Gadgetory

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