Gadgetory

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