welcome to day 14 of the i switched
video blog now i've had a lot of christmas criticism
criticism that uh i don't know what i'm doing in Windows phone 8 and this much
has been true especially up till now because i haven't known what i was doing
which is the point of this video blog however
in the last couple of weeks i have picked up an awful lot of cool stuff
that i'm going to show you guys some of which is to do with new things i found
that i like or dislike and some of which is to do with things that i've
discovered that are actually way better than i thought so why don't we start
with the fantastic copy paste so if i were to look for say for example
shaw phone number this has to be just the super
most elegantest copy paste that i have ever seen so here's that contextual
search so hopefully this is going to search web yep there it goes
shaw contact us and all i got to do is
find a phone number touch it
okay well it didn't pick it up that time but check this out anytime you highlight
something there's your little copy next time you go to a text box it'll just be
sitting there ready for you to go ahead and paste it so i love the way it does
copy paste another thing i discovered is the it's that Windows phone jumps very
cleanly between wi-fi and cellular data so you know how it has that feature
where it scans for wireless hotspots around you
that's cool it's also kind of annoying because as you're driving around
there'll be little notifications coming up hotspot hotspot hotspot well they're
all protected you can't use them however what i noticed is that even compared to
iOS and Android there was a power outage
um and in our studio and slick's phone
you couldn't load up a page mine did and i was like oh but i'm connected to wi-fi
Windows phone 8 automatically figures out oh well it's not working so why
don't i just use cellular yay i personally think that's awesome
because it's so annoying when you have a flaky Wi-Fi connection that you're connected to but is too flaky to
actually load a page and it just gives up forever it's frigging annoying so it
actually finds a way to load the page which i think is absolutely great
um oh yeah so for those of you who were criticizing me for not finding the
multitasking interface you're right i didn't i did not find the back button to
use the multitasking interface that intuitive i also still don't really like
it because the way see how do you see how smooth the slide is you can't
actually click anything until it's stopped so that makes it a little bit
challenging for me personally to quickly
navigate to something that i'm looking for because you have to kind of
stop it stop stop and then you're actually able to navigate to something
within the multitasking interface but it's a lot better than what i thought it
was which was just press the Windows key and have everything close on you so
there you go i probably could have figured this out if i'd noticed the notification that
comes up the first time you turn on the phone that sends you to the Windows site with some helpful tips and tricks did
not see that for those of you who said my cloud media app
is probably only not working correctly resuming the
playback because i wasn't using multitasking it looks like that's not
quite the case even if you skip and cloud media i've decided is an
acceptable substitute for uh for air video it's not perfect
because i mean it doesn't resume and all that kind of stuff but it's sort of it's
getting me by so check this out if i multitask and go
somewhere else let's go back to shaw tech support then we multitask back
to a show it is going to
press play even though it knows where it is
it is going to take me back to the beginning of the show so this is probably just a bug within the o and of
course the one time that i'm trying to prove a point here
it doesn't do that so there you go trust me guys usually when i wait a bit go do
a few things and then go back to it it doesn't it doesn't work it just goes
right back to the beginning of the show um so oh oh the stock twitter app holy
crap i don't even know if it's still on my phone but i mean you got people complaining that
there's no native facebook app but quite frankly if the native facebook app ends
up anywhere near as bad as the stock twitter app then yeah i don't think
we're really missing anything so here check this out
okay i want to reply to everyone here
oh replies to no okay
reply no oh they're all gone uh
okay how do i reply to all okay hashtags what i can't even reply
all it's freaking ridiculous however i had i had viewers point out this
particular app which is called oh yeah this was another thing that was pointed
out to me as well is that if you click on something and expand it you can see
what it's called then you can put it back if you don't remember for whatever
reason you go back so rowi is awesome this is probably the best twitter app
that i've yet encountered it's extremely clean it looks very Windows 8 ui
gorgeous it scrolls well it's uh it's
very very elegant in terms of new tweets integrating pictures you can sort of
pick whatever pictures you want you can basically you can just do all the stuff
that you should be able to do in a twitter app very very easily i really
really like it so that's all from january 24th this is going to end up
being a long video um xbox music on the desktop i wasn't able to use i had
someone suggest to me that i use that because i don't have Windows 8 yet
however the um the subscription is kind
of awesome you just basically go to the xbox music store it's 100 bucks a year
you go okay top albums i want to listen to some justin bieber i can either
download it or just stream it and
there you go just like that so it's extremely fast uh it's not something i
had pre-cached on my phone let me tell you that much uh tansy was suggested to
transfer sms but it's 20 bucks so i didn't bother i just decided you know what i'm gonna live without my old sms's
plugging in the headphone jack on this particular phone makes a bit of a staticky noise so unplugging and
plugging it causes a little bit of interference i found it kind of annoying
but it's not a huge deal it's just something i wasn't really used to
beats audio needs to be off i think i mentioned that last time for me to enjoy
it because i find it boosts up the bass too much so that's january 26th let's
move on to january 28th skydrive integration is awesome
i actually tried to do a so it syncs all your photos
automatically which is great because you just sit down at any other computer where you have skydrive hooked up and
they're just all kind of there as soon as it's anywhere near wi-fi it'll upload
them very very cool and this is amazing
so the way oh wait no i'm not moving on to that yet sorry sorry sorry not that
so yeah convenient not to have to worry about syncing things it syncs your app list as well as your photos your
documents and pretty much whatever else you want your settings all that good
stuff um nokia drive nokia drive i wanted to
use it on the 28th but i discovered that you can't oh hold on no no that's going
to have my my gps for where i am right now which is not optimal
but nokia drive doesn't allow you to download maps
for a location where um
hold on i'm just going to go like somewhere else there let's look in the middle of the countryside so check this
out it doesn't allow you to download maps when you're on 3g even though the files
aren't that big and you can say yeah no i really do want it it's okay it won't
let you do it but i love the fact that you're downloading maps offline and
you're able to use your gps even if you have no data connection
phenomenal absolutely awesome and the way the navigation works in this app the
turn by turn is outstanding i absolutely love it so there you go january 29th
music and contacts navigation i had complained that um when i go to my music
library so my collection uh i said i had to scroll down like this
i was wrong all you have to do is click any one of these letters and then you
can navigate directly to artists or albums or songs or whatever else
starting with that letter and that is the quick navigation i personally don't
find this quite as fast because it's two clicks as just having a scroll here but
this is way better than what i thought it was and honestly it's it's fine as
far as quick navigation goes sort of thumbs up maybe just like one and a half
thumbs up you can swipe notifications away to the right so notifications that come down on
the top i had said you can't get rid of them you swipe them to the right i'm sorry guys this wasn't intuitive to me
as a Windows user i'm used to something comes up i click somewhere else to make
that other thing go away so this was a new sort of ui thing for me i missed it
but there you go you can get rid of them quickly if you need to uh there's an app
for map monitoring battery i think this is a kludgy solution because you can see
here there's no percentage you can't turn that on you have to actually get a
separate app to tell you what your battery life percentage is at it also
gives you some neat tips about how to um you know preserve more battery life
suggest things like turning off nfc which can be a bit of a battery hog
you know closing apps rather than leaving them running in the background so cool little stuff like that but this
isn't useful for when i'm in a browser say for example and i want to know what
my battery life is oh how do i do that oh i can't even see the bar now so
yeah it's not perfect still but it's better than i thought because at least
you can get an app that tells you the percentage ah i said rowie's awesome ah the people
hub so i've spent more time with people now um actually i'm a shut-in i've spent no
time with people but i've spent more time with the people app no this is the me app that's a different one there it
is people um so people's cool because it's great for
monitoring other people uh however what i've noticed about it is
that it's not okay so together that's for groups it's really not that great
for um communicating with other people
so if i go what is it
oh if i create like a great contact no
where is it twitter i don't know show updates yeah
so it's great for monitoring then you go to the me one and i don't think these
should be two separate apps so look at this i want to post an update i want to
post to twitter where how do i add a photo to it
okay maybe you can do it maybe i'm just totally wrong but come on why why is
this hard um i very much prefer rally
and um yeah i'm mostly a twitter guy that's one
thing i wanted to mention on january 29th as well is i don't miss facebook at
all actually i totally don't miss having facebook on my phone because the things
i care about with facebook things like being able to message someone are
integrated into either people or my
messaging application hold on let me just make sure there's nothing there um
or my messaging application here which is okay you guys will just
have to take my word for it let me just find someone there we go oh i don't have
diesel on facebook do i have the crazy russian on facebook
i don't have the crazy russian on facebook well okay between the people
app and the messaging app you can message someone pretty much any way you'd want without an official facebook
app so like i said i actually just totally don't miss it
and then people allows you to monitor people's facebook updates
anyway so yeah uh moving right along let me just see if
we missed anything yep uh Windows phone.com freaking awesome so
there are some pretty cool features there you can ring
lock track erase install apps and
uh you can do a full wipe of the phone from windowsphone.com which is pretty
freaking cool did you zoom in on that that's right but
then it wouldn't focus okay that's probably just as well because my phone number's on there but the point is that
you can see where your phone is you can ring it so you can find it if it's under something you can even set your phone
within the find my phone app itself
which we're gonna just go find uh so you go to settings
settings find my phone check it out so you can
tell it hey save my phone's location periodically and before the battery runs
out send apps to my phone using push notifications not sms
very very cool stuff and i mean those are huge features if you're using this
for like for work or anything like that although i did found one kind of neat
flaw because i had thrown my sim in an
htc 8s and done a full migration so i
did a backup and restore the backup is completely automatic i didn't have to do
anything to do it all you have to do is put a sim in a new car in a new phone
boot it up log in and say hey i want to restore from that phone and it does
everything even even now like it's getting all of my text messages and
installed on my apps it does everything but arranger live tiles which is very
very cool so i could go sim out sim in
and this phone would be as up to date as this one even all my text messages are
syncing on the fly now that this phone is logged into my skydrive account so i
absolutely love that it's very smooth compared to the iOS way okay obviously
it doesn't do all your music and media but you can copy that manually because
all you got to do is plug in a usb cable yay compared to itunes so way way more
elegant as an iOS user though i'm finding i'm
finding persistent soft buttons down here a real problem because sometimes my
leg through the pocket will press a button when i have like a video playing
and then i have an earbud in or something like a youtube music video or
something i'm listening to it'll press stuff and then it'll go places and i'm
finding that sort of disruptive overall i mean i i like having hard
buttons here but i could probably get used to it in time
what i'm doing right now is i'm turning it around in my pocket so that it
doesn't bump stuff but it's just it's kind of a clutchy solution we're moving
on to january 31st within the settings things are linked in multiple places i
really like this so back to settings um
so you don't have to fuss around trying to figure out sort of what logic was
used by whoever set it up so for example sms
is under both uh backup and messaging
so if you go back up so you can have all of your text
messaging settings there so you can click that to go into it in more detail
or you can see it within ah this i love
okay i actually had a pocket pc back
when those were cool and why doesn't iOS implement this
snooze why can't you snooze a notification on iOS that's awesome
remind me in 10 minutes freaking amazing like what i want to go
back into my calendar and like reconjigger it for 10 minutes from now
because i don't have time right now no i want to snooze it's awesome love it
so i set that up so that i could show you guys that but it kind of surprised me so now i forget where i was
the thing about the browser if i had to complain about anything it's snappy it
scrolls quickly it's responsive but it's two
touches to get to my tabs i wish it was one touch to select tabs um
it's a minor thing i don't use tabbed browsing that much on my phone but there
you go uh copy paste is outstanding yeah i
already talked about that everything everything that's been driving me crazy
about the 8x keyboard it turns out is purely a form factor thing because i
tried using the 8s for a day and that fixed every complaint i had about it so
you can see with the size of my hand this is a reach for me i can barely make
it oversee i pressed the search button trying to make it over to here which is
where the keyboard would be annoying with the 8s on the other hand i can
easily and comfortably type no matter
what and i don't have to yeah i recommend it it's fine i didn't use it
much so i can just go yeah hello
this is a queue and i won't press the search
button so i thought that the keyboard was just kind of difficult for me to use
it's nothing to do with the keyboard keyboard is fine it's just the 8x is a
little bit too big for my hands and for those of you who are going to say ooh use the note 2. no i'm not going to use
a note 2. it's too big this is too big i have small hands you'll get used to it
no you won't your small hands don't grow because your phone is bigger um
yeah every day with Windows phone
yeah so i may stick i may actually okay this is sort of a spoiler alert but i'm
only going to do one more update at day 30 i may actually end up sticking with
Windows phone but i probably won't stick with the 8x if i can figure out a way to
get all of my apps in the four gigs of the 8s i may actually just go that route
because the form factor is just too i wish that they were still
compact high-end phones but it seems like screen size has become the new sort
of um you know appendage measuring contest
so whatever the email app destroys the built-in one
for iOS i love the email app it is just
awesome you can see your flag messages your urgent ones i'm not no i don't need
to look too closely but just uh the way it does it the way it does attachments
is awesome in iOS you have to go browse to your photo then you have to go send
this to someone no no no no not not in Windows so here let's send let's send an
email to slick
oh nope hold on here so i'm just going to kind of cover
this up but the point is you want to
send an attachment you click the attachment button oh yeah that simple
then you go find an attachment that's like herder here's a picture of you
and it's and it's done i i love it it's just really elegant it's quick and it's
quick to search the server so if it doesn't find anything it's just a button
yeah search the server and it doesn't take forever which on iOS it does for
some i just stopped using the iOS one i just used the gmail browser-based mobile
site because the app is terrible whereas
on this one i've stopped using the mobile site entirely the app is much
better uh emailing photos easy ah february 1st
the people app can be manually over ah yes the people app
so the people app has some really good things about it but here i'm just gonna
find this is just kind of funny so we're gonna go down to j
where i have ah here we go
so you know what that should be fine i have
three jack chens actually i know two jack chens and one
of these jack chens here i just don't want to show anyone's phone yeah there we go so see this
shows a a yahoo and a pivos one
and um it has combined multiple yeah i see
here's an NVIDIA one so it's got three different ones for what are two jack
chens who work for two different companies you can override it though so
it's not the end of the world and then there were some individual people that were split out into multiple ones but
all you have to do is use a setting that says link so you can unlink and then you
can link additional ones together and it'll just take your entire disorganized
contact list so you've got some of them in your hotmail contacts your gmail
contacts your whatever contacts and it just kind of goes
and it puts them all together facebook linkedin all that stuff so yeah manual
overriding is good uh-ho error codes uh
this is this is hilarious so there was some app that couldn't install
on here we go this particular phone when it tried to do the synchronization so i
was like click i clicked on it i was like attention required tap here
error message uh oh hold on
the error code 800 fff
come on microsoft come on guys i mean this is like when um
you know back when msn messenger was the big deal and you'd like get this error
code you'd be like what does that mean you try to google it and you couldn't
find anything because your internet wasn't working turns out the error code meant your internet's not connected and
you're just like why didn't you just say my internet's not connected
there you go there's a freaking concept for you so yeah just those those little
microsoft things um oh i found a bit of a glitch the
backup restore process doesn't work if you don't have a data connection through
your cellular provider so it doesn't give you an option to connect to wi-fi to do a
restore and phone ownership transfer so that's just bizarre and you can only
switch a profile from one phone to another one upon initial boot up you
have to wipe and restore a phone in order to take your profile and transfer
the entire thing so if you have no sim in there with no data connection you
cannot do it um and i did google that it's like a true
thing oh the to-do list i love the to-do list it's integrated really well with
the calendar so you just swipe over to to-do list and you're going to have a bunch of no no it's okay you're going to
have a bunch of to do stuff so you can see your day agenda your agenda and your
to-do list and it's really really smooth
i think that's about it thank you for checking out this
extremely long and hopefully interesting video about my two weeks into the
Windows phone 8 experience where i'm actually finding you know i got my sound
town now i got metrotube which is an awesome youtube app
um i'm not really missing this thing anymore so
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