Windows 11 is Microsoft’s brand new flagship operating system, replacing the old-reliable Windows 10. While the new OS has completely changed the Windows experience with a fresh new look and underlying infrastructure built for the personal computers of tomorrow, Windows 11 has been light on any actual increase in functionality over Windows 10. Microsoft has attempted to improve this by releasing an update crammed with features, but that doesn’t seem to identify as a feature update.
One of the most highly-anticipated features is WSA or the Windows Subsystem for Android. This is a feature that lets Windows 11 users use Android apps on their Windows 11 devices. While it sounds impressive, it’s more of a preview feature at this stage. The feature isn’t automatically installed with the latest update, and it only lets you download and install a curated list of apps. Curated in this case means limited.
Don’t get too excited about content from Google Play Store either; you can only download Android apps from the Amazon Appstore at this stage. The Windows Subsystem for Android gives users an exciting look into the future of what might be possible on Windows 11, but for now, it’s not much to write home about.
The next feature is one that we’ve covered quite comprehensively thanks to earlier previews and snapshots; an updated taskbar. The Windows 11 taskbar is the hub of most of your operations, but in previous releases, the taskbar has been light on features. The new update adds a weather icon to where the Windows 10 Start icon used to be. The weather icon shows you the current weather at a glance, with the temperature and a brief forecast. Clicking on the icon opens up the Widgets panel for a more detailed look at the weather. If you don’t want widgets or weather, you can turn off the widgets option in your taskbar settings.
There are a host of small bug fixes, like your clock, which now appears on additional monitors you have set up, and other new mini-features like dark mode in the Notepad app. All in all, though, while necessary for updates to the taskbar, this update is rather light on how heavily the many features have been updated.
If you’d like to read more about the Windows 11 taskbar update and subsequent bug fixes, head over to our articles. If the introduction of Android and Windows 11 cross-functionality excites you more, we have a few articles about that too.
