Microsoft today pushed Windows 10 Mobile Redstone Build 14342.1003 to Fast Ring as the latest Redstone build with additional fixes over the last Build 14342. Since it is a patched version of Build 14342, it doesn’t bring any new features, but should offer better user experience theoretically. So time for our evaluation of the build. Watch our Hands-on performance, multitasking and navigation demo of the Build 14342.1003 and read our Installation experience and Impressions.
Installation Experience:
Just like Build 14342, the Installation experience has been mixed to good for the Build 14332.1003, though some of you have reported issues in upgrading to this build. It took around 50-55 minutes for the build to get downloaded, installed, data migrated and the devices getting up and running on one of the device. On other device it took around 1 hour 10 minutes. While we didn’t face any issue with Data migration post installation of the update, you may face it and best is to wait and let it do its thing and finish data migration. In case it takes too much time try a soft reset and it may work finally. You can refer to our common issues and errors fixing guide for more.
You will be usually notified for a restart when the download has completed in background. It may require up to 1 GB of free storage. So, check the storage before you upgrade and you can check our tutorial on how to prepare for upgrade to Windows 10 Mobile.
Hands-on Impressions (Performance, Multitasking):
Here is what you can notice in our hands-on video demo.
- During our hands-on with the Build 14342.1003 we found it to be generally responsive during start-screen navigation, apps list scrolling, opening and closing of settings.
- Microsoft Edge seems loading pages bit faster as compared to last Build and swipe navigation is really impressive.
- Native apps like Microsoft Edge, Camera, Outlook Mail & Calendar etc work fine
- Mobile Data and Wi-Fi works fine and without any issue
- Gaming seems to work without issues. Video streaming and playing also works fine without any issue like flickering faced on earlier builds.
- Generally Multitasking works fine but Games take time in resuming and apps may crash during multitasking. Read more in Bugs & Issues below
- Battery Life seems promising so far during our hands-on usage of the Build
Major Bug & Issues:
- Microsoft needs to improve the RAM management on Redstone. The issues of Apps crashing in background is still there and seems more prominent when you multitask with a game opened in background.
- Even on Build 14342.1003 Bluetooth experience is sub-par. Microsoft needs to do something about the Bluetooth functionality. It takes lots of time in even pairing two devices running Redstone builds. We tried and failed in sending images from one device to another even after pairing both of them.
- It is not frequent but swiping down to close Apps in Multitasking screen doesn’t seem to close the apps and the “closed apps” open one by one, till the time you close them again.
So, Build 14342.1003 doesn’t seem to really offer much over Build 14342 even in terms of experience with issue of Apps crashing in background during multitasking. In our opinion Microsoft needs to fix these nagging issues around multitasking that directly affect user experience. Our hands-on with this build is still brief and we may be able to find more bugs and issues after playing with this build for some more time. We also want to make it clear that it is our hands-on experience with the build and your experience may vary and may be better or worse than ours.
We must mention that we haven’t done hard reset on our devices but we recommend if you are facing lots of issues. You can read our guide to fix commonly known Windows 10 Mobile upgrade, installation and usability issues.
