Second Technical Preview of Windows 10 for phones is now available

Microsoft has released the second technical preview of Windows 10 for phones, to Windows Insiders on the Fast update ring. The latest build 10051 comes with several new features and improvements, including the Spartan web browser, Outlook and Messaging. It also expands the list of supported devices, allowing several more Insiders to try out the preview release.

The first technical preview of Windows 10 for phones was released in February, but it was only offered to a handful of Lumia handsets. The latest release on the other hands greatly expands the list as promised offering the update to a wider range of handsets.

• Lumia 1520
• Lumia 1320
• Lumia 1020
• Lumia 928, Lumia 925, Lumia 920
• Lumia 830, Lumia 822, Lumia 820, Lumia 810
• Lumia 735, Lumia 730 (Dual SIM), Lumia 720
• Lumia 640 (Dual SIM), Lumia 638, Lumia 636, Lumia 635. Lumia 630 (Dual SIM), Lumia 625, Lumia 620
• Lumia 535 (Dual SIM), Lumia 532 (Dual SIM), Lumia 530 (Dual SIM), Lumia 526, Lumia 525, Lumia 520
• Lumia 435 (Dual SIM) (DTV), Lumia 430

Unfortunately the Lumia 930 has been excluded from the Windows 10 update due to a scaling issue

How to install the Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 10051) for phones

Those who have the first technical preview installed will find the update available for them under Settings > Update & Recovery > Phone update. New users can follow these steps:

• Join the Windows Insider Program
• Download the Windows Insider app from the Windows Phone Store
• Open the app and select 'Check for update'
• Select the 'Fast Ring' when prompted and follow the onscreen instructions.
• Once completed, head over to Settings > Update & Recovery > Phone update and wait for the update to be downloaded.

The update will require your device to be appropriately (at least 50%) charged, in order to install it. It is also recommended that you fully backup your data before installing the Technical Preview and perform a reset after installing the update to ensure compatibility and stability.

What's new in Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 10051) for phones

Alongside the new build of Windows 10 for phones, Microsoft has also published a changelog detailing all the new features and improvements offered with the update.

• Project Spartan: An early version of Project Spartan is available in this flight. It uses our new rendering engine to give greater interoperability with the modern mobile web, and includes early versions of Reading View and Reading List. For now, Project Spartan is not the default browser, and exists side-by-side with IE11. You can find it in the All Apps list and pin it to your Start Screen from there. Please send feedback on sites and design.

• New mail and calendar apps: Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar are the new built-in mail and calendar universal apps for Windows 10. These new apps bring a fresh UI, with a toggle to freely move between your email and calendar without returning to the Start screen. Outlook Mail includes customizable Swipe Gestures, letting you swipe right or left to take actions like delete, flag, move or mark as read/unread. Also check out the new email authoring experience. Outlook Mail leverages the familiar capabilities of Word to create a richer email experience. You can do formatting tricks like inserting tables, adding pictures and using bullets and text. Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar connects to Office 365, Exchange, Outlook.com, Gmail, Google Calendar, Yahoo!, IMAP, POP and other popular accounts. Please note that to add or remove accounts in Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar, you do so within these apps. The Email + accounts page has been removed from the Settings app.

• New Phone and Messaging apps: You’ll see our new Phone and Messaging apps in this build. Give them a try and let us know what you think. The Messaging app has a new visual design. You can also easily upgrade from a messaging conversation to a voice call with one click of the phone icon in the new app bar. Note: If you are updating a phone from Build 9941 – please see below for a known issue regarding MMS that will require you to go use the Windows Phone Recovery Tool to roll back to Windows Phone 8.1 first and upgrade to this build in order to have MMS working on your phone.

• New People app: The new universal People app has a new visual design but will continue to be the comprehensive list of all your contacts across the services you care about such as Exchange, Outlook.com, Gmail, Facebook, etc. You’ll be able to easily manage all your contacts and quickly connect with them.

• New Maps app: The first preview of our new universal Maps app on phone is now available. Maps offers you the features and tools you need to explore and navigate the world. This includes the best maps, aerial imagery, rich local search data, and voice guided navigation experiences from both Bing Maps and HERE maps, integrated together for the first time into a single app for Windows.

• Updated App Switcher: Check out the updated app switcher by pressing and holding the back button on your phone to see your recently used apps. We've added support for landscape when invoked from an app being viewed in landscape. For large phones like the Lumia 1520, we've introduced a new grid layout so you can be more efficient at switching between apps. And we've extended the length of recently used apps to 15.

The following video from +Windows Central gives you a quick look at the new features on Windows 10 for phones.

Fixes in Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 10051) for phones

• Keyboard layout updated based on your feedback. The keyboard layout now has period, comma and emoji keys on first page of keyboard. Language switching is enabled by press-and-hold on the &123 key. There is also an option to replace the emoji key with the language switching key. 
• Cortana icon resolution fixed, so it now scales with tile size. 
• Fixed the issue where the Photos app would fail to launch periodically when attempting to add a photo attachment to an email, OneNote or Facebook item. 
• Microsoft Band sync issue fixed 
• The Photos app’s tile will now pick up the phone’s theme color before it’s launched and then start showing pictures from your collection including OneDrive in the Live tile.

Known Issues in Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 10051) for phones

• There might be situations in which auto-upload of your Camera Roll to OneDrive may not be working. Please be sure to backup your photos especially if you need to use the Windows Phone Recovery Tool to go back to Windows Phone 8.1. 
• The Office Hub has been removed from this build. You won't be able to open Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote files in this build. Preview versions of the universal Office apps will be available in the coming weeks. 
• We are redoing how text messages are handled and processed by Cortana so in this build text messages cannot be read out over Bluetooth. 
• After upgrade, some apps that have been installed onto a SD memory card will fail to launch. To fix this, uninstall and reinstall the apps. 
• About 1% of the time, incoming phone calls may not play a ringing sound. 
• Call + SMS filtering will not work after upgrade. 
• For people upgrading their phone from Build 9941, there is a bug in which your phone’s MMS settings will be lost after upgrade. The new Messaging app doesn't yet have the ability to re-enter these settings. You will need to use the Windows Phone Recovery Tool to go back to Windows Phone 8.1 and then upgrade to this build to get MMS working again. 
• Also for people upgrading their phone from Build 9941, the tiles on your Start screen for the Camera and Photos apps may be missing or corrupt. You will have to unpin any corrupt tiles and re-pin the apps to your Start screen. 
• On some phones, due to a scaling bug the dismiss button won’t be visible when an alarm is triggered. To stop your phone from “alarming “just touch the arrow and swipe up on the notification and off the screen to end the alarm. 
• On phones with 512MB of memory, apps can randomly crash due to an issue with memory management. 
• Flight mode cannot be enabled. 
• Data connections can't be disabled. 
• You may need to re-pin the Phone app after upgrade. 
• The Insider Hub is now included on Phone but may fail to launch on some phones.

Since this is still a pre-release build of Windows, it is likely you will come across other issues with the update which have not been identified in this build. If you do come across any issues, feel free to report them through Windows Feedback.


[UPDATE 1] Due to error in the database for provisioning record data, the 10051 update was not properly rolling out to all listed handsets.. Microsoft has now updated their official blog post saying that launch is delayed by 2 hours.

We discovered this morning that there was an error in the database for provisioning record data, which is required for new phones to join the Fast Ring through the Windows Insider app. The team has been working to correct it but the load on the provisioning data servers has made all operations extremely slow. To fix the issue, we are taking the service offline and updating the provisioning record data for all 5100 phone POPs. It will take approximately 2 hours for us to make the update, and validate that everything is working. This is a different service from Windows Update, so Insiders who are currently on 9941 should be able to update their phones if they are already in the Fast ring. If they are in the Slow ring they will encounter the same issue with provisioning data. We apologize for the delay on this and are working to ensure it never happens again.

If you were unable to install the update before, you should try again now, as the issue has been resolved and you should be able to install the Windows 10 Technical Preview on your supported handset.


source - Microsoft