 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 going to start with just some general feelings about the HTC 8X. So number one is it's absolutely gorgeous. The ergonomics is 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, I guess it's more of a habit than anything else, I can still almost reach sort of the top tile here, but not quite. 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 button's 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 stuttery compared to what I'm used to on iOS, but I'd imagine there's probably some optimization 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 one. I mean, 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 USB media players or anything like that. It's fine. 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. Yeah, 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 Flickster. 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 a thing that you can change. Nope, 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 I said that it comes with Nokia Maps, but it's actually not bad. You can sort of 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 download the Maps so that you can view it offline, 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. What else? It comes with a flashlight app. So this is an HTC inclusion. So you just press the button for 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? My DVDs of Futurama that I own and ripped, of course. So play from the beginning. So this is pretty good. So I'm just playing this off of my server. It transcodes on the fly to save on data and to save on CPU intensiveness on this side. So give it a minute and that should start playing. The one thing I didn't like about this versus Air Video is 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 faster than this. 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 Air 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 own all the DVDs for and I ripped them into this. Okay, 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. But with this one, if I go out momentarily and come back, say resolving, preparing, you can scrub pretty easily. 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. There's nothing like that. Preferences maybe. Nope, I don't know what that preference is. Sorry guys. This is going to be sort of a strange, yeah, see, nothing like that. This is going to be sort of a strange format of 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 smooth as an actual YouTube app from Google. Google seems to be sort of not really that interested in this platform in general. Little sort of Microsoft, yay, 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 go in here, which was relatively straightforward. So it's very intuitive to use. I didn't really have to think about any of this too much. So settings, keyboard, which is here. And then you just kind of hold on things for contextual stuff. Actually, well, you can't do that when there aren't multiple ones. But I added a keyboard. It was like a 20 meg download and I had to reboot the phone though. And I was like, yay, Microsoft, that's how things work. You reboot. Oh yeah, 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 settings, 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 syncs and it's very intuitive, which I thought was great. Wi-Fi was simple. Tap and send is 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. What else? What was I 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 flat EQ when you don't have Beats Audio on. But Beats Audio, go figure, goes and sort of amps up the bass to the point where I found it kind of objectionable. So that was something. But what was I talking about with the keyboard? Not as much of the 16 gigs left as I like. I think I already did that. Oh yeah, it had an update to apply on day one of me installing it which I guess is sort of expected depending on how long the phone has 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 dedicated button which is kind of nice. And then you can take pictures very, very quickly. So if you want to focus on something all of 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 going to 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've already made 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... Ah, 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. Like I said, I haven't spent much time in this. So edit, set as lock screen, save to SkyDrive. SkyDrive integrations so far seems kind of neat. Going to the market. The market I thought 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. 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. 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 transfer... 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 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. Some of it's synced on iCloud, some of it's in Google, some of it's 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 mish mash and just kind of import it and it looks like you can't really do that. It 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 Windows Phone thing here which has some general settings, which is very very basic stuff. Not a whole lot here and Windows Phone, move things between your phone and PC. Oh, apparently there is a wizard. Plug your phone to see what's on it. It should be plugged in, I don't know. Oh yeah, there it is. So you can do things like sync libraries from Windows Media Player and stuff. Okay, which leads me to what's probably the coolest thing about Windows Phone. Check this out. Drag and drop? Yeah, I'll drag and drop my music, documents and pictures and not worry about having stupid iTunes installed on my computer or anything like that because iTunes just crashes my stuff all over the place. Loving it. So yeah, I'm not going to 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 text to diesel. The keyboard doesn't feel laggy like an Android keyboard does to me. You click it and it feels like you're clicking on it 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. The spacing's 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 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 breaks 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, 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? I'm getting the nod from Slick. Just kind of go for it. There's a lot of stuff I'm going to miss though. All right, well, that's pretty much it. So subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, 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.