I sideloaded the Windows Phone 8.1 preview onto my Lumia 1020 last Tuesday night and Ive basically been talking to my phone ever since, which is a weird sentence to type but here we are.
Quick background for anyone who skipped the Build keynote a couple weeks back: Microsoft opened up the developer preview program so you dont need a paid dev account anymore to get early builds. Its free now, just an app called Preview for Developers, a Microsoft account, and about twenty minutes of your evening while it downloads over wifi. I want to say mine was somewhere north of 400MB, and it ate most of an episode of something I wasnt really watching anyway.
The headline feature is Cortana, and yes, its named after the Halo AI, and yes, if you ask her about it she has a whole scripted bit ready to go. Cute the first time. Ive already asked twice more than necessary. Shes US-only for now which stings a little if youre not stateside, but I am, so I got to poke at it right away.
Heres the thing nobody tells you going in: Cortana is genuinely better at the "remind me" stuff than Siri has ever been for me. I told her to remind me to call my dentist when I get home tonight, and she actually asked what "home" meant to set up the location trigger, and now it just sits there waiting. Siri on my old phone would've just set a generic reminder with no location awareness unless you dug through three menus first. Small thing, but its the kind of small thing that actually gets used every day instead of demoed once and forgotten.
The notebook concept is the more interesting design choice honestly. Instead of some black box guessing what you want, Cortana keeps this actual list of stuff it knows about you, interests, quiet hours, who your VIP contacts are, and you can go in and edit or delete any of it. Google Now is still better at the proactive card thing, showing you traffic before you ask, but Google Now also feels like its watching everything I do and just not telling me about it. Cortana at least shows her work.
Not everything is great. The Bing dependency is annoying if youve spent three years building muscle memory around Google search shortcuts, and searching by voice sometimes just... doesnt understand a normal Boston accent, mine included, on the first try. I said "text Sarah I'm running late" twice before it worked. Also the whole thing is still very obviously a beta. I had one lockup yesterday that needed a soft reset, and the Action Center (finally, a real notification center, only took them long enough) sometimes just doesnt clear notifications when you swipe them away. Small bugs, but the kind that make you remember why you dont normally run preview software on your only phone.
Word Flow, the swipe keyboard, is the other big addition and its actually the one Ive been most impressed by day to day. I was skeptical, Ive used swipe keyboards on other platforms and always ended up back on tap-typing within a week. This ones predictions feel noticeably better, maybe because its had years of Microsofts research typing data to draw from, I dont know the actual reason, I just know Im swiping now and not tap-typing, which surprised me.
Separate from all this, and I promise this is related somehow, Ive spent probably four hours total over the past two weeks changing passwords because of the whole Heartbleed mess, and I still dont think Ive gotten to all of them. I found an old Xanga login in my password manager during the process. Xanga. I dont even remember making that account. Anyway.
Back to the phone stuff. If youve got a Lumia sitting around and dont mind occasional flakiness, the developer preview is worth grabbing just to see where Windows Phone is actually headed, because honestly this update makes the platform feel less like its playing catch-up feature-by-feature and more like it has an actual point of view on what a phone assistant should be. Whether Microsoft can get anyone to care at this point is a whole separate question I dont have an answer to. But the software itself, six days in, is better than I expected going in, bugs and all.