iSwitched to Windows Phone 8 - Day 4 Experience Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
4,015 words · ~20 min read
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welcome to day four of my I switched
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video blog where I'm going from my iPhone 4 to my uh HTC Windows Phone 8 8X
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phone you can see I've got the shakes now because I'm going through withdrawal
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actually it hasn't been that it hasn't been as bad as I thought uh probably my
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biggest frustration has been um they not
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being easy and convenient way to Port over all of my SMS messages although
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speaking of SMS messages so we're going to we're going to get right into this
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here so so here we go typing a text message
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so there a couple cool things so number one is that the keyboard suggestions are
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pretty cool so if I go like this there's a very good okay well see bad example
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Hela comes up before hello so
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how are you doing today
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so it actually has a fairly intelligent system for suggesting what the next
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message that you might want to send is this is also really cool too actually
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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
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this out it put in a space for me so if I did want to type rather than selecting
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a word I could do that but if I press period it'll actually retract that space
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so the iPhone in my experience hasn't really been that intelligent about uh
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punctuation a lot of time I have to make Corrections so it's uh it's it's nice to
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it's nice to have that done for me uh there's no password to update apps so
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updating apps was as simple as I don't
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even remember it was really really
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really simple and I have totally lost it
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now it might have been in like settings somewhere maybe it was like I don't know
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updates or something but the point is that phone update I don't know maybe it
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wasn't a phone update the point is updates were simple all I have to do is press the button it updates uh
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everything Auto fill during typing predicts en oh yeah predicts entire
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words yep reminder set with one minute granularity okay this was something that
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I found to be a bit of a challenge so uh
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if I want to add a thing so I go okay what time um you can set times for
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things with one minute so iOS is a bit of a bear to do this with uh however I
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found that scrolling to scrolling through this is a bit of a
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challenge um well it's not I mean it's not a challenge obviously you can do it
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but it takes longer than if you just had a drop down that was every 5 minutes I
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think every 5 minutes would probably be a good balance between being able to
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select exactly the right time 12:17 p.m.
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versus not being able to um I find that this little contextual guy actually does
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something sometimes but doesn't do something other times in fact the
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inconsistencies in the UI are a little bit weird so sometimes confirm is
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denoted with a check mark whereas other
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times uh right there we go whereas other
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times there you go it's actually denoted with a dis so normally I would expect
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any kind of uh change commit to be the
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same icon regardless of of where I am
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and for that matter things like a confirmation so here I'm going to go to
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Twitter really quick so sometimes when
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you're when you're typing something or whatever else sometimes uh the confirm
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is done through enter whereas other times the confirm is done through a
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button down here and so those those little inconsistencies in the UI can be a
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little bit can be a little bit weird and can make it a little bit a little bit
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distracting when one app is different from another one uh sometimes y
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sometimes music okay music navigation I wasn't that impressed with so the first
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thing is that other than going into the Xbox music app there doesn't seem to be
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a quick way to get to music if you had Music open you can use the multitasking
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key here to go to yeah see it's gone now
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for some reason but uh so so you can
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click the volume here and that'll bring down a music navigation um display here if you have
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it open so let's go ahead and find some
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song that we're going to play so now when I go out of there you can see that
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navigation there and I can switch between okay I would be able to switch
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between songs except again the the music navigation I'm finding to be a bit um a
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bit insufficient so there's no see look I pressed play to pause it just now now
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or to play something else or whatever's going on um so you have to go to
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collection and then you can't go to music and press play here to just play
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all your songs if you play these then you won't be able to change it see and
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then if you go out here you actually have to press play here to start your
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whole collection going on shuffle and then if you close down the app in
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between that actually doesn't take you back to the song that you were listening to before and we'll reshuffle it so if
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that's what you wanted to do then that'll work for you again I'm pressing
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I'm pressing play because that's the only button I have that um that that
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will do anything whereas if I go in here then I can play and pause and start and
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stop um so I did find find music
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navigation to be a bit frustrating I also discovered that the Xbox music app
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is actually not available on anything other than Windows 8 and I have not
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upgraded my PC to Windows 8 yet I'm waiting till I finish my personal rig
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haha um before I do that I'm getting a
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look from slick right now but uh that means I have to use the older Zoom app
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and I haven't actually installed it yet but maybe that'll be in my sort of you
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know day 10 or day 15 or whenever I do my next update so so that's where the
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integration comes in I actually had a coupon I don't know where it went for a
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one-year subscription to Xbox music for $100 or whatever it was and so I've
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subscribe to that and that's really cool because it means I can basically ignore
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my collection oh yeah then there's no convenient way to just sort by songs so
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you can go music you can go and it doesn't remember the way that you prefer
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to sort so it'll take you to artists every single time even though that's not
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how I sort and I found uh I found this
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really frustrating so I have to actually
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go like this to get down to a song that starts you know if I remember it starts
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with you know M I have to actually do
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this to go through it there's no quick scroll like there is on Android and iOS
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and you'd think that this would be a dedicated search button for sort of
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whatever app it is but it always takes you to Bing search and if you search for
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I don't know Hello Kitty or something like that hello cotti see got it uh and
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oh it doesn't autoc correct a lot of the time um although it's it's already
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adapting to my Tendencies so that's kind of cool so I I can't quite decide what I
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think of the predictive text yet see this is another thing where like I would
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think pressing search in a search bar on
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no no you press enter for this okay um
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it always takes you to images and media first and I don't know that there's a
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way to change this to uh to search for web or I mean either local or web search
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are more logical to me than media I don't necess unless I search for picture
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of Hello Kitty I don't think that that's necessarily the most natural thing to uh
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to go with um right so I wish the search button was a dedicated search button
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even when you're here it's going to search for some random thing on the internet uh you you can use voice search
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which is kind of neat I did try it it is quite accurate um notifications won't oh
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yeah notifications don't move on their own so if I click outside of this this
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just kind of stays and it doesn't really go away that's a problem I have with iOS
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as well like especially because I'm a heavy Twitter user oh and the Twitter
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app is just terrible for Windows Phone 7 I'll get or Windows Phone 8 I'll get
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into that more later um so where was I going with that yeah
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it bothers me in iOS as well because the notifications come down here and a lot
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of the time I can't exit an app until they go away and I'll have tweets coming
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in so it'll be quite a while and I'll have to like try to be really really
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accurate and try try and close it so this is not just a Windows Phone 8
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thing uh brightness randomly boosts when switching apps so for here hold on it's
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want to make sure I don't have any private conversations anyway there you go see Skype is super bright and now
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it's dimmed again so that uh that's been just kind of annoying when sort of it's
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dark and speaking of brightness there's only actually uh three settings for
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brightness so I found even on iOS the brightness options were not necessarily
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enough for me and I used there's a screen dimming app that you can use to
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dim it even lower well this one has low medium and high and then you can turn on
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or off automatic adjustments and that's
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pretty much it so I did find that a little bit frustrating has a built-in QR
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Code Reader that seems to be an HTC Edition and it works extremely well it's
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one of the faster ones I've experienced uh landscape mode sometimes isn't
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graceful so for example the tile UI completely doesn't work in landscape
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mode at all um and then a funny thing about the phone is you actually cannot
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turn off auto rotate so the phone will
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always always always auto rotate I have Googled it it is a thing uh you cannot
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turn it off so I'd love to see them add this functionality cuz when you're like
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lying in bed doing something then it's nice to be able to still use it in
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portrait mode if you're reading a longer article or something like that so I would appreciate that um here's a funny
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thing about the auto correct again so here we'll type something to uh to
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diesel uh autoc correct doesn't help you compensate for a missed space for
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example so if we said hello oops how
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it's not going to oh this is the first time I've seen it do that okay well
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there you go I was wrong um one thing that it doesn't do is it won't uh
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compensate for okay apparently I'm
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totally wrong about this so maybe hello
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is just a more common one so there
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are
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some okay well I'm totally wrong about that so the auto correct is better than
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I thought it was it looks like it's just kind of missing things from time to time
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because it's only when I see it that I kind of go oh it didn't catch that
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um H okay one thing it definitely doesn't
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do is what I've seen iOS do is uh here so let's go with a word like uh uh okay
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ho where I accidentally put in a space it does not suggest ho to me whereas I
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have seen that done in iOS but I don't have much experience with Android on
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that one so and I mean all of this is just sort of my experience with it so
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don't take it as sort of the Gospel truth the only way uh auto correct okay
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the auto correct uh auto correct is kind of cool
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it's uh cool if you
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don't type that fast but as soon as as soon as
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you want to speed
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up it doesn't really see it's not really suggesting anything fast enough for me
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to actually use it so so that was something that I observed was that it
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was useful if you're slow but if you're not then it's not that useful however
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those of you who are really fast on the keyboard are probably not going to have that much trouble with it anyway I
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wouldn't have minded a more Square keyboard and I wish you could change the
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keyboard uh one thing that I found from my first blog that is not as bad as I
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thought it was was the underscore you don't have to do this to access it you
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can K away okay you can just go like this so
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you can switch between your special characters this way so it's actually
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really not that bad that's quite fast now uh typing kep accurate sensor is
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accurate in handy ah yes okay so when you're trying to highlight something
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accurately uh it takes quite a while to pop up the cursor but the cursor is
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quite accurate the one time I did have an issue with it was when I was trying
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to get it over to the very far left although this can be an issue with sort of any phone sometimes getting uh
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accurate sensitivity right near the edges of the screen so I had trouble
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selecting the first letter when I was typing over at the very far left the
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only thing I don't like about it is how long it takes to pop up so it just feels
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whoops it just feels a little bit on the slower side and because it doesn't pop
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itself right under your thumb so I I mean I like Android because with Android
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if you're in acccurate enough C toucher then you just touch the spot and it
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actually just goes there whereas iOS you have to hold it down and then it gives
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you that little magnifying glass but at least it's still under your finger with
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this one you go okay I want to put it here see how it's up there now no matter
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what I'm going to have to move so if I was close enough in the first place with
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iOS then I don't have to move once I see the popup this time I have to move no
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matter what on Windows Phone 8 um I find
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I'm less accurate on the keyboard I think part of that is just my small hands like I actually have significant
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amount of trouble reaching the que and now I've gone and pressed the camera
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button sorry about that um so I find I'm less accurate if I hold it two-handed or
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if I hold it with one hand and type with the other hand I don't have uh I don't
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have trouble with that uh music app okay
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yep yep yep where okay yeah the other
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thing about the music app is where's my now playing list exactly like I go to
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music and it lets me sort of navigate album songs playlist I don't have have
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playlists why would I need playlists um there's your history there's new stuff
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there's apps there's music store the music store is cool when you have a
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subscription because you can basically just go okay let's play this and it's
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sort of all you can eat which for $100 a year actually really isn't that
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unreasonable uh compared to actually paying for the songs individually I mean
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that's 100 songs it's like Five albums it's really not that much uh there's no
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battery life percentage on the top so I haven't found a way to turn that on yet
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I do like to know exactly how much battery life is left cuz I find those
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can be sometimes not that accurate again I'm pressing play to pause or I can do
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this or I can do that there we go um
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very limited screen brightness settings I think I showed that contact scrolling
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ah yeah same thing in contact so I'm not going to show you guys my contact list
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in too much detail here but let me just go through here and sort of I'll show
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you so it's the same thing where you actually can't uh you can't scroll by by
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names like that they want you to search so if I were to search for hold on
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so there's you could can't use the search button here you want to use a
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search button here I wish again that this was a search button the contextual
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search button as opposed to um just a regular search button so I can't scroll
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here but if I search for something like acute Tech mechanic so searching works
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but it's just um it's it's frustrating it's not that
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um yeah it's just it's not that intuitive uh dialing is dialing is good
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though I really like the way the actual phone interface itself works so you know
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8888888888 you call something gives you a bunch of cool options mute speaker put
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your thing on there don't put your thing on there so all of that worked really
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really well uh SMS app oh yeah the SMS app so
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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
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this out so you can actually use this right here to okay you have to okay if
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you have someone entered as a contact in multiple ways so here I'll find uh slick
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here um nope you I don't okay well whatever
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I'll just have to describe it so if you have someone entered in multiple ways in
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your um here we go so yeah that'll do so
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this is cool within the SMS app you can use this little switch button right here
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to go oh I want to send an SMS this time oh I want to send send uh an MSN
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Messenger message this time whatever it is you want to do the one thing is that
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until you sort of wrap your mind around that you got to remember what kind of
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message you're sending because I sent some messages to someone to their
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Facebook and then what I actually wanted to send was an SMS because they don't
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even have Facebook on their phone and so it didn't get to them so you just have
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to kind of get used to that but I thought that was really really cool um
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we're getting pretty close to the end here pretty close to the end iMessage uh
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I had a couple people call me out cuz I said I had to use my iPhone for or
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something and going back to the small screen was really hard like this thing
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feels like a toy now compared to the 8X
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which as you guys can see with my iPhone size comparison is significantly bigger
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both in terms of screen size and in terms of just overall size so this thing
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was like you know felt like felt like yeah felt like a child's play thing um
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but I had to go back to it CU I had to turn off iMessage so if you just sort of
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throw your iPhone away and sort of Chuck it and you leave iMessage on and it's
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sort of sort of somewhere what will happen is some of your SMS messages will
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automatically go to your iPhone using data instead of SMS so I had someone
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sending me messages and they actually went to my iPhone not to the phone that
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actually had my SIM card in it so that was sort of annoying oops my bad and you
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know what I think that's pretty much it for now um overall snappiness is good I
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like being able to you know pin things I've started creating some tiles I did
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find a good substitute for air video so cloud media is actually working really
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really well now that I've got all the ports set up right and all that good
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stuff so you know there you go uh you can play back things pretty quickly in
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much the same way that uh that air video works so auto rotate always works cuz
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yeah you can't turn it off so that's just playing off of off of a server so
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it's just an app you run on a server computer that uh that you know trans
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codes on the Fly and beams it to your phone just like Air Video on iOS um let
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me just see if there's anything else that I'm forgetting right now this seems pretty detailed so far found a couple
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games that I like already uh right so
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all the games are instead of actually having dedicated tiles for each game you
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just kind of go through here and you can pin things to the place where you like
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them the most sort of within the games thing that actually works quite well for
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me so this is rag doll run which I find pretty fun and I think that's what we're
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going to close off with here so stay tuned for my next Windows
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8 um Windows 8 phone I switched blog I'm
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doing as you guys as I said last time I'm doing a 30-day trial where I'm going
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to stay with Windows Phone 8 no matter what and then at the end I'm going to
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decide if I'm going to go back to iOS or if I'm going to uh stick with Windows
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Phone 8 and for those of you who are bound to ask I am not going to Android I
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don't like Android please stop asking me if I'm going to Android because I'm not
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