Microsoft have made the Technical Preview of Windows Phone available for Windows Insiders. This is an early look of the Windows 10 for Phone and there is a long blog post with warnings and caveats.

The main limitation is it is only for a small set of Lumia’s and not the high end 1520 and 930 as expected. The phones that are supported are the Lumia’s 630,635,636,638,730 and 830.

The reason for the limitations Microsoft say are due to how the phones’ memory is partitioned, I expect many disappointed Windows Phone fans but Microsoft have their reason:

Some context on why we chose these and not higher end phones like the 930/Icon or 1520: We have a feature that will be coming soon called “partition stitching” which will allow us to adjust the OS partition dynamically to create room for the install process to be able to update the OS in-place. Until this comes in, we needed devices which were configured by mobile operators with sufficiently sized OS partitions to allow the in-place upgrade, and many of the bigger phones have very tight OS partitions.

So if you have one of the supported devices and want to test it out you can join the insiders program.

The new features of Windows 10 on phones were shown at the January event:

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

If you have one of the supported devices and want to take the plunge you should read Microsoft’s blog post as they explain some of the bugs:

Known issues

This is still an early build and while there are many things that work great, there are also known bugs and things that just don’t work quite right yet. Remember that you’re seeing a work in progress, and a huge goal of the Windows Insider program is to work with a large community of people to provide feedback. Here are the big issues that we think you should know about for this build. In most cases a fix is coming in a future build, but a few have workarounds you can try in the meantime.

Issue Workaround
Existing alarms will not be migrated to Windows 10 Reset alarms after upgrade
Wi-Fi settings don’t roam when phone is upgraded to Windows 10 Manually set Wi-Fi settings when on Windows 10
VPN not available in current Windows 10 builds. Setting will fail to launch. Coming in a future update
Additional language keyboards may not be present and may not be able to install on US builds after upgrading to Windows 10 Reopen the Windows Insider app and re-select Insider Fast/Slow again. The download of keyboard packages will then work
Photos app will fail to launch periodically when attempting to add a photo attachment to an email, OneNote or Facebook item. Try again. Succeeds after a few attempts.
Quiet Hours is missing the automatic rule that enables Quiet hours during calendar appointments marked busy. Also the setting “Anyone breaks through if they call 2 times in 3 minutes” us unchecked but enabled.
Apps are not displayed in Battery saver after the upgrade.
Access Point Names (APNs) in recovery images can fall out of date. For some phones/networks, this will block the cellular data and MMS capabilities of a phone when recovering back to the base image. Before using the Windows Mobile Recovery Tool to recover, record the specific APN settings on your phone.  Set manually once phone restored
Cellular data not working while roaming, despite enabling data roaming The setting doesn’t work the first time it’s enabled. Turning off and then turning on again will enable data while roaming
Using a Bluetooth headset while playing back video results in low frame rate for video, due to a bug in the interaction between video playback and Bluetooth. Use wired headset for listening to audio when playing videos.
Sync to Microsoft Band doesn’t work after updating to Windows 10. If you have your phone synced to Microsoft band, it will not pair after the update to Windows 10. After upgrade to Windows 10, go to Bluetooth settings, un-pair the Microsoft Band device and re-pair it.
DataSense resets data use history on upgrade to Windows 10. No workaround. Will calculate correctly after the reset.
Trying to set lock screen picture will fail at times Re-attempt the operation.
After upgrade, tapping on “Playlist” from start screen or from within Music App fails to play music. Playlists are greyed out.
Cortana tile and settings are missing on the start screen after upgrade Go to app list and re-pin the tile

 

Microsoft will roll it out to additional devices once the “partition stitching” is in the OS and then I will probably put it on my Lumia 1520, my son has a 630 I wonder if he will notice if I “borrow” it?

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