• Diyan
• On July 11, 2015

More performance improvements over the last public preview

Yesterday, Microsoft released Mobile build 10166 to Windows 10 Insiders and I have already spent several hours with this build on my daily driver- Nokia Lumia 1020.

Build 10166 is definitely smoother, faster and more stable than the previous version – 10149. The installation process was painless, as well as resetting the phone and restoring from an archive. Most of the bugs I found in build 10149 have been fixed – setting a background photo works; the photo app loads faster; sending and opening photos via third party apps works, the action center is smoother.

The multitasking capabilities in build 10166 have been improved – opening and resuming apps are faster and there are no resuming screens. The battery life may have been improved too, but I need to use the phone for a couple of days to give more accurate conclusions.

The new features in this build are:

• A bigger battery icon
• New icons for Battery Saver and File Explorer
• Annoying animation for People Live Tile
• The action center can be expanded / collapsed by tapping
• Window Store drops the Beta Tag, the old Store has been retired

I found some issues on my phone:

• Lumia Photo apps are not available in the Windows 10 Store. Lumia Camera, Lumia Creative Studio and the other apps cannot be installed on the phone.
• The Store is still buggy
• The animation while switching between apps in Multitasking view is a bit choppy.
• The Glance screen settings disappeared from Extras after I hard reset the phone. The workaround is to change the setting as you want as soon as you perform a hard reset. Otherwise, you could be stuck with Glance Screen always turned on.

Overall, I found build 10166 to be quite good for daily use, but if you have a low-end device such as Lumia 520, 530, 630 etc. you may proceed with caution, because these preview builds are still not optimized to run well on less powerful hardware.