Windows 10 Mobile review

The future of Windows Phone is here

Windows 10 Mobile
Windows 10 Mobile

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After two decades Microsoft has killed off Internet Explorer, replacing it with the new Edge web browser.

When Windows 10 Mobile lands on your phone Edge will be ready and waiting for you, and it has a number of new features that make this a better browser than its predecessor.

One of the new features is a Reading List, which enables you to save articles to read later – it's handy if you want to save a bunch of long-read features and other material to catch up with at the weekend.

Windows 10 Mobile

If you've ever used Pocket I was expecting a similar concept, and I'd anticipated being able to access saved material when I was offline.

Having that feature in my browser would be great, and would do away with the need for Pocket altogether, but actually Reading List is just a way of saving favourites and reminding you to keep up with them.

Windows 10 Mobile

You won't be able to read articles when you're not connected to the internet – and that's when you really want to have those articles available, otherwise you'd just bookmark them or search for them.

There's also a Reading View option for when you want to catch up on saved articles, but don't want the distraction of adverts.

Tap the book icon at the bottom right of the screen and it'll boot up Reading View, removing all the ads and page furniture for an easier reading experience.

Windows 10 Mobile

However, Reading List can sometimes screw up the formatting – if you take a look at the Far Cry Primal article above you can see that it's removed the spacing between the author name, posting date and category.

It's another good idea from Microsoft, and sometimes it works well – but not always, and 'some of the time' isn't good enough.

Popular Bing search terms now appear in a drop-down menu below the search bar as you type. It's a good little feature, but it's something Chrome and Safari have been doing for a long time – it's what Internet Explorer should have had at least three years ago.

Personally, I still don't understand why Microsoft thought we needed a whole new browser.

All these updates could have been rolled out to Internet Explorer, and we would have appreciated them just as much (where they worked properly at least); but I guess Microsoft wanted a clean slate to work with for the release of Windows 10.

James Peckham

James is the Editor-in-Chief at Android Police. Previously, he was Senior Phones Editor for TechRadar, and he has covered smartphones and the mobile space for the best part of a decade bringing you news on all the big announcements from top manufacturers making mobile phones and other portable gadgets. James is often testing out and reviewing the latest and greatest mobile phones, smartwatches, tablets, virtual reality headsets, fitness trackers and more. He once fell over.

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