Impressions of the build after using it for a few days:
- it's really fast and smooth, probably faster than 8.1 on my 1020
- in general use (outside of apps) it's far more stable than previous builds
- apps seem to be more stable and less buggy as well, but there's still a considerable amount of crashes with some (especially Edge)
- the new Edge interface is a big improvement over the previous one, the browser itself also feels faster than before - but it is buggy and likes to crash. Sometimes it crashes a few seconds after launching (with the address bar greyed out), only a restart fixes that
- the music app is coming together quite nicely now, it's a big step up over what we had on 8.1. While that's not that difficult, I think the new UI is genuinely nice.
- that said, the initial song discovery takes a very long time and if you back out of it can lead to stuff on your phone not being discovered,they need to fix that. Also, no live tile.
- there's still a large number of UI inconsistencies (old vs new, new vs newer, weird vs strange etc), but things are improved over the previous build and and there's a few nice touches showing up here and there
- Apps still need a lot of work both from a bug fixing and a feature perspective. I really like Outlook, but there's some way to go to make it really good (lacking options, crashing, weird orange bar at the top, sometimes starting in landscape and seemingly being stuck there forever, no live tiles or unread counts which is especially shit for the calendar).
- the people hub now no longer calls Facebook Crossy Road and it also doesn't crash anymore when you're linking contacts together, but it's still a long way from being finished. Facebook updates don't appear at the moment (only Twitter), suggested contacts don't work, no me tile etc. etc.
- Cortana is slow as fuck
- the Store still needs a lot of work
- there's still a lot of annoying bugs (one that springs to mind is that keyboard closing down after each letter you type in the search in the app list)
- battery life seems to be worse than on the previous build, but that's a bit early to say after only a few days
Overall it's a big step forward in performance with a lot of small improvements in look and feel. If you're looking for big new features you'll be disappointed, but if you're prepared to live with a few bugs and crashes I think this build is probably ready to be installed on your main phone for a lot of people.
After seeing this step between 36 & 49 I'm a lot more confident that W10 will be ready for phones in September. As for game changing features, they're not there and if they're not there yet they are very unlikely to come at the time of release.
Works fine for me, maybe try rebooting the phone.
Regarding your other issue, I'd try a hard reset.
Seems to be gone for now.
Yes, that is "normal".
Yes, go to all settings > system > notifications and select messaging
No, but there's an app called ringtone maker with which you can create ringtones from sound files/songs. Not sure if it works on W10, but it should.
Like unread counts? Still works except for apps that don't yet have a live-tile (outlook, etc.)
