iSwitched to Windows Phone 8 - Day 1 - Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,801 words · ~14 min read
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so this will be day one of my uh what's
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it like to go from iOS to Windows Phone 8 sort of blog I'm going to start with
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just some general feelings about the uh the HTC 8X so uh number one is it's
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absolutely gorgeous the ergonomics it's very very nice to hold I find that I'm
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actually able to use it mostly one-handed if I put my pinky here for
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support which I find I do sort of need
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to do for it's just I guess it's more of a habit than anything else I can still
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almost reach sort of the the top tile here but not quite I'm more comfortable
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in the bottom parts of the screen but I can reach back and search and all that
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good stuff um if I had any complaints about the phone it would be that the
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lock button's a little bit stiff compared to the volume and the camera
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shutter buttons so I will often be trying to get to the lock button and I
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will accidentally adjust the volume of the phone um overall though it's very
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very Snappy games feel a little bit a little bit stuttery compared to what I'm
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used to on iOS but I'd imagine there's probably some optimization coming for
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that at some point you guys can check it out if you want so I just installed uh
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Angry Birds and I think one other one so
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I mean it's not it's nothing sort of super objectionable or anything so you
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guys can actually see how it's running so it's not like running on one of those
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uh those like USB media players or anything like that like it's fine um you
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know going in and out of things is extremely responsive I installed the cat
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piano app so I was actually just kind of randomly going through my iOS apps and
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seeing Oh yeah this is very similar to the one I have
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already yeah so I was going through my iOS apps and just sort of seeing what
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equivalent stuff was available there's a lot of stuff that isn't there's my
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flickster uh these are for these are just quick links to the Google mail
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accounts I have as well as my hot mail mail I wish that it would label them
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correctly I don't know if that's a thing that you can change no not so much but
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you can pin it over to the start menu here which is good which is a good thing
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um so slick gave me kind of a look when uh when I said that it comes with no Kia
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Maps but it's actually not bad you can sort of pan around and do everything
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that you'd expect to do one cool thing about the maps app is you can actually
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uh there's a way I actually don't know how to do it yet but you can you can
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download the map so that you can view it offline which is which is kind of neat
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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
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it comes with a flashlight app so this is an HTC inclusion so you just press
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the button for different flash levels so
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I liked the medium one I think last time I was playing around with it so that's
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good I did find a replacement for air video although it's not as good as the
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one that I have so I'm going to go ahead
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and show you guys
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whatever what's the point of view even trying to hide anything at this point so
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my DVDs of Futurama that I own and ripped of course so play from the
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beginning so uh this is this is pretty good so I'm just playing this off of off
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of my server it transcodes on the fly to save on to save on data and to save on
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uh on CPU intensiveness on this side so
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give it a minute and that should start playing uh the one thing I didn't like
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about this versus Air Video is it's just not as polished so when you leave off
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somewhere and exit the app to check a text message or whatever else you go back inside the app and no really it's
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it's faster than this this is uh this isn't
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right okay hold on let's try that again I've actually I've never seen it do that
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before like I'm not trying to sell this app by any stretch of the imagination
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it's not as good as air video which is the one that I like but it's not that
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bad so here let's go look at something else so there I don't know South Park or
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something which of course I own all the DVDs for and I RI them to this
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okay season six find something there we
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go play from the beginning so Air Video will resume your playback from where you
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left off last time it'll also do things like um you can check a text message and
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come back and it remembers where you were with this one if I go out
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momentarily and come back see resolving preparing you can you can um scrub
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pretty pretty easily it's not really scrubbing but you can move around pretty
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easily so if I go out and then I open the app
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again um um it has no idea what was going on so
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there's no resume nothing like that preferences maybe no I don't know that
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preferences sorry guys I know this is going to be sort of a strange uh yeah
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see nothing like that this is going to be sort of a strange format of video for
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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
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app also there's a YouTube app that was created by
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Microsoft um so it's not quite as it's
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not quite as smooth as as uh as an
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actual YouTube app from Google Google seems to be sort of not really that
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interested in this platform in general um couple sort of micros yay it's
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Microsoft moments that I had when I first got the phone was uh the keyboard
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update so it came with a UK keyboard on it and to get a new keyboard I had to I
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had to go in here which was relatively straightforward so it's very intuitive
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to use like I didn't really have to think about any of this too much so settings keyboard
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which is here and then um you know you just kind of hold on things for
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contextual stuff actually well you can't do that when they're aren't multiple
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ones but I added a keyboard it was like a 20 mag download and I had to reboot
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the phone though and I was like Yay Microsoft that's how things work you
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reboot um uh oh yeah there's there's not as
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much of the 16 gigs left on the phone when you first get it as I would like
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compared to something like Android or iOS but my personal music library is
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only around 5 gigs and then I don't store much other than than videos or
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photos that I take on the phone other than that so it doesn't really bother me
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that much if you guys want to see what else is in settings it's pretty straight
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forward you can add as many accounts as you want which is great um and there's
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all my accounts so you can add a buttload of accounts to
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it which is kind of neat so you just throw all your accounts in there and then everything just kind of syncs and
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it's very intuitive which I thought was great um Wii was simple tap and send is
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I guess what they're calling NFC uh mobile network not found I actually
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don't have a Sim in it right now cuz I haven't quite managed to make the switch
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more on that later uh backup cloud is good um what else what was I looking for
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here H yeah Beats Audio you can turn on and off basically my experience with
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this so far is it does make it louder so it does enable the headphone amp but the
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thing that I didn't like about it is it sort of messes with the EQ for me it's
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more of a it's more of a flat EQ when you don't have Beats Audio on but Beats
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Audio go figure goes and sort of amps up the base to the point where I found it
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kind kind of objectionable so um so that was that was something but what was I
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talking about with the keyboard something not as much of the 16 gigs
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left as I like I think I already did that oh yeah it had an update to apply
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sort of on on day one of me installing it which I guess is sort of expected
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depending on how long the phone's been sitting in the Box um oh yeah the camera experience is
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much better than I'm used to so all you do is press the camera the dedicated
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button which is kind of nice um and then
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you can take pictures very very quickly so you know if you want to focus on something all of that works about the
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way you'd expect otherwise you can just take pictures very quickly and what's
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neat is that what you see in the viewfinder doesn't necessarily indicate
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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
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yellowed out and kind of ugly so if I actually take the picture it looks way
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better than that all the usual settings are there so there's your flash your
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additional photo settings things like white balance saturation sharpness ISO
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face detection all that good stuff uh video I recorded a little bit of video
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and it looked pretty good so far so I actually have not tried to review
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pictures that I've taken on the phone before so I guess that would be ah
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photos there you go camera roll there we go so you can check out
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what these ones look like see it's much sharper than what you
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were actually seeing through the viewfinder which I think is cool and
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then presumably there's going to be some kind of an easy way to share them or
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something I don't know I haven't spent like I said I haven't spent much time in
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this so edit set as lock screen save to Sky Drive okay Sky Drive integration so
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far seems kind of neat uh going to the market the market I thought the the sort
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of the navigation wasn't as intuitive as I would have liked half the time I try
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to do a store search like if I look for Angry Birds you know like to me it would
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be intuitive if I could press search to do that but you want to do that
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otherwise it takes you to like a b search and then I don't know I guess I
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just sort of found that a little bit confusing um you you have to kind of
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figure out with the tiles me on your own so it took me sort of a second to
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realize that this wasn't text messages but is actually the Windows mail icon so
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I was looking for text messages there but they weren't there um what else so
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this is a cool thing to do with music now I did mention that the music uh
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transfer oh no I didn't mention that before you know what this is just
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awesome this is probably one of the biggest sort of breaths of fresh air
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versus iOS that I've encountered so far so if you look at the computer uh
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there's a couple things here so there's the welcome to home welcome home to Windows phone thing that you can
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download technically it's for no keia Lumia phones but it actually works with
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any Windows phone the only issue I had with this one is that it didn't end up
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wanting to um take my contacts and
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calendar uh because my contacts and calendar are like a total mess like some
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of it um synced on iCloud some of it's uh in
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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
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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
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that it sort of freaked out and it didn't want to copy all my music as well
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probably some kind of a DRM thing so I didn't find this one that useful yeah I
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want to quit there's also the the Windows phone thing here which has some
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general settings which is very very basic stuff not a whole lot here and
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Windows Phone move things between your phone and PC um oh apparently there is a
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wizard wizard plug your phone to see what's on it it should be plugged in I
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don't know oh yeah there it is so you can do things like sync libraries from
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like Windows Media Player and stuff okay which leads me to what's like probably
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the coolest thing about Windows Phone check this out drag and drop yeah I'll
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drag and drop my music documents and pictures and not worry about having
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stupid iTunes installed on my computer
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or anything like that cuz iTunes just crashes my stuff all over the place
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loving it uh so yeah I'm not going to miss iTunes and that's one thing that I
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really like just sort of that ease of integration drag and drop file copies
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that's the way that things should work I love the keyboard so here's a text that
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well I had the Sim in here's my text to Diesel um the keyboard doesn't feel
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laggy like an Android keyboard does to me like you click it and it feels like
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you're clicking on it just like the uh just like the iPhone keyboard the one
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thing that I don't like about it is that it's a little slow to get to underscore
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you have to do this which I think is kind of dumb and um the spacing is just
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different so I've been using this phone at this width and this height for 2
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years which just kind of means that um
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it's just it's going to take me a little while to to get used to this so I think
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that pretty much concludes it so I haven't managed to make the switch yet
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because I haven't found a way to back up my SMS messages
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and it sounds like talking to people that that's just generally not going to
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be possible and thems the brakes for switching from platform to platform but
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um I don't know I guess if I just have to kind of take the plunge so yeah I my
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my day one of using Windows phone I actually haven't switched to it yet but
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uh you know what should should I just do it tomorrow yeah I'm getting the nod
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from slick just kind of just kind of go for it there's a lot of stuff I'm going
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to miss though all right well that's pretty much it so subscribe to L Tech
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tips for boxing reviews and other computer videos and uh hopefully
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tomorrow I have a slightly different update for you but that's my thoughts
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from day one with Windows phone