Gadgetory

welcome to day four of my I switched video blog where I'm going from my iphone 4 to my HTC Windows Phone 8 8x phone you can see I've got the shakes now because I'm going through withdrawal actually it hasn't been that it hasn't been as bad as I thought probably my biggest frustration has been there not being an easy and convenient way to port over all of my SMS messages although speaking of SMS messages so we're gonna we're gonna get right into this here so so here we go typing a text message so there's a couple cool things so number one is that the keyboard suggestions are pretty cool so if I go like this there's a very good okay well it's a bad example hella comes up before hello so how are you doing today so it actually has a fairly intelligent system for suggesting what the next message that you might want to send is this is also really cool to actually you know I'm gonna go through an order because I have notes so it helps with punctuation which is cool so check this out it put in his face for me so if I did want to type rather than selecting a word I could do that but if I press period it'll actually retract that space so the iPhone in my experience hasn't really been that intelligent about punctuation a lot of time I have to make corrections so it's it's nice to it's nice to have that done for me there's no password to update apps so updating apps was as simple as I don't even remember it was really really really simple and I have totally lost it now it might have been in like settings somewhere he was like I don't know updates or something but the point is that phone update I don't know maybe it wasn't a phone update the point is updates for simple all I have to do is press the button it updates everything autofill during typing predicts and - oh yeah predicts entire words yep reminders set with 1-minute granularity ok this was something that I found to be a bit of a challenge so if I want to add things so I go okay what time you can set times for things with one minute so iOS is a bit of a bear to do this with however I found that scrolling to scrolling through this is a bit of a challenge well it's not I mean it's not a challenge obviously you can do it but it takes longer than if you just had a drop-down that was every five minutes I think every five minutes would probably be a good balance between being able to select exactly the right time 12:17 p.m. versus not being able to I find that this little context you'll guy actually does something sometimes but doesn't do something other times in fact the inconsistencies in the UI are a little bit weird so sometimes confirm is denoted with a check mark whereas other times there we go whereas other times there you go it's actually denoted with a disk so normally I would expect any kind of change commit to be the same icon regardless of of where I am and for that matter things like a confirmation so here I'm going to go to Twitter really quick so sometimes when you're when you're typing something or whatever else sometimes the confirm is done through enter whereas other times the confirm is done through a button down here and so those those little inconsistencies in the UI can be a little bit can be a little bit weird and can make it a little bit a little bit distracting when one app is different from another one sometimes yep sometimes music okay music navigation I wasn't that impressed with so the first thing is that other than going into the Xbox music app there doesn't seem to be a quick way to get to music if you had music open you can use the multitasking key here to go to yeah see it's gone now for some reason but so so you can click the volume here and that'll bring down a music navigation display here if you have it open so let's go ahead and find some song that we're gonna play so now when I go out of there you can see that navigations there and I can switch between okay I would be able to switch between songs except again the the music navigation I'm to be a bit a bit insufficient so there's no seat look I pressed play deposit just now or to play something else or whatever's going on so do you have to go to collection and then you can't go to music and press play here to just play all your songs if you play these then you won't be able to change it see and then if you go out here you actually have to press play here to start your whole collection going on shuffle and then if you close down the app in between that actually doesn't take you back to the song that you're releasing to before and will reshuffle it so if that's what you wanted to do then that'll work for you again I'm pressing I'm pressing play because that's the only button I have that that that will do anything whereas if I go in here then I can play and pause and start and stop so I did find find new music navigation to be a bit frustrating I also discovered that the Xbox music app is actually not available on anything other than Windows 8 and I have not upgraded my PC to Windows 8 yet I'm waiting until I finish my personal rig before I do that I'm getting a look from slick right now but that means I have to use the older Zune app and I haven't actually installed it yet but maybe that'll be in my sort of you know day 10 or day 15 or whenever I do my next update so so that's where the integration comes in I actually had a coupon I don't know where it went for a one-year subscription to Xbox music for $100 or whatever it was and so I've subscribed to that and that's really cool because it means I can basically ignore my collection oh yeah then there's no convenient way to just sort by songs so you can go music you can go and it doesn't remember the way that you prefer to sort so it'll take you to artists every single time even though that's not how I sort and I found I found this really frustrating so I have to actually go like this to get down to a song that starts you know if I remember it starts with you know M I have to actually do this to go through it there's no quick scroll like there is on Android and iOS and you'd think that this would be a dedicated search button for sort of whatever app it is but it always takes you to bing search if you search for I don't know Hello Kitty or something like that hello Katya I got it and it doesn't auto correct a lot of the time although it's it's already adapting to my tendencies so that's kind of cool so I can't quite decide what I think of the predictive text yet see this is another thing where like I would think pressing search in a search bar I'm students oh no no you press ENTER for this okay it always takes you to images and media first and I don't know that there's a way to change this to to search for web or I mean either local or web search are more logical that to me than media I don't necessarily kitty I don't think that that's necessarily the most natural thing to to go with right so I wish the search button was a dedicated search button even when you're here it's gonna search for some random thing on the Internet you can use voice search which is kind of neat I did try it it is quite accurate notifications well oh yeah well notifications don't move on their own so if I click outside of this this just kind of stays and it doesn't really go away and that's a problem I have with iOS as well like especially because I'm a heavy Twitter user oh and the Twitter app is just terrible for Windows set phones out I'll get them Lerman the Windows Phone II it I'll get into that more later so yeah it bothers me in iOS as well because the notifications come down here and a lot of the time I can't exit an app until they go away and I'll have tweets coming in so it'll be quite a while off like try to do really really accurate in tribes trying to close this so this is not just a Windows Phone 8 thing brightness randomly boosts when switching apps so for here I hold on its want to make sure I don't have any private conversations look anyway there you go see Skype is super bright and now it's dimmed again so that that's been just kind of annoying when sort of it's dark and speaking of brightness there's only actually three settings for brightness so I found even on iOS the brightness options were not necessarily enough for me and I used there's a screen dimming app that you can use to dim it even lower well this one has low medium and high and then you can turn on or off automatic adjustments and that's pretty much it so I did find that a little bit frustrating has a built-in QR code reader that seems to be an HTC addition and it works extremely well it's one of the faster ones I've experienced landscape mode sometimes isn't graceful so for example the tile UI completely doesn't work in landscape mode at all and then a funny thing about the phone is you actually cannot turn off auto rotate so the phone will always always always auto rotate I have googled it it is a thing you cannot turn it off so I'd love to see them add this functionality because when you're like lying in bed doing something then it's nice to be able to still use it in portrait mode if you're reading a longer article or something like that so I would appreciate that here's a funny thing about the autocorrect again so here we'll type something - - diesel it autocorrect doesn't help you compensate for a missed space for example so if we said hello oops how it's not gonna oh this is the first time I've seen it do that okay well there you go I was wrong one thing that it doesn't do is it won't compensate for okay apparently I'm totally wrong about this so maybe Hello is just a more common one so there are some okay well I'm totally wrong about that so the autocorrect is better than I thought it was it looks like it's just kind of missing things from time to time because it's only when I see it but I kind of go oh it didn't catch that hmm okay one thing it definitely doesn't do is what I've seen iOS do is here so let's go with a word like okay who've where I accidentally put in a space it does not suggest who've to me whereas I have seen that done in iOS but I don't have much experience with Android on that one so and I mean all of this is just sort of my experience with it so don't take it as sort of the gospel truth the only way autocorrected gotta practice it autocorrect is kind of cool it's cool if you don't type that fast but as soon as as soon as you want to speed up it doesn't really see it's not really suggesting anything fast enough for me to actually use it so so that was something that I observed was that it was useful if you're slow but if you're not then it's not that useful however those of you who are really fast on the keyboard or probably not gonna have that much trouble with in any way I wouldn't have minded a more square keyboard and I wish you could change the keyboard one thing that I found from my first blog that is not as bad as I thought it was was the underscore you don't have to do this to access it you can with kick away holy okay you can just go like this so you can switch between your special characters this way so it's actually really not that bad that's quite fast now typing kept again accurate sensor is accurate and handy I yes okay so when you're trying to highlight something accurately it takes quite a while to pop up the cursor but the cursor is quite accurate the one time I did have an issue with it was when I was trying to get it over to the very far left all those can be an issue with sort of any phones sometimes getting accurate sensitivity right near the edges of the screen so I had trouble selecting the first letter when I was typing over at the very far left the only thing I don't like about it is how long it takes to pop up so it just feels whoops it just feels a little bit on the slower side and because it doesn't pop itself right under your thumb so I mean I like Android because with Android if you're in accurate enough toucher then you just touch the spot and it actually just goes there whereas iOS you have to hold it down and then it gives you that little magnifying glass but at least it's still under your finger with this one you go okay I want to put it here see how it's up there now no matter what I'm gonna have to move so if I was close enough in the first place with iOS then I don't have to move once I see the pop-up this time I have to move no matter what on Windows Phone 8 I find I'm less accurate on the keyboard I think part of that is just my small hands like I actually have significant amount of trouble reaching the Q and now I've gone to impressed the camera button sorry about that so I find I'm less accurate if I hold it two-handed or if I hold it in with one hand and type with other hand I don't have I don't have trouble with that ah music yep okay yep yep yep okay yeah the other thing about the music cap is where's my now playing list exactly okay go to music and it lets me sort of navigate albums songs playlist I don't have playlist why would I need playlists there's your history there's new stuff there's apps there's music stores music stores cool when you have a subscription cuz you can basically just go okay let's play this and it's sort of all-you-can-eat which for a hundred dollars a year actually really isn't that unreasonable compared to actually paying for the songs individually I mean that's 100 songs it's just like five albums it's really not that much there's no battery life percentage on the top so I haven't found a way to turn that on yet I do like to know exactly how much battery life is left because I find those can be sometimes not that accurate again I'm pressing play to pause or I can do this or I can do that there we go very limited screen brightness settings I think I showed that contact scrolling yeah same thing in contact so I'm not going to show you guys my contact list in too much detail here but let me just go through here and sort of I'll show you so it's the same thing where you actually can't you can't scroll by by names like that they want you to search so if I were to search for hold on so there's a you can't use a search button here you want to use the search button here I wish again that this was a search button the contextual search button as opposed to just a regular search button so I can't scroll here but if I search for something like a Q Tech mechanic so searching works but it's just it's it's frustrating it's not that yeah it's just not that intuitive dialing is dialing is good though I really like the way the actual phone interface itself works so you know eight eight eight eight eight eight and I call something gives you a bunch of cool options mute speaker put your thing on there don't put your thing on there so all of that worked really really well ah SMS app oh yeah the SMS app so this is this kind of neat hold on again I don't want to show sort of everyone in there dogs names but I check this out so you can actually use this right here too okay you have to okay if you have someone entered as a contact in multiple ways so here I'll find slick here nope you I don't okay well whatever I'll just have to describe it so if you have someone entered in multiple ways in your here we go so yeah that'll do so this is cool within the SMS app you can use this little switch button right here to go oh I want to send an SMS this time oh I want to send an MSN Messenger message this time whatever it is you want to do but one thing is that until you sort of wrap your mind around that you've got to remember what kind of message you're sending because I sent some messages to someone to their Facebook and then what I actually wanted to send was an SMS cuz I don't even have facebook on their phone and so it didn't get to them so you just have to kind of get used to that but I thought that was really really cool we're getting pretty close to the end here pretty close to the end iMessage I had a couple people call me out cuz I said I had to use my iPhone 4 for something and going back to the small screen was really hard like this thing feels like a toy now compared to the 8x which as you guys can see with my iPhone size comparison is significantly bigger both in terms of screen size and in terms of just overall size so this thing's like you know felt like I felt like yeah I felt like a child's plaything but I had to go back to it because I had to turn off iMessage so if you just sort of throw your iPhone away and started chuck it and you leave iMessage on and it's sort of somewhere what will happen is some of your SMS messages will automatically go to your iPhone using data instead of SMS so I had someone sending me messages and they actually went to my iPhone not to the phone that actually had my sim card in it so that was sort of annoying oops my bad and you know what I think that's pretty much it for now overall snappiness good I like being able to you know pin things I've started creating some tiles I did find a good substitute for air video so cloud media is actually working really really well now that I've got all the ports set up right and all that good stuff so you know there you go you can play back things pretty quickly in much the same way that that our video works so auto-rotate always works because yeah it you can't turn it off so that's just playing off of off of a server so it's just an app you run on a server computer that that you know transcodes on the fly and sunbeams it to your phone just like our video on iOS let me just see if there's anything else that I'm forgetting right now this seems pretty detailed so far found a couple games that I like already right so all the games are instead of actually having dedicated tiles for each game you just kind of go through here and you can pin things to the place where you like them the most sort of within the games thing that actually works quite well for me so this is a ragdoll run which I find pretty fun and I think that's what we're gonna close off with here so stay tuned for my next Windows 8 Windows 8 phone I switched blogg I'm doing as you guys as I said last time I'm doing a 30-day trial where I'm going to stay with Windows Phone 8 no matter what and then at the end I'm going to decide if I'm going to go back to iOS or if I'm going to stick with Windows Phone 8 and for those of you who are bound to ask I am NOT going to Android I don't like Android please stop asking me if I'm going to Android because I'm not don't forget to subscribe fly this tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos I swear they ripped off the Mario sound effect for the