Microsoft Delivers Second Windows 10 Mobile Build in Less Than a Week

UPDATED: The new build is up! –Paul

I’ve got good news and bad news for fans of Windows 10 Mobile: Today, less than a week after the previous build, Microsoft will grace us with a new build for Windows Insiders on the Fast ring. The bad? As with the previous build, you can only upgrade to build 10572 from Windows Phone 8.1, not from previous Windows 10 Mobile builds.

As you may know, Windows 10 Mobile has been on a bit of a back burner in recent months, so this suddenly (hopefully not temporarily) quickened delivery schedule is perhaps good news. (Either that or Microsoft simply has to ship something soon, since the first Windows 10 Mobile-based phones are set to ship in just weeks.)

The previous build, 10549, arrived six days ago on October 14. But the build before that,10536, shipped a month earlier.

Windows 10 Mobile build 10572 does share one similarity with the previous build: If you’re already running some Windows 10 Mobile pre-release build, you will not be offered this new build. Instead, you can only upgrade from Windows Phone 8.1. That said, Microsoft promises that the next build, build 10575, will support upgrades from any current Windows 10 Mobile builds, including 10166,10536,10549, and 10572. (Of course, they made this promise with the last build too, so…)

Here’s what’s new in Windows 10 Mobile build 10572.

Get missed call notifications and send texts on your PC with Cortana. Now Cortana notifies you on your PC (running Windows 10 build 10565 or higher) that you missed a call. And if you do miss a call, you can reply with a text to the person who called you right from your PC and Cortana will send it with your phone.

Send a text message from your PC. On that note, you can send a text message from your PC at any time, assuming you have build 10565+ on the PC and build 10572+ on your phone: Just type or speak “Text” and the name of a contact to Cortana on your PC. Again, Cortana will send the message with your phone.

Other Cortana improvements. Now, Cortana can help keep track of your leisure time, including movie and event reminders, and you can book and track a Uber rides.

Skype messaging, calling and video experience. As previously promised—and previously delivered on the PC—this build integrates Skype integration with the Messaging, Phone and Skype Video apps. Also, the Messaging app now supports animated GIFs and includes the ability to search your messages. And the Phone app has the ability to search for contacts from Call History.

Save offline maps to SD. A huge user request, fulfilled: You can now save offline maps to an SD card, not just internal memory.

Photo app improvements. Mark as Favorite returns in this build, and you can once again assign favorite photos to the app tile. There are also improvements around context menus.

Storage settings improvements. Storage settings now looks and works more like the version on the PC and lets you to install apps to an SD card or even a USB drive.

Other fixes. As you might expect, this build includes a number of fixes too, including one that bit me earlier where the Start screen didn’t load.

Known issues. And, yes, there are some known issues: Visual voicemail is broken on some devices, there are some issues on dual-SIM devices, and so on.More here.