Yesterday, after my Lumia 950 XL arrived, I noted that one of the two features I was going to try was Windows Hello. I want to start by saying that I now have this on both my Surface Book and the Lumia 950XL, and I’ve been using it on the former for quite some time now. Windows Hello on the Surface Book absolutely rocks – it’s not as instant sign on as say the Touch ID sign in capability on the iphone, which is virtually instantaneous on the latest iphones/ipads, but it is still relatively quick and definitely hands free. The latter is useful if you don’t have the keyboard attached.
Unfortunately my experience on the Lumia 950 XL has been disappointing at best, frustrating in some cases. I’ve gone in and repeatedly try to improve recognition but despite this Windows Hello only recognises me less than 50% of the time. What’s worse is that after not recognising me a couple of times it stops trying and forces me to use PIN to unlock. It would be good if it would prompt and suggest PIN to unlock, followed by perhaps a suggestion to improve recognition (perhaps to allow for different lighting conditions etc) but this should only be a suggestion, the camera should still try to identify me, especially since my head is in front of the camera and it should be able to at least detect the presence of a head, even if it can’t identify that it’s me.
The disappointing thing is that even when it does recognise me, it’s no quicker than me swiping up and entering my 4 digit PIN, and you look much less of an idiot doing it. I feel that the integration of a finger print reader would have been much better – less chance of you putting your finger in the wrong place and less environment factors to account for. Not to mention the technology is probably cheaper than the camera required to do Windows Hello with a camera.
This bring me to the final point of this post which is that I’ve bought a production device which comes with the RTM build of Windows 10 Mobile. Now of course, Windows is now a service, which means that patches and updates should come through progressively but at this point no updates have come out for regular customers. If you go to Settings and look at setting up Windows Hello, it is clearly marked as Beta…. WTF! Why have I got Beta features on a device I’ve paid a lot of money for? I don’t know when it became acceptable to ship Beta features to end customers but I think it traces back to Google (if you recall Google was in Beta for years before this tag was removed from their service). Beta testing is there for a purpose, to iron out bugs before you ship to end customers. Now that’s not to say that you can’t have some end customers as beta testers, but they should be invited/request to take part, rather than assume that every customer will tolerate unpolished, incomplete or broken features. Microsoft shipping Beta features to end customers just points to why Apple dominates the mobile market and why iOS customers rarely switch to other platforms.