welcome to day four of my I switched
video blog where I'm going from my iPhone 4 to my uh HTC Windows Phone 8 8X
phone you can see I've got the shakes now because I'm going through withdrawal
actually it hasn't been that it hasn't been as bad as I thought uh probably my
biggest frustration has been um they not
being easy and convenient way to Port over all of my SMS messages although
speaking of SMS messages so we're going to we're going to get right into this
here so so here we go typing a text message
so there a couple cool things so number one is that the keyboard suggestions are
pretty cool so if I go like this there's a very good okay well see bad example
Hela comes up before hello so
how are you doing today
so it actually has a fairly intelligent system for suggesting what the next
message that you might want to send is this is also really cool too actually
you know what I'm going to go through an order because I have notes so it helps with punctuation which is cool so check
this out it put in a space for me so if I did want to type rather than selecting
a word I could do that but if I press period it'll actually retract that space
so the iPhone in my experience hasn't really been that intelligent about uh
punctuation a lot of time I have to make Corrections so it's uh it's it's nice to
it's nice to have that done for me uh there's no password to update apps so
updating apps was as simple as I don't
even remember it was really really
really simple and I have totally lost it
now it might have been in like settings somewhere maybe it was like I don't know
updates or something but the point is that phone update I don't know maybe it
wasn't a phone update the point is updates were simple all I have to do is press the button it updates uh
everything Auto fill during typing predicts en oh yeah predicts entire
words yep reminder set with one minute granularity okay this was something that
I found to be a bit of a challenge so uh
if I want to add a thing so I go okay what time um you can set times for
things with one minute so iOS is a bit of a bear to do this with uh however I
found that scrolling to scrolling through this is a bit of a
challenge um well it's not I mean it's not a challenge obviously you can do it
but it takes longer than if you just had a drop down that was every 5 minutes I
think every 5 minutes would probably be a good balance between being able to
select exactly the right time 12:17 p.m.
versus not being able to um I find that this little contextual guy actually does
something sometimes but doesn't do something other times in fact the
inconsistencies in the UI are a little bit weird so sometimes confirm is
denoted with a check mark whereas other
times uh right there we go whereas other
times there you go it's actually denoted with a dis so normally I would expect
any kind of uh change commit to be the
same icon regardless of of where I am
and for that matter things like a confirmation so here I'm going to go to
Twitter really quick so sometimes when
you're when you're typing something or whatever else sometimes uh the confirm
is done through enter whereas other times the confirm is done through a
button down here and so those those little inconsistencies in the UI can be a
little bit can be a little bit weird and can make it a little bit a little bit
distracting when one app is different from another one uh sometimes y
sometimes music okay music navigation I wasn't that impressed with so the first
thing is that other than going into the Xbox music app there doesn't seem to be
a quick way to get to music if you had Music open you can use the multitasking
key here to go to yeah see it's gone now
for some reason but uh so so you can
click the volume here and that'll bring down a music navigation um display here if you have
it open so let's go ahead and find some
song that we're going to play so now when I go out of there you can see that
navigation there and I can switch between okay I would be able to switch
between songs except again the the music navigation I'm finding to be a bit um a
bit insufficient so there's no see look I pressed play to pause it just now now
or to play something else or whatever's going on um so you have to go to
collection and then you can't go to music and press play here to just play
all your songs if you play these then you won't be able to change it see and
then if you go out here you actually have to press play here to start your
whole collection going on shuffle and then if you close down the app in
between that actually doesn't take you back to the song that you were listening to before and we'll reshuffle it so if
that's what you wanted to do then that'll work for you again I'm pressing
I'm pressing play because that's the only button I have that um that that
will do anything whereas if I go in here then I can play and pause and start and
stop um so I did find find music
navigation to be a bit frustrating I also discovered that the Xbox music app
is actually not available on anything other than Windows 8 and I have not
upgraded my PC to Windows 8 yet I'm waiting till I finish my personal rig
haha um before I do that I'm getting a
look from slick right now but uh that means I have to use the older Zoom app
and I haven't actually installed it yet but maybe that'll be in my sort of you
know day 10 or day 15 or whenever I do my next update so so that's where the
integration comes in I actually had a coupon I don't know where it went for a
one-year subscription to Xbox music for $100 or whatever it was and so I've
subscribe to that and that's really cool because it means I can basically ignore
my collection oh yeah then there's no convenient way to just sort by songs so
you can go music you can go and it doesn't remember the way that you prefer
to sort so it'll take you to artists every single time even though that's not
how I sort and I found uh I found this
really frustrating so I have to actually
go like this to get down to a song that starts you know if I remember it starts
with you know M I have to actually do
this to go through it there's no quick scroll like there is on Android and iOS
and you'd think that this would be a dedicated search button for sort of
whatever app it is but it always takes you to Bing search and if you search for
I don't know Hello Kitty or something like that hello cotti see got it uh and
oh it doesn't autoc correct a lot of the time um although it's it's already
adapting to my Tendencies so that's kind of cool so I I can't quite decide what I
think of the predictive text yet see this is another thing where like I would
think pressing search in a search bar on
no no you press enter for this okay um
it always takes you to images and media first and I don't know that there's a
way to change this to uh to search for web or I mean either local or web search
are more logical to me than media I don't necess unless I search for picture
of Hello Kitty I don't think that that's necessarily the most natural thing to uh
to go with um right so I wish the search button was a dedicated search button
even when you're here it's going to search for some random thing on the internet uh you you can use voice search
which is kind of neat I did try it it is quite accurate um notifications won't oh
yeah notifications don't move on their own so if I click outside of this this
just kind of stays and it doesn't really go away that's a problem I have with iOS
as well like especially because I'm a heavy Twitter user oh and the Twitter
app is just terrible for Windows Phone 7 I'll get or Windows Phone 8 I'll get
into that more later um so where was I going with that yeah
it bothers me in iOS as well because the notifications come down here and a lot
of the time I can't exit an app until they go away and I'll have tweets coming
in so it'll be quite a while and I'll have to like try to be really really
accurate and try try and close it so this is not just a Windows Phone 8
thing uh brightness randomly boosts when switching apps so for here hold on it's
want to make sure I don't have any private conversations anyway there you go see Skype is super bright and now
it's dimmed again so that uh that's been just kind of annoying when sort of it's
dark and speaking of brightness there's only actually uh three settings for
brightness so I found even on iOS the brightness options were not necessarily
enough for me and I used there's a screen dimming app that you can use to
dim it even lower well this one has low medium and high and then you can turn on
or off automatic adjustments and that's
pretty much it so I did find that a little bit frustrating has a built-in QR
Code Reader that seems to be an HTC Edition and it works extremely well it's
one of the faster ones I've experienced uh landscape mode sometimes isn't
graceful so for example the tile UI completely doesn't work in landscape
mode at all um and then a funny thing about the phone is you actually cannot
turn off auto rotate so the phone will
always always always auto rotate I have Googled it it is a thing uh you cannot
turn it off so I'd love to see them add this functionality cuz when you're like
lying in bed doing something then it's nice to be able to still use it in
portrait mode if you're reading a longer article or something like that so I would appreciate that um here's a funny
thing about the auto correct again so here we'll type something to uh to
diesel uh autoc correct doesn't help you compensate for a missed space for
example so if we said hello oops how
it's not going to oh this is the first time I've seen it do that okay well
there you go I was wrong um one thing that it doesn't do is it won't uh
compensate for okay apparently I'm
totally wrong about this so maybe hello
is just a more common one so there
are
some okay well I'm totally wrong about that so the auto correct is better than
I thought it was it looks like it's just kind of missing things from time to time
because it's only when I see it that I kind of go oh it didn't catch that
um H okay one thing it definitely doesn't
do is what I've seen iOS do is uh here so let's go with a word like uh uh okay
ho where I accidentally put in a space it does not suggest ho to me whereas I
have seen that done in iOS but I don't have much experience with Android on
that one so and I mean all of this is just sort of my experience with it so
don't take it as sort of the Gospel truth the only way uh auto correct okay
the auto correct uh auto correct is kind of cool
it's uh cool if you
don't type that fast but as soon as as soon as
you want to speed
up it doesn't really see it's not really suggesting anything fast enough for me
to actually use it so so that was something that I observed was that it
was useful if you're slow but if you're not then it's not that useful however
those of you who are really fast on the keyboard are probably not going to have that much trouble with it anyway I
wouldn't have minded a more Square keyboard and I wish you could change the
keyboard uh one thing that I found from my first blog that is not as bad as I
thought it was was the underscore you don't have to do this to access it you
can K away okay you can just go like this so
you can switch between your special characters this way so it's actually
really not that bad that's quite fast now uh typing kep accurate sensor is
accurate in handy ah yes okay so when you're trying to highlight something
accurately uh it takes quite a while to pop up the cursor but the cursor is
quite accurate the one time I did have an issue with it was when I was trying
to get it over to the very far left although this can be an issue with sort of any phone sometimes getting uh
accurate sensitivity right near the edges of the screen so I had trouble
selecting the first letter when I was typing over at the very far left the
only thing I don't like about it is how long it takes to pop up so it just feels
whoops it just feels a little bit on the slower side and because it doesn't pop
itself right under your thumb so I I mean I like Android because with Android
if you're in acccurate enough C toucher then you just touch the spot and it
actually just goes there whereas iOS you have to hold it down and then it gives
you that little magnifying glass but at least it's still under your finger with
this one you go okay I want to put it here see how it's up there now no matter
what I'm going to have to move so if I was close enough in the first place with
iOS then I don't have to move once I see the popup this time I have to move no
matter what on Windows Phone 8 um I find
I'm less accurate on the keyboard I think part of that is just my small hands like I actually have significant
amount of trouble reaching the que and now I've gone and pressed the camera
button sorry about that um so I find I'm less accurate if I hold it two-handed or
if I hold it with one hand and type with the other hand I don't have uh I don't
have trouble with that uh music app okay
yep yep yep where okay yeah the other
thing about the music app is where's my now playing list exactly like I go to
music and it lets me sort of navigate album songs playlist I don't have have
playlists why would I need playlists um there's your history there's new stuff
there's apps there's music store the music store is cool when you have a
subscription because you can basically just go okay let's play this and it's
sort of all you can eat which for $100 a year actually really isn't that
unreasonable uh compared to actually paying for the songs individually I mean
that's 100 songs it's like Five albums it's really not that much uh there's no
battery life percentage on the top so I haven't found a way to turn that on yet
I do like to know exactly how much battery life is left cuz I find those
can be sometimes not that accurate again I'm pressing play to pause or I can do
this or I can do that there we go um
very limited screen brightness settings I think I showed that contact scrolling
ah yeah same thing in contact so I'm not going to show you guys my contact list
in too much detail here but let me just go through here and sort of I'll show
you so it's the same thing where you actually can't uh you can't scroll by by
names like that they want you to search so if I were to search for hold on
so there's you could can't use the search button here you want to use a
search button here I wish again that this was a search button the contextual
search button as opposed to um just a regular search button so I can't scroll
here but if I search for something like acute Tech mechanic so searching works
but it's just um it's it's frustrating it's not that
um yeah it's just it's not that intuitive uh dialing is dialing is good
though I really like the way the actual phone interface itself works so you know
8888888888 you call something gives you a bunch of cool options mute speaker put
your thing on there don't put your thing on there so all of that worked really
really well uh SMS app oh yeah the SMS app so
this is this is kind of neat hold on again I don't want to show sort of everyone in their dogs names but check
this out so you can actually use this right here to okay you have to okay if
you have someone entered as a contact in multiple ways so here I'll find uh slick
here um nope you I don't okay well whatever
I'll just have to describe it so if you have someone entered in multiple ways in
your um here we go so yeah that'll do so
this is cool within the SMS app you can use this little switch button right here
to go oh I want to send an SMS this time oh I want to send send uh an MSN
Messenger message this time whatever it is you want to do the one thing is that
until you sort of wrap your mind around that you got to remember what kind of
message you're sending because I sent some messages to someone to their
Facebook and then what I actually wanted to send was an SMS because they don't
even have Facebook on their phone and so it didn't get to them so you just have
to kind of get used to that but I thought that was really really cool um
we're getting pretty close to the end here pretty close to the end iMessage uh
I had a couple people call me out cuz I said I had to use my iPhone for or
something and going back to the small screen was really hard like this thing
feels like a toy now compared to the 8X
which as you guys can see with my iPhone size comparison is significantly bigger
both in terms of screen size and in terms of just overall size so this thing
was like you know felt like felt like yeah felt like a child's play thing um
but I had to go back to it CU I had to turn off iMessage so if you just sort of
throw your iPhone away and sort of Chuck it and you leave iMessage on and it's
sort of sort of somewhere what will happen is some of your SMS messages will
automatically go to your iPhone using data instead of SMS so I had someone
sending me messages and they actually went to my iPhone not to the phone that
actually had my SIM card in it so that was sort of annoying oops my bad and you
know what I think that's pretty much it for now um overall snappiness is good I
like being able to you know pin things I've started creating some tiles I did
find a good substitute for air video so cloud media is actually working really
really well now that I've got all the ports set up right and all that good
stuff so you know there you go uh you can play back things pretty quickly in
much the same way that uh that air video works so auto rotate always works cuz
yeah you can't turn it off so that's just playing off of off of a server so
it's just an app you run on a server computer that uh that you know trans
codes on the Fly and beams it to your phone just like Air Video on iOS um let
me just see if there's anything else that I'm forgetting right now this seems pretty detailed so far found a couple
games that I like already uh right so
all the games are instead of actually having dedicated tiles for each game you
just kind of go through here and you can pin things to the place where you like
them the most sort of within the games thing that actually works quite well for
me so this is rag doll run which I find pretty fun and I think that's what we're
going to close off with here so stay tuned for my next Windows
8 um Windows 8 phone I switched blog I'm
doing as you guys as I said last time I'm doing a 30-day trial where I'm going
to stay with Windows Phone 8 no matter what and then at the end I'm going to
decide if I'm going to go back to iOS or if I'm going to uh stick with Windows
Phone 8 and for those of you who are bound to ask I am not going to Android I
don't like Android please stop asking me if I'm going to Android because I'm not
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