 Welcome to day 14 of the iSwitched video blog. Now, I've had a lot of criticism that I don't know what I'm doing in 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've 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, Shaw Phone number, this has to be just the super most elegantest copy paste that I have ever seen. So here's that contextual search. So hopefully this is going to search web. Yep, there it goes. Shaw slash contact us, and all I got to do is find a phone number, touch it. Okay, well, it didn't pick it up that time, but check this out. Anytime you highlight something, there's your 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 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, hotspot, hotspot, hotspot. 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 in our studio and Slick's phone, he couldn't load up a page. Mine did, and I was like, oh, 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 because 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 frigging annoying. So it actually finds a way to load the page, which 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, 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 close 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 air video. It's not perfect because I mean it doesn't resume 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 Shawtech 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 work. It just goes right back to the beginning of the show. So oh, oh the stock Twitter app. 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 frigging ridiculous. However, 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 and you can put it back if you don't remember for whatever reason, you can go back. So Rowey 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 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 because I don't have Windows 8 yet. However, 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. Tanzi was suggested to transfer SMS, but it's 20 bucks, so I didn't bother. I just decided, you know what, I'm going to live without my old SMSes. Plugging in the headphone jack on this particular phone makes a bit of a staticky noise. So unplugging it 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 them. Very, very cool. And this is amazing. So the way... oh wait, no, I'm not moving on to that yet. Sorry, sorry, sorry, not that. So yeah, convenient not to have to worry about syncing things. It syncs your app list as well as your photos, your documents, and pretty much whatever else you want. Your settings, all that good stuff. Nokia Drive. Nokia Drive, I wanted to use it on the 28th, but I discovered that you can't... Oh, hold on. No, no, that's going to have 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... Hold on, I'm just going to go somewhere else. Let's look in the middle of the country. So check this out. 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 fine as far as quick navigation goes, 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 map monitoring battery. I think this is a kludgy 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 at. It also gives you some neat tips about how to preserve more battery life, suggest things like turning off NFC, which can be a bit of a battery hog, 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 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 rowey's awesome. Ah, the people hub. So I've spent more time with people now. Actually I'm a shut in. I've spent no time with people, but I've 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 is that's for groups. It's really not that great for communicating with other people. So if I go, what is it? 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 want to post an update. I want to post to Twitter. How do I add a photo to it? Okay. Maybe you can do it. Maybe I'm just totally wrong, but come on. Why is this hard? I very much prefer Rowey and yeah, I'm mostly a Twitter guy. That's the 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. Like I said, I actually just totally don't miss it. Then people allows you to monitor people's Facebook updates anyway. So yeah. Moving right along, let me just see if we missed anything. Windows phone.com, freaking awesome. 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 windows phone.com, which is pretty freaking cool. Did you zoom in on that? That's right, but then it wouldn't focus. Okay. That's probably just as well because my phone number is 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 going to just go find. So you go to Settings, Settings, 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 work or anything like that. Although I did found one kind of neat flaw because I had thrown my SIM 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 to do anything to do it. All you have to do is put a 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 now. 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 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 kludgy 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. So 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 re-cadjigger it for 10 minutes from now because I don't have time right now. No, I want to snooze it. It's awesome. Love it. Ah, so I set that up so that I could show you guys that, but it kind of surprised me so 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 that's been driving me crazy about the 8X keyboard, it turns out is purely a form factor thing because I tried using the 8S 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 pressed the search button trying to make it over to here, which is where the keyboard would be. Annoying. With the 8S on the other hand, I can easily and comfortably type no matter what and I don't have to, yeah, I recommend it. It's fine. I didn't use it much. I just go, yeah, hello, this is a 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. Keyboard's fine. It's just the 8X is a little bit too big for my hands. And for those of you who are going to say, use a Note 2. No, I'm not going to use a Note 2. It's too big. This is too big. I have small hands. You'll get used to it. No, you won't. Your small hands don't grow because your phone is bigger. Yeah, so I may stick. I may actually, okay, this is sort of a spoiler alert, but I'm only going to 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 8S, I may actually just go that route because the form factor's just too, I wish that there were still compact high-end phones, but it seems like screen size has become the new sort of 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 don't want you to look too closely, but just 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 in Windows. So here, let's send an email to Slick. Oh, no, hold on here. So I'm just going to kind of cover this up, but the point is you want to send an attachment? You click the attachment button. Oh yeah, that simple. Then you go find an attachment that's like, here's a picture of you, and it's done. I love it. It's just really elegant. It's quick to search the server. So if it doesn't find anything, it's just a button to search the server, and it doesn't take forever, which on iOS it does for some reason. I just stopped using the iOS one. I just used 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. Email and photo is easy. February 1st, the People app can be manually over... Ah, yes, the People app. So the People app has some really good things about it, but here, I'm just going to find this is just kind of funny. So we're going to go down to J, where I have... Here we go. So you know what? That should be fine. I have three Jack Chens. Actually, I know two Jack Chens, and one of these Jack Chens... Here, I just don't want to show anyone's phone. Yeah, there we go. So see this? Shows a Yahoo and a Pivos one, and it has combined multiple... See, here's an NVIDIA one, so it's got three different ones for what are two Jack Chens 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 will just take your entire disorganized contact list, so you got some of them in your Hotmail contacts, your Gmail contacts, your whatever contacts, and it just kind of goes bleh, and it puts them all together. Facebook, LinkedIn, all that stuff. So yeah, manual overriding is good. Oh, error codes. 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 clicked on it. I was like, attention required, tap here. Error message... Oh, hold on. The error code 800FFFF. Come on, Microsoft. Come on, guys. This is like when... Back when MSN Messenger was the big deal, and you'd get this error code, and you'd be like, what does that mean? And you'd try to Google it, and 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 frigging concept for you. So yeah, those little Microsoft things. 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. It's integrated really well with the calendar. So you just swipe over to to-do list and you're going to have a bunch of, no, no, it's okay. You're going to 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've got my SoundHound now. I've got MetroTube, which is an awesome YouTube app. I'm not really missing this thing anymore. So that's exciting. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.