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Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1

Michael Muchmore
 & Michael Muchmore Contributor

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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. - Operating Systems
4.0 Excellent

The 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.

Pros & Cons

    • Cortana digital assistant combines Siri's personality with Google Now's intelligence.
    • Appealing home-screen customization.
    • Action Center notifications.
    • "Senses" help you conserve data and battery life.
    • Excellent Swype-style shaped-text input.
    • Quiet hours.
    • Weak mail and browser interfaces.
    • App selection still trails the competition.
    • Keyboard doesn't have voice entry.

Although its precise rollout timing is up to carriers, the release of vastly improved Windows Phone 8.1 is imminent, with support having officially started on June 24. 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 include innovations beyond those offered in Apple's iOS 7 and Google's Android 4.4 with Windows Phone 8.1.

Windows Phone's 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 live app tiles that are both easier to touch and more informative than the other OS's icons, becomes even more appealing. Wi-Fi Sense and Storage Sense are useful, unique tools. With all these changes, Microsoft has removed most of the barriers to Windows Phone's widespread adoption.

Microsoft first showed off the newest phone OS version at its Build 2014 conference at the start of April. If you can't wait for your carrier to update your smartphone, instructions for getting the Preview version are on this Windows Phone Preview for Developers page. Nokia chief Stephen Elop has stated that all Nokia Windows Phone 8's will be upgraded, but it's up to the mobile carriers to make it happen. And, of course, it will come preinstalled on new Windows Phones, available this summer.

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PCMag got an early look at Windows Phone 8.1, running on a spiffy Nokia Lumia Icon—a reasonably priced PCMag Editors' Choice smartphone.

Though Windows Phone 8.1 has a lot of big new features, such as Cortana, new live-tile home-screen options, and a pull-down Action Center notification panel, the update doesn't break existing apps the way the move from 7.x to 8 did. 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 incorporate only the best features of both. Cortana, based on the female AI character in the Halo videogames, also replaces the woefully limited search features of Windows Phone 8. The previous search functionality was just a Bing Web search. 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 gives you more control over privacy than Google Now does, because you decide what personal information to share with her. You do this by entering your interests, locations, and relationships in your "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 you 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, reminders, 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 ask who the Mets are playing tonight, the page showing the evening's schedule also offers to add the team to my notebook as an interest.

You can tell Siri to create a reminder, but with Cortana, I can actually say, "Remind me to buy Ziploc bags when I'm near Costco." You can choose a particular Costco or any Costco. Without fail, when I show up at the bulk warehouse, the message pops 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 comes in only 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 the wait while she connected to the cloud servers was occasionally 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. The feature is officially a beta (though you'd be hard-pressed to find that fact in the feature or on the Windows Phone webpages) until the second half of 2014.

New Home Screen Options

The 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.

Windows Phone 8.1 Start Screen

Action Center

Cortana 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.

Windows Phone Action Center

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.

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Final Thoughts

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. - Operating Systems

Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1

4.0 Excellent

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.

About Our Expert

Michael Muchmore

Michael Muchmore

Contributor

My Experience

I've been testing PC and mobile software for more than 20 years, focusing on photo and video editing, operating systems, and web browsers. Prior to my current role, I covered software and apps for ExtremeTech and headed up PCMag’s enterprise software team. I’ve attended trade shows for Microsoft, Google, and Apple and written about all of them and their products.

I still get a kick out of seeing what's new in video and photo editing software, and how operating systems change over time. I was privileged to byline the cover story of the last print issue of PC Magazine, the Windows 7 review, and I’ve witnessed every Microsoft misstep and win, up to the latest Windows 11.

I’m an avid bird photographer and traveler—I’ve been to 40 countries, many with great birds! Because I’m also a classical music fan and former performer, I’ve reviewed streaming services that emphasize classical music.

Technology I Use

For everyday work, I use a good-old Dell tower with 16GB of RAM, a 12th-gen Intel Core i7 processor, and an Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti GPU that runs on Windows 11. I pair it with a 4K Lenovo ThinkVision P27u-10 monitor and a Logitech MX Vertical mouse. For offsite work, I use a 2024 Microsoft Surface Laptop with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor. Camera-wise, I moved to mirrorless from a Canon EOS 80D with a Canon 70-300mm IS USM lens. I now have a Canon EOS R7 with a 100-400mm lens, but I miss my DSLR for several reasons.

In order of usage, the software I turn to most frequently is the Edge web browser, Slack, Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft 365, Firefox, Brave, and WhatsApp. I use the Windows Phone link app to see everything on my Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra phone, which has excellent telephoto capability.

For fitness monitoring, I have a Fitbit Charge 6 and use an Anker Smart Scale P1. I’m also a streaming fan, so I subscribe to both Amazon Music Unlimited (especially for its Dolby Atmos content) and Qobuz (for its high-res sound quality and classical catalog). I recently added a Vizio 5.1 Soundbar SE, which sounds surprisingly good given its low price. To holler commands instead of using a remote control, I have the Amazon Fire TV Cube in the living room, which lets me verbally tell the TV what I want to watch. It hooks up to an LG B4 OLED TV. I have a Sonos One speaker in my kitchen that also ties in with Alexa, as does the Echo Dot 2 With Clock in my bedroom. For serious listening, I have B&W 601 speakers plugged into a Conrad-Johnson Sonographe amp and preamp, with a Cambridge Audio AXN10 streamer as source. For reading, I also have a Nook GlowLight 3.

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