Technology Ramblings

Now that the Redstone 1 branch of Windows 10 development has ended with the release of the Anniversary Upgrade 1607 - Build 14393.5, the focus now turns to the Redstone 2 branch - which is expected to complete sometime in Spring of 2017.   The common POV is that will sometime in April. The big question is what will Redstone 2 bring to the table in terms of new features and capabilities ? With Redstone 1 - the big new features were directly addressed at the Build Conference in March.  They included: 1. A big emphasis and expansion of Microsoft Ink.  So more integration across more apps and some cool things like rulers and app relevance. 2. Cortana taking a bigger role - again with more integration across more apps -  like Skype - and access via the lock screen.  Also some backend capabilities like the Cortana Intelligence Engine. 3. Updates to MS Hello to support biometrics as well as integration with Edge for site logins. 4. BASH shell integration th...

On Friday, July 29 - MS annouced the release of Windows 10 Anniversary Upgrade to the the Windows Insider Release Preview ring.  This was part of the preparations for Aug 2 and also allowed those who were not interesting in getting all of the intermediate builds in Redstone to get the upgrade a few days early. Of all of the machines in my home, I intentionally left one at the Threshold 2 1511 10586 based release from November.  It was my wife's machine and I knew she would not tolerate getting the high frequency of new builds that the Fast Ring provided.   She did get all of the Cumulative Upgrades and so was at 10586.494 as of July 29. So I decided to go ahead with the upgrade.    But it was not as smooth as I expected.    My wife's MS account was registered as an Insider - so I went into Settings and turned on Insider and entered her account info.    But almost immediately I ran into a problem, where Windows kept stating that "Y...

IDC recently published their Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker data for Q2 2016. In Q2 of 2016 343.3M smartphones were sold.  Similar to Q1 this was an extremely modest gain of only 0.3% over 2015 Q2 sales of 342.4M units. The top five vendors maintained their ranking - so Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Oppo and vivo in that order.  #1 Samsung sold 77M units up 5.5% over 2015 and increased their overall market share to 22.4%.   #2  Apple once again saw a dramatic decline in sales of 15% - selling 40.4M units compared to 47.5M units last year and it's market share dropped to 11.8% from 13.9%.  The 40.4M units was Apple's lowest unit total in 7 quarters. The big gainers where the next 3 vendors - all Chinese focusing on the home market - where Apple was the big loser seeing a 33% decline in unit sales year over year from 13.2M units in 2015 to 8.8M in 2016.   #3 Huawei sold 32.1M units and increased market share to 9.4%. Huawei is not only doing w...

Monday afternoon MS released another Windows 10 Cumulative update to Fast Ring Insiders for PC & Mobile.  This update bumps the build to 14393.5 My biggest question is why ? The updated seems to have addressed just two or three issues with some repeats of 14393.3 listed items.  Here is the official list: We have improved reliability and performance of Microsoft Edge with AdBlock and LastPass extensions enabled. These extensions should continue to work after installing other extension updates from the Store.  We fixed an issue causing battery to drain due to runaway CPU processes while a device is idle. We also fixed a battery life issue due to the proximity sensor always running on some devices.  We fixed an issue causing Store apps to stop launching due to a licensing issue. We have fixed an issue that results in Windows Updates being delayed on systems with Connected Standby. We fixed an issue where the Korean IME would not have the correct compositi...

Late on Friday, MS released a cumulative update to Windows 10 Build 14393 which bumped the version to 14393.3. 14393.3 addressed the following specific issues. We have fixed an issue where keyboard input on some Windows tablet devices would not rotate to landscape normally. We have fixed an issue that results in Windows Updates being delayed on systems with Connected Standby. We have fixed a problem with text input with Korean Input Method Editor (IME) in some Store apps. We fixed an issue causing Store apps to stop launching due to a licensing issue.  We have fixed an issue with apps that synchronize using DDE for inter-process communication As always I install the update across desktop, laptop, tablet and phone platforms and in all cases the update was smooth.  On my Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet I was not experiencing the keyboard issue described.  And on any platform I was not experiencing any Store crashes. I can report on Mobile that an update to the Mail ...

This week AdDuplex published their latest usage statistics for Windows Phone/Mobile. Worldwide - older 2 series (520, 920) 3 series (535, 630, 635, etc) and 4 series (640, 640XL) devices dominate the top 10 with 68.8% of all devices and none of the newer 5 series devices (550, 650, 950) showing up in that top 10. Nokia/Microsoft devices still dominate usage @ nearly 97% of all devices with Samsung, HTC, Huawei and BLU scrambling for the remaining 3%.   The new Acer & HP devices have not shown up yet as they are just released.   We probably won't see any indication of their existence until the September report. Overall - Windows 10 Mobile usage has only inched up 1% in the last month to 11.9% of all devices with Windows 8.1 @ nearly 80%.  The UK, Italy and Germany do have higher acceptance rates with Germany the clear leader approaching 30%.  That 11.9% upgrade rate is a little more than half of the estimated 20% of PCs running Windows 10.  I ...

Today MS released Windows 10 Build 14393 to Fast Ring Insiders for PC and Mobile. Just as with 14390 - 14393 according the the announcement contained a relatively small number of fixes. Just 2 for PC We have improved the reliability of Start, Cortana, and Action Center.  You should now be able to mount iPods as USB mass-storage devices. and 3 for Mobile We fixed an issue resulting in rapid battery drain when Visual Voicemail syncs voicemail messages on Dual SIM devices like the Lumia 950 XL.  We also fixed an issue causing some battery drain on older devices like the Lumia 535, 640, 735, 830, 930 and Icon.  We fixed the issue causing Voice Recorder to not show up consistently as an option for Call Recording. A app update was released last Friday that fixes this issue. Make sure you have the app version 10.1607.1931.0.  The announcement also called out some known issues with BlueScreen reboots on Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 related to a camera ...