phone has over iOS is that Microsoft's mobile assistant lets you use text as well as your voice—handy for quiet times. Speaking of quiet times, Cortana gives you the option of letting people in your "inner circle" contact you when your phone is set to quiet hours.

Cortana is definitely surprisingly smart, but she's young and has a bit to learn. I found that Cortana's speech recognition was nearly flawless and very fast, but too often the wait while she connected to the cloud servers was just too long. Too often I just got a Web search result, but that's not an unfamiliar state of affairs to Siri or Google Now users, either. Siri is much better now than when it launched, because its servers learn as they are used, and the same should happen with Cortana. I expect she will be even better by the time Windows Phone 8.1 is generally available though Microsoft will launch her as a "beta."

New Home Screen OptionsThe tiled Windows Phone home screen was already a unique feature, and with 8.1 it gets even cleverer and more customizable. It now allows three large tiles across, great for those who don't like scrolling a lot. A Microsoft rep said people saw this capability on the big Lumia 1520 phone and wanted it on their smaller phones, too. If you made all your tiles the smallest size, you could actually have 66 on the Start screen without scrolling!

An even cooler new capability is that you can use an image behind these tiles, and tiles can be transparent:

Action CenterCortana and the new start screen may be flashier, but for me, the Action Center is the most needed addition to Windows Phone 8.1. Similar to features that appeared in Android and then iOS, Action Center lets you swipe down from the top of the screen to get access to important settings and notifications. Unlike iOS, Windows Phone lets you choose which commands appear in the four large buttons atop the slide-down panel.

Easy access to Airplane Mode alone makes this feature a boon, but maybe even more important is that now you can see basic system info like time, battery charge, and connection signal from any screen. When an app was running in Windows Phone 8.0, access to that small strip of info at the top of the screen was completely gone.

The Senses—Wi-Fi, Storage, Data, and Battery Saver
Windows Phone 8.1 adds several sensing capabilities to help you see what's using up resources on your phone. Storage sense shows you how much storage each app is taking up and lets you decide whether, for example, you'd rather save music, photos, and videos to either the phone's memory or to a memory card. Battery Saver shows you which apps are eating up your battery, so you can shut down those offenders when power is running low. Data Sense, which has already been available exclusively on Verizon phones, shows how much data you've used and which apps are using the most. It also offers a website compression service to shrink data usage by Internet Explorer, similar to Opera's "off-road" mode.

Wi-Fi Sense may be the coolest Sense: You can tell it to connect automatically to free Wi-Fi hotspots, and it will even OK the terms of use automatically. I tested this by walking into nearby Starbucks and McDonalds establishments, and it worked magically in the latter. The Starbucks free Wi-Fi triggered Wi-Fi Sense but didn't complete the connection. That service was provided by Google, which is notorious for making its services not work with Windows Phones (see Official Windows Phone YouTube app and Gmail ActiveSync support). This might not be the best practice from a security standpoint, but Microsoft is guiding the feature with known, trusted Wi-Fi hotspots. Another trick makes it easy for your friends to use your home Wi-Fi without making them enter your password. Of course, they'll have to be using Windows Phones for this to work!

Internet Explorer
The Internet Explorer version in Windows Phone gets an upgrade to IE11, with WebGL and better HTML5 support. YouTube videos will now play right on the webpage. Most pages display as you'd expect, but on a couple sites I ran into mis-rendered pages with lots of blank white space up top. The recommended settings use Data Sense, sending your browsing URL requests to Microsoft servers to reduce data use and personalize services. I'm still not a fan of the browser interface, but a big improvement is the tab button, which saves you from having to tap … and then choose "tabs" just to get to your tabs. The Maxthon Windows Phone app actually does a nicer job, and a Firefox option like the one for Android would be great. A final cool new feature is the ability to pin individual sites as start screen tiles, complete with live updates displaying on the tile! I tried this with MSN.com, and the tile flipped over repeatedly displaying different headlines.

Swype-Like WritingMicrosoft likes to point out that Windows Phone 8.1's "shape writing" is now the Guinness record holder for fastest text entry. Like Android's gesture text entry (iOS has no equivalent), Word Flow has you slide your finger in the path of the letters you want to spell. If you haven't tried this type of typing, don't be shy! You'd be amazed at how accurate it is, even if your finger strays off the path.

Windows Phone 8 already had very helpful and accurate word suggestions that pop up as you finger-type, but Word Flow is even more remarkable. Not being on a quest for the Guinness speed record, though, I didn't see much difference in ease, speed, or accuracy between this and Android's gesture keyboard entry.

One keyboard feature I do miss in Windows Phone 8.1 is the microphone button for voice entry. Cortana lets you write messages, notes, and emails with your voice, but having the capability built into the keyboard the way the other two big phone OSes do means you can use it in every app.

Windows Phone Store and the App SituationWith the 8.1 update, the Windows Phone app store has been slightly redesigned to get you more quickly to the apps that are important to you. Instead of starting out showing a text list of content types, you now see thumbnails for top app suggestions for you. Here is the first page of the old store on the left and two shots of the new one on the right:

You still can view categories, top downloads, and search for a particular app. I really appreciate that I can be at my PC browsing the Web and install a Store app remotely to my phone. Android has this ability, too; iOS does not.

One of the biggest, most-persistent complaints about Windows Phone is that it trails iOS and Android in terms of app selection. The majority of the big apps have finally arrived on the platform—with Vine, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Pandora, Kik, Twitter, and The Weather Channel available now and others like Flipboard coming soon. A good selection of games is also available, including Xbox titles like Halo, Final Fantasy, NBA Jam, and Temple Run.

Mere availability is no longer the big problem: Rather, feature completeness is what's lacking in the Windows Phone version of these apps. For example, the Words With Friends app doesn't include extras (some would call them "cheats") like the ability to count the points for a play before you move. New features like Instagram's Direct sharing are slow to show up in the Windows Phone version.

Developers will have more reasons to code for the platform soon, though. At its Build conference, Microsoft introduced what it calls the Universal App model, which will let programmers target Windows 8.1, Windows Phone, and eventually Xbox One using largely the same code.

Mail, Calendar, Phone, Included AppsA big part of what people do with their smart phones is read email, and, unfortunately, this piece is not much improved in Windows Phone 8.1. Windows Phone has an attractive, clear mail client, but functionally it's a Pontiac Aztek compared with the Tesla Model S of Android and iPhone. There's no swiping to quickly archive or delete messages, and, when I added accounts from other services like Yahoo! or Gmail to my default Outlook.com account, new app tiles appeared for each. There's no combining the accounts into one mail interface the way the iPhone does, though some users actually prefer separate clients, as PCMag's mobile guru, Sascha Segan, pointed out to me.

The stock Calendar app has been updated with a week view, and you can now swipe through dates side to side. It also helpfully shows the weather with small icons in dates and color codes for multiple calendar support.

A bright spot for Windows Phone, when it comes to included apps, is Microsoft Office. This lets you create and edit Word and Excel documents (though still no word on PowerPoint) in a clever, touch-friendly interface. The docs are saved to OneDrive, so they're accessible on any of your computers or tablets as well as the phone.

Remember making phone calls? That's something you can still do with a Windows Phone. Like iPhone's FaceTime button, Windows Phone 8.1 now lets you elevate a call to video, but using Skype. Similar to the way Apple's FaceTime only works with iOS devices, this Skype feature only works when you're calling other Windows Phones, even if the person you're calling has Skype installed.

Included Bing apps such as Weather, News, Sports, Finance, Travel, Food & Drink, and Health & Fitness are cleanly designed yet powerful. And for entertainment you get Xbox Music and Xbox Video. The latter included very popular TV shows like Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, Sherlock, and the Big Bang Theory for purchase and streaming. Xbox Music, in addition to offering a massive library for sale, now includes an Internet radio feature.

The Camera app is a big plus in Windows Phone: It offers burst mode, including the ability to create multi-exposure montages. Windows Phone also lets any third-party camera-capable app act as a "lens." And unlike iOS, Windows Phone lets you set ISO, white balance, and aperture.

Corporate FeaturesComing from the business OS leader, it's no surprise that Windows Phone 8.1 includes new features for businesses: These include an automatically triggered VPN, which turns on when you try to visit an internal website or corporate application; S/Mime for sending encrypted mail, better enterprise Wi-Fi support, and enhanced mobile-device management, which lets you whitelist or blacklist particular applications. An IT department could also simply prevent users from installing games.

This may make the OS more attractive to large enterprises. But of use for everyone is the OS's support for NFC, which enables simpler hardware setup, mobile payments, and the nifty "Tap-to-send" feature to transfer photos and other files between devices.

A final new feature coming to Windows Phone is support for two SIM cards at once. This lets you do things like use the same phone for separate work and personal numbers, or use different SIMs for calls from different geographical locations. You can even tell the phone which contacts should be fielded by which SIM.

Is Windows Phone Smart Enough Yet?
Windows Phone 8.1 now does nearly everything most people need from a smartphone—in a stylish, intuitive way. It even includes some advanced capabilities not found in iOS, such as NFC, gesture text entry, and Web installation for apps. And in many ways it's cleaner and simpler to use than Android. The new Cortana voice-activated digital assistant is very promising, and the new swipe-down Action Center panel is smartly implemented. Cortana has a thing or two to learn before she's everything you'd want her to be, but the ideas motivating her bode well. But the OS still trails in the quality and selection of third-party apps, and its browser and email clients could stand improvement. We'll re-assess this situation in a rated review when the operating system fully launches in a couple of months.