so this will be day one of my uh what's
it like to go from iOS to Windows Phone 8 sort of blog I'm going to start with
just some general feelings about the uh the HTC 8X so uh number one is it's
absolutely gorgeous the ergonomics it's very very nice to hold I find that I'm
actually able to use it mostly one-handed if I put my pinky here for
support which I find I do sort of need
to do for it's just I guess it's more of a habit than anything else I can still
almost reach sort of the the top tile here but not quite I'm more comfortable
in the bottom parts of the screen but I can reach back and search and all that
good stuff um if I had any complaints about the phone it would be that the
lock button's a little bit stiff compared to the volume and the camera
shutter buttons so I will often be trying to get to the lock button and I
will accidentally adjust the volume of the phone um overall though it's very
very Snappy games feel a little bit a little bit stuttery compared to what I'm
used to on iOS but I'd imagine there's probably some optimization coming for
that at some point you guys can check it out if you want so I just installed uh
Angry Birds and I think one other one so
I mean it's not it's nothing sort of super objectionable or anything so you
guys can actually see how it's running so it's not like running on one of those
uh those like USB media players or anything like that like it's fine um you
know going in and out of things is extremely responsive I installed the cat
piano app so I was actually just kind of randomly going through my iOS apps and
seeing Oh yeah this is very similar to the one I have
already yeah so I was going through my iOS apps and just sort of seeing what
equivalent stuff was available there's a lot of stuff that isn't there's my
flickster uh these are for these are just quick links to the Google mail
accounts I have as well as my hot mail mail I wish that it would label them
correctly I don't know if that's a thing that you can change no not so much but
you can pin it over to the start menu here which is good which is a good thing
um so slick gave me kind of a look when uh when I said that it comes with no Kia
Maps but it's actually not bad you can sort of pan around and do everything
that you'd expect to do one cool thing about the maps app is you can actually
uh there's a way I actually don't know how to do it yet but you can you can
download the map so that you can view it offline which is which is kind of neat
so you don't necessarily have to use your data when you're out and about so I thought that was kind of cool what else
it comes with a flashlight app so this is an HTC inclusion so you just press
the button for different flash levels so
I liked the medium one I think last time I was playing around with it so that's
good I did find a replacement for air video although it's not as good as the
one that I have so I'm going to go ahead
and show you guys
whatever what's the point of view even trying to hide anything at this point so
my DVDs of Futurama that I own and ripped of course so play from the
beginning so uh this is this is pretty good so I'm just playing this off of off
of my server it transcodes on the fly to save on to save on data and to save on
uh on CPU intensiveness on this side so
give it a minute and that should start playing uh the one thing I didn't like
about this versus Air Video is it's just not as polished so when you leave off
somewhere and exit the app to check a text message or whatever else you go back inside the app and no really it's
it's faster than this this is uh this isn't
right okay hold on let's try that again I've actually I've never seen it do that
before like I'm not trying to sell this app by any stretch of the imagination
it's not as good as air video which is the one that I like but it's not that
bad so here let's go look at something else so there I don't know South Park or
something which of course I own all the DVDs for and I RI them to this
okay season six find something there we
go play from the beginning so Air Video will resume your playback from where you
left off last time it'll also do things like um you can check a text message and
come back and it remembers where you were with this one if I go out
momentarily and come back see resolving preparing you can you can um scrub
pretty pretty easily it's not really scrubbing but you can move around pretty
easily so if I go out and then I open the app
again um um it has no idea what was going on so
there's no resume nothing like that preferences maybe no I don't know that
preferences sorry guys I know this is going to be sort of a strange uh yeah
see nothing like that this is going to be sort of a strange format of video for
me but this is just sort of my general thoughts after the first day there's no hoot app so I had to use a stock Twitter
app also there's a YouTube app that was created by
Microsoft um so it's not quite as it's
not quite as smooth as as uh as an
actual YouTube app from Google Google seems to be sort of not really that
interested in this platform in general um couple sort of micros yay it's
Microsoft moments that I had when I first got the phone was uh the keyboard
update so it came with a UK keyboard on it and to get a new keyboard I had to I
had to go in here which was relatively straightforward so it's very intuitive
to use like I didn't really have to think about any of this too much so settings keyboard
which is here and then um you know you just kind of hold on things for
contextual stuff actually well you can't do that when they're aren't multiple
ones but I added a keyboard it was like a 20 mag download and I had to reboot
the phone though and I was like Yay Microsoft that's how things work you
reboot um uh oh yeah there's there's not as
much of the 16 gigs left on the phone when you first get it as I would like
compared to something like Android or iOS but my personal music library is
only around 5 gigs and then I don't store much other than than videos or
photos that I take on the phone other than that so it doesn't really bother me
that much if you guys want to see what else is in settings it's pretty straight
forward you can add as many accounts as you want which is great um and there's
all my accounts so you can add a buttload of accounts to
it which is kind of neat so you just throw all your accounts in there and then everything just kind of syncs and
it's very intuitive which I thought was great um Wii was simple tap and send is
I guess what they're calling NFC uh mobile network not found I actually
don't have a Sim in it right now cuz I haven't quite managed to make the switch
more on that later uh backup cloud is good um what else what was I looking for
here H yeah Beats Audio you can turn on and off basically my experience with
this so far is it does make it louder so it does enable the headphone amp but the
thing that I didn't like about it is it sort of messes with the EQ for me it's
more of a it's more of a flat EQ when you don't have Beats Audio on but Beats
Audio go figure goes and sort of amps up the base to the point where I found it
kind kind of objectionable so um so that was that was something but what was I
talking about with the keyboard something not as much of the 16 gigs
left as I like I think I already did that oh yeah it had an update to apply
sort of on on day one of me installing it which I guess is sort of expected
depending on how long the phone's been sitting in the Box um oh yeah the camera experience is
much better than I'm used to so all you do is press the camera the dedicated
button which is kind of nice um and then
you can take pictures very very quickly so you know if you want to focus on something all of that works about the
way you'd expect otherwise you can just take pictures very quickly and what's
neat is that what you see in the viewfinder doesn't necessarily indicate
the quality of the picture you're going to get a lot of the time you'll actually get something see oh that looks all
yellowed out and kind of ugly so if I actually take the picture it looks way
better than that all the usual settings are there so there's your flash your
additional photo settings things like white balance saturation sharpness ISO
face detection all that good stuff uh video I recorded a little bit of video
and it looked pretty good so far so I actually have not tried to review
pictures that I've taken on the phone before so I guess that would be ah
photos there you go camera roll there we go so you can check out
what these ones look like see it's much sharper than what you
were actually seeing through the viewfinder which I think is cool and
then presumably there's going to be some kind of an easy way to share them or
something I don't know I haven't spent like I said I haven't spent much time in
this so edit set as lock screen save to Sky Drive okay Sky Drive integration so
far seems kind of neat uh going to the market the market I thought the the sort
of the navigation wasn't as intuitive as I would have liked half the time I try
to do a store search like if I look for Angry Birds you know like to me it would
be intuitive if I could press search to do that but you want to do that
otherwise it takes you to like a b search and then I don't know I guess I
just sort of found that a little bit confusing um you you have to kind of
figure out with the tiles me on your own so it took me sort of a second to
realize that this wasn't text messages but is actually the Windows mail icon so
I was looking for text messages there but they weren't there um what else so
this is a cool thing to do with music now I did mention that the music uh
transfer oh no I didn't mention that before you know what this is just
awesome this is probably one of the biggest sort of breaths of fresh air
versus iOS that I've encountered so far so if you look at the computer uh
there's a couple things here so there's the welcome to home welcome home to Windows phone thing that you can
download technically it's for no keia Lumia phones but it actually works with
any Windows phone the only issue I had with this one is that it didn't end up
wanting to um take my contacts and
calendar uh because my contacts and calendar are like a total mess like some
of it um synced on iCloud some of it's uh in
Google some of it's in hot Mill and they're all just kind of in there and just sort of doing their thing um so
what I wanted was I wanted to take that whole mish mash and just kind of import it and it looks like you can't really do
that it sort of freaked out and it didn't want to copy all my music as well
probably some kind of a DRM thing so I didn't find this one that useful yeah I
want to quit there's also the the Windows phone thing here which has some
general settings which is very very basic stuff not a whole lot here and
Windows Phone move things between your phone and PC um oh apparently there is a
wizard wizard plug your phone to see what's on it it should be plugged in I
don't know oh yeah there it is so you can do things like sync libraries from
like Windows Media Player and stuff okay which leads me to what's like probably
the coolest thing about Windows Phone check this out drag and drop yeah I'll
drag and drop my music documents and pictures and not worry about having
stupid iTunes installed on my computer
or anything like that cuz iTunes just crashes my stuff all over the place
loving it uh so yeah I'm not going to miss iTunes and that's one thing that I
really like just sort of that ease of integration drag and drop file copies
that's the way that things should work I love the keyboard so here's a text that
well I had the Sim in here's my text to Diesel um the keyboard doesn't feel
laggy like an Android keyboard does to me like you click it and it feels like
you're clicking on it just like the uh just like the iPhone keyboard the one
thing that I don't like about it is that it's a little slow to get to underscore
you have to do this which I think is kind of dumb and um the spacing is just
different so I've been using this phone at this width and this height for 2
years which just kind of means that um
it's just it's going to take me a little while to to get used to this so I think
that pretty much concludes it so I haven't managed to make the switch yet
because I haven't found a way to back up my SMS messages
and it sounds like talking to people that that's just generally not going to
be possible and thems the brakes for switching from platform to platform but
um I don't know I guess if I just have to kind of take the plunge so yeah I my
my day one of using Windows phone I actually haven't switched to it yet but
uh you know what should should I just do it tomorrow yeah I'm getting the nod
from slick just kind of just kind of go for it there's a lot of stuff I'm going
to miss though all right well that's pretty much it so subscribe to L Tech
tips for boxing reviews and other computer videos and uh hopefully
tomorrow I have a slightly different update for you but that's my thoughts
from day one with Windows phone