Sometimes, the surest sign of an update’s success is how quickly it makes its predecessor look like old news. Due to the pre-release nature of the software, buggy behavior was expected and encountered where relevant, it’s called out below. The phone features the Lumia Black software package from Nokia, and as such doesn’t include the improvements coming with Nokia’s Cyan update this summer. Our review device is a Nokia Lumia Icon provided to us by Microsoft, with software version 9.825. Windows Phone 8.1 Review VideoĪdam Lein and I have spent the past six days testing Windows Phone 8.1 between New York City and Greater Boston. So despite its unimpressive version number, 8.1 is huge news for everyone who was, is, or will be a Windows Phone customer. In that sense, version 8.1 is a fairly typical upgrade.īut even the world’s most straightforward smartphone OS is a monumentally elaborate piece of software, and the improvements brought by this update touch nearly every corner of that elaborate framework, solving some of the platform’s most glaring shortcomings in the process. Less a reinvention than a honing of what came before, the new Windows Phone seeks instead to fill gaps that have long plagued the platform, cracks in a four-year-old foundation that have widened into fissures threatening the contender’s viability … or at least its ability to be taken seriously. After over a year since the last major upgrade, it’s natural for advocates and casual users alike to pine for something profound – a ground-up rewrite that propels the third-place contender to the top in one fell swoop. It might seem merely a bland truth or a bit of farcical arithmetic, but the above statement is important to keep in mind when considering Microsoft’s latest update to its distinctive smartphone operating system.

Windows Phone 8.1 is not Windows Phone 9.

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