iSwitched to Windows Phone 8 - Day 14 Experience Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
4,471 words · ~22 min read
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welcome to day 14 of the i switched
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video blog now i've had a lot of christmas criticism
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criticism that uh i don't know what i'm doing in Windows phone 8 and this much
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has been true especially up till now because i haven't known what i was doing
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which is the point of this video blog however
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in the last couple of weeks i have picked up an awful lot of cool stuff
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that i'm going to show you guys some of which is to do with new things i found
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that i like or dislike and some of which is to do with things that i've
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discovered that are actually way better than i thought so why don't we start
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with the fantastic copy paste so if i were to look for say for example
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shaw phone number this has to be just the super
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most elegantest copy paste that i have ever seen so here's that contextual
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search so hopefully this is going to search web yep there it goes
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shaw contact us and all i got to do is
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find a phone number touch it
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okay well it didn't pick it up that time but check this out anytime you highlight
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something there's your little copy next time you go to a text box it'll just be
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sitting there ready for you to go ahead and paste it so i love the way it does
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copy paste another thing i discovered is the it's that Windows phone jumps very
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cleanly between wi-fi and cellular data so you know how it has that feature
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where it scans for wireless hotspots around you
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that's cool it's also kind of annoying because as you're driving around
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there'll be little notifications coming up hotspot hotspot hotspot well they're
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all protected you can't use them however what i noticed is that even compared to
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iOS and Android there was a power outage
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um and in our studio and slick's phone
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you couldn't load up a page mine did and i was like oh but i'm connected to wi-fi
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Windows phone 8 automatically figures out oh well it's not working so why
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don't i just use cellular yay i personally think that's awesome
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because it's so annoying when you have a flaky Wi-Fi connection that you're connected to but is too flaky to
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actually load a page and it just gives up forever it's frigging annoying so it
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actually finds a way to load the page which i think is absolutely great
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um oh yeah so for those of you who were criticizing me for not finding the
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multitasking interface you're right i didn't i did not find the back button to
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use the multitasking interface that intuitive i also still don't really like
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it because the way see how do you see how smooth the slide is you can't
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actually click anything until it's stopped so that makes it a little bit
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challenging for me personally to quickly
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navigate to something that i'm looking for because you have to kind of
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stop it stop stop and then you're actually able to navigate to something
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within the multitasking interface but it's a lot better than what i thought it
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was which was just press the Windows key and have everything close on you so
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there you go i probably could have figured this out if i'd noticed the notification that
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comes up the first time you turn on the phone that sends you to the Windows site with some helpful tips and tricks did
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not see that for those of you who said my cloud media app
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is probably only not working correctly resuming the
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playback because i wasn't using multitasking it looks like that's not
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quite the case even if you skip and cloud media i've decided is an
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acceptable substitute for uh for air video it's not perfect
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because i mean it doesn't resume and all that kind of stuff but it's sort of it's
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getting me by so check this out if i multitask and go
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somewhere else let's go back to shaw tech support then we multitask back
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to a show it is going to
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press play even though it knows where it is
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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
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course the one time that i'm trying to prove a point here
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it doesn't do that so there you go trust me guys usually when i wait a bit go do
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a few things and then go back to it it doesn't it doesn't work it just goes
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right back to the beginning of the show um so oh oh the stock twitter app holy
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crap i don't even know if it's still on my phone but i mean you got people complaining that
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there's no native facebook app but quite frankly if the native facebook app ends
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up anywhere near as bad as the stock twitter app then yeah i don't think
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we're really missing anything so here check this out
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okay i want to reply to everyone here
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oh replies to no okay
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reply no oh they're all gone uh
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okay how do i reply to all okay hashtags what i can't even reply
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all it's freaking ridiculous however i had i had viewers point out this
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particular app which is called oh yeah this was another thing that was pointed
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out to me as well is that if you click on something and expand it you can see
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what it's called then you can put it back if you don't remember for whatever
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reason you go back so rowi is awesome this is probably the best twitter app
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that i've yet encountered it's extremely clean it looks very Windows 8 ui
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gorgeous it scrolls well it's uh it's
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very very elegant in terms of new tweets integrating pictures you can sort of
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pick whatever pictures you want you can basically you can just do all the stuff
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that you should be able to do in a twitter app very very easily i really
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really like it so that's all from january 24th this is going to end up
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being a long video um xbox music on the desktop i wasn't able to use i had
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someone suggest to me that i use that because i don't have Windows 8 yet
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however the um the subscription is kind
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of awesome you just basically go to the xbox music store it's 100 bucks a year
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you go okay top albums i want to listen to some justin bieber i can either
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download it or just stream it and
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there you go just like that so it's extremely fast uh it's not something i
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had pre-cached on my phone let me tell you that much uh tansy was suggested to
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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
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plugging in the headphone jack on this particular phone makes a bit of a staticky noise so unplugging and
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plugging it causes a little bit of interference i found it kind of annoying
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but it's not a huge deal it's just something i wasn't really used to
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beats audio needs to be off i think i mentioned that last time for me to enjoy
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it because i find it boosts up the bass too much so that's january 26th let's
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move on to january 28th skydrive integration is awesome
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i actually tried to do a so it syncs all your photos
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automatically which is great because you just sit down at any other computer where you have skydrive hooked up and
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they're just all kind of there as soon as it's anywhere near wi-fi it'll upload
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them very very cool and this is amazing
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so the way oh wait no i'm not moving on to that yet sorry sorry sorry not that
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so yeah convenient not to have to worry about syncing things it syncs your app list as well as your photos your
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documents and pretty much whatever else you want your settings all that good
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stuff um nokia drive nokia drive i wanted to
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use it on the 28th but i discovered that you can't oh hold on no no that's going
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to have my my gps for where i am right now which is not optimal
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but nokia drive doesn't allow you to download maps
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for a location where um
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hold on i'm just going to go like somewhere else there let's look in the middle of the countryside so check this
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out it doesn't allow you to download maps when you're on 3g even though the files
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aren't that big and you can say yeah no i really do want it it's okay it won't
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let you do it but i love the fact that you're downloading maps offline and
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you're able to use your gps even if you have no data connection
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phenomenal absolutely awesome and the way the navigation works in this app the
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turn by turn is outstanding i absolutely love it so there you go january 29th
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music and contacts navigation i had complained that um when i go to my music
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library so my collection uh i said i had to scroll down like this
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i was wrong all you have to do is click any one of these letters and then you
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can navigate directly to artists or albums or songs or whatever else
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starting with that letter and that is the quick navigation i personally don't
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find this quite as fast because it's two clicks as just having a scroll here but
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this is way better than what i thought it was and honestly it's it's fine as
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far as quick navigation goes sort of thumbs up maybe just like one and a half
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thumbs up you can swipe notifications away to the right so notifications that come down on
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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
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as a Windows user i'm used to something comes up i click somewhere else to make
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that other thing go away so this was a new sort of ui thing for me i missed it
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but there you go you can get rid of them quickly if you need to uh there's an app
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for map monitoring battery i think this is a kludgy solution because you can see
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here there's no percentage you can't turn that on you have to actually get a
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separate app to tell you what your battery life percentage is at it also
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gives you some neat tips about how to um you know preserve more battery life
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suggest things like turning off nfc which can be a bit of a battery hog
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you know closing apps rather than leaving them running in the background so cool little stuff like that but this
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isn't useful for when i'm in a browser say for example and i want to know what
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my battery life is oh how do i do that oh i can't even see the bar now so
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yeah it's not perfect still but it's better than i thought because at least
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you can get an app that tells you the percentage ah i said rowie's awesome ah the people
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hub so i've spent more time with people now um actually i'm a shut-in i've spent no
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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
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is people um so people's cool because it's great for
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monitoring other people uh however what i've noticed about it is
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that it's not okay so together that's for groups it's really not that great
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for um communicating with other people
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so if i go what is it
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oh if i create like a great contact no
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where is it twitter i don't know show updates yeah
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so it's great for monitoring then you go to the me one and i don't think these
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should be two separate apps so look at this i want to post an update i want to
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post to twitter where how do i add a photo to it
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okay maybe you can do it maybe i'm just totally wrong but come on why why is
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this hard um i very much prefer rally
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and um yeah i'm mostly a twitter guy that's one
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thing i wanted to mention on january 29th as well is i don't miss facebook at
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all actually i totally don't miss having facebook on my phone because the things
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i care about with facebook things like being able to message someone are
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integrated into either people or my
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messaging application hold on let me just make sure there's nothing there um
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or my messaging application here which is okay you guys will just
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have to take my word for it let me just find someone there we go oh i don't have
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diesel on facebook do i have the crazy russian on facebook
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i don't have the crazy russian on facebook well okay between the people
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app and the messaging app you can message someone pretty much any way you'd want without an official facebook
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app so like i said i actually just totally don't miss it
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and then people allows you to monitor people's facebook updates
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anyway so yeah uh moving right along let me just see if
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we missed anything yep uh Windows phone.com freaking awesome so
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there are some pretty cool features there you can ring
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lock track erase install apps and
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uh you can do a full wipe of the phone from windowsphone.com which is pretty
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freaking cool did you zoom in on that that's right but
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then it wouldn't focus okay that's probably just as well because my phone number's on there but the point is that
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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
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within the find my phone app itself
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which we're gonna just go find uh so you go to settings
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settings find my phone check it out so you can
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tell it hey save my phone's location periodically and before the battery runs
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out send apps to my phone using push notifications not sms
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very very cool stuff and i mean those are huge features if you're using this
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for like for work or anything like that although i did found one kind of neat
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flaw because i had thrown my sim in an
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htc 8s and done a full migration so i
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did a backup and restore the backup is completely automatic i didn't have to do
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anything to do it all you have to do is put a sim in a new car in a new phone
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boot it up log in and say hey i want to restore from that phone and it does
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everything even even now like it's getting all of my text messages and
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installed on my apps it does everything but arranger live tiles which is very
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very cool so i could go sim out sim in
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and this phone would be as up to date as this one even all my text messages are
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syncing on the fly now that this phone is logged into my skydrive account so i
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absolutely love that it's very smooth compared to the iOS way okay obviously
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it doesn't do all your music and media but you can copy that manually because
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all you got to do is plug in a usb cable yay compared to itunes so way way more
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elegant as an iOS user though i'm finding i'm
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finding persistent soft buttons down here a real problem because sometimes my
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leg through the pocket will press a button when i have like a video playing
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and then i have an earbud in or something like a youtube music video or
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something i'm listening to it'll press stuff and then it'll go places and i'm
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finding that sort of disruptive overall i mean i i like having hard
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buttons here but i could probably get used to it in time
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what i'm doing right now is i'm turning it around in my pocket so that it
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doesn't bump stuff but it's just it's kind of a clutchy solution we're moving
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on to january 31st within the settings things are linked in multiple places i
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really like this so back to settings um
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so you don't have to fuss around trying to figure out sort of what logic was
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used by whoever set it up so for example sms
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is under both uh backup and messaging
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so if you go back up so you can have all of your text
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messaging settings there so you can click that to go into it in more detail
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or you can see it within ah this i love
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okay i actually had a pocket pc back
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when those were cool and why doesn't iOS implement this
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snooze why can't you snooze a notification on iOS that's awesome
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remind me in 10 minutes freaking amazing like what i want to go
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back into my calendar and like reconjigger it for 10 minutes from now
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because i don't have time right now no i want to snooze it's awesome love it
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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
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the thing about the browser if i had to complain about anything it's snappy it
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scrolls quickly it's responsive but it's two
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touches to get to my tabs i wish it was one touch to select tabs um
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it's a minor thing i don't use tabbed browsing that much on my phone but there
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you go uh copy paste is outstanding yeah i
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already talked about that everything everything that's been driving me crazy
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about the 8x keyboard it turns out is purely a form factor thing because i
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tried using the 8s for a day and that fixed every complaint i had about it so
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you can see with the size of my hand this is a reach for me i can barely make
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it oversee i pressed the search button trying to make it over to here which is
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where the keyboard would be annoying with the 8s on the other hand i can
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easily and comfortably type no matter
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what and i don't have to yeah i recommend it it's fine i didn't use it
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much so i can just go yeah hello
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this is a queue and i won't press the search
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button so i thought that the keyboard was just kind of difficult for me to use
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it's nothing to do with the keyboard keyboard is fine it's just the 8x is a
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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
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a note 2. it's too big this is too big i have small hands you'll get used to it
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no you won't your small hands don't grow because your phone is bigger um
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yeah every day with Windows phone
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yeah so i may stick i may actually okay this is sort of a spoiler alert but i'm
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only going to do one more update at day 30 i may actually end up sticking with
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Windows phone but i probably won't stick with the 8x if i can figure out a way to
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get all of my apps in the four gigs of the 8s i may actually just go that route
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because the form factor is just too i wish that they were still
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compact high-end phones but it seems like screen size has become the new sort
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of um you know appendage measuring contest
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so whatever the email app destroys the built-in one
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for iOS i love the email app it is just
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awesome you can see your flag messages your urgent ones i'm not no i don't need
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to look too closely but just uh the way it does it the way it does attachments
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is awesome in iOS you have to go browse to your photo then you have to go send
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this to someone no no no no not not in Windows so here let's send let's send an
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email to slick
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oh nope hold on here so i'm just going to kind of cover
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this up but the point is you want to
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send an attachment you click the attachment button oh yeah that simple
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then you go find an attachment that's like herder here's a picture of you
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and it's and it's done i i love it it's just really elegant it's quick and it's
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quick to search the server so if it doesn't find anything it's just a button
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yeah search the server and it doesn't take forever which on iOS it does for
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some i just stopped using the iOS one i just used the gmail browser-based mobile
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site because the app is terrible whereas
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on this one i've stopped using the mobile site entirely the app is much
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better uh emailing photos easy ah february 1st
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the people app can be manually over ah yes the people app
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so the people app has some really good things about it but here i'm just gonna
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find this is just kind of funny so we're gonna go down to j
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where i have ah here we go
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so you know what that should be fine i have
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three jack chens actually i know two jack chens and one
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of these jack chens here i just don't want to show anyone's phone yeah there we go so see this
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shows a a yahoo and a pivos one
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and um it has combined multiple yeah i see
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here's an NVIDIA one so it's got three different ones for what are two jack
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chens who work for two different companies you can override it though so
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it's not the end of the world and then there were some individual people that were split out into multiple ones but
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all you have to do is use a setting that says link so you can unlink and then you
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can link additional ones together and it'll just take your entire disorganized
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contact list so you've got some of them in your hotmail contacts your gmail
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contacts your whatever contacts and it just kind of goes
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and it puts them all together facebook linkedin all that stuff so yeah manual
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overriding is good uh-ho error codes uh
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this is this is hilarious so there was some app that couldn't install
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on here we go this particular phone when it tried to do the synchronization so i
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was like click i clicked on it i was like attention required tap here
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error message uh oh hold on
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the error code 800 fff
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come on microsoft come on guys i mean this is like when um
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you know back when msn messenger was the big deal and you'd like get this error
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code you'd be like what does that mean you try to google it and you couldn't
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find anything because your internet wasn't working turns out the error code meant your internet's not connected and
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you're just like why didn't you just say my internet's not connected
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there you go there's a freaking concept for you so yeah just those those little
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microsoft things um oh i found a bit of a glitch the
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backup restore process doesn't work if you don't have a data connection through
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your cellular provider so it doesn't give you an option to connect to wi-fi to do a
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restore and phone ownership transfer so that's just bizarre and you can only
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switch a profile from one phone to another one upon initial boot up you
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have to wipe and restore a phone in order to take your profile and transfer
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the entire thing so if you have no sim in there with no data connection you
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cannot do it um and i did google that it's like a true
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thing oh the to-do list i love the to-do list it's integrated really well with
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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
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have a bunch of to do stuff so you can see your day agenda your agenda and your
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to-do list and it's really really smooth
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i think that's about it thank you for checking out this
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extremely long and hopefully interesting video about my two weeks into the
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Windows phone 8 experience where i'm actually finding you know i got my sound
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town now i got metrotube which is an awesome youtube app
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um i'm not really missing this thing anymore so
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it's exciting don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from unboxings
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