 Welcome to day four of my iSwitched 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 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, we're going to get right into this here. Here we go, typing a text message. There's a couple of cool things. Number one is that the keyboard suggestions are pretty cool. If I go like this, there's a very good... Okay, well, let's see. Bad example. Hella comes up before hello. How are you doing today? 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 too. Actually, you know what? I'm going to go through an order because I have notes. It helps with punctuation, which is cool. Check this out. It put in a space for me. If I did want to type rather than selecting a word, I could do that. If I press period, it'll actually retract that space. The iPhone, in my experience, hasn't really been that intelligent about punctuation. A lot of time I have to make corrections. It's nice to have that done for me. There's no password to update apps. 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 settings somewhere. It was like, I don't know, updates or something. The point is that... Phone update? I don't know. Maybe it wasn't a phone update. The point is updates were simple. All I have to do is press the button. It updates everything. Auto-fill during typing predicts entire words. Yep. Reminder set with one minute granularity. This was something that I found to be a bit of a challenge. If I want to add a thing, so I go, okay, what time... You can set times for things with one minute. iOS is a bit of a bear to do this with. However, I found that 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 contextual guy actually does something sometimes but doesn't do something other times. I think the inconsistencies in the UI are a little bit weird. 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. Normally I would expect any kind of change commit to be the same icon regardless of where I am. For that matter, things like a confirmation. Here, I'm going to go to Twitter really quick. Sometimes 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. Those little inconsistencies in the UI can be a little bit weird and can make it a little bit distracting when one app is different from another one. Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes music. Okay, music navigation I wasn't that impressed with. 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... See, it's gone now for some reason. You can click the volume here and that'll bring down the music navigation display here if you have it open. Let's go ahead and find some song that we're going to play. Now, when I go out of there, you can see that navigation is there and I can switch between. Okay, I would be able to switch between songs except, again, the music navigation I'm finding to be a bit insufficient. There's no... See, look, I pressed play to pause it just now or to play something else or whatever is going on. 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? Then if you go out here, you actually have to press play here to start your whole collection going on shuffle. If you close down the app in between, that actually doesn't take you back to the song that you were listening to before and will reshuffle it. If that's what you wanted to do, then that'll work for you. Again, I'm pressing play because that's the only button I have that will do anything. Whereas if I go in here, then I can play and pause and start and stop. I did find 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. That means I have to use the older Zoom app and I haven't actually installed it yet, but maybe that'll be in my day 10 or day 15 or whenever I do my next update. 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. 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. You can go music. 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. I found this really frustrating. I have to actually go like this to get down to a song that starts with, if I remember, it starts with M. I have to actually do this to go through it. There's no quick scroll like there is on Android and iOS. You'd think that this would be a dedicated search button for 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 Cawddy, got it. Oh, and it doesn't auto-correct a lot of the time, although it's already adapting to my tendencies, so that's kind of cool. I can't quite decide what I think of the predictive text yet. This is another thing where I would think pressing search in a search bar on... No, you press enter for this. It always takes you to images and media first, and I don't know that there's a way to change this to search for web. Either local or web search are more logical to me than media. Unless I search for picture of Hello Kitty, I don't think that that's necessarily the most natural thing to go with. I wish the search button was a dedicated search button. Even when you're here, it's going to 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 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. That's a problem I have with iOS as well, especially because I'm a heavy Twitter user. Oh, and the Twitter app is just terrible for Windows Phone 7. I'll get into that more later. Where was I going with that? 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, and I'll have to try to be really, really accurate and try to close it. This is not just a Windows Phone 8 thing. Brightness randomly boosts when switching apps. So for here, hold on, I just want to make sure I don't have any private conversations. Anyway, there you go. See, Skype is super bright, and now it's dimmed again. That's been just kind of annoying when it's dark. 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 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 edition, 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 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 auto-correct again. So here we'll type something to diesel. Auto-correct doesn't help you compensate for a missed space, for example. So if we said, hello, oops, how, it's not going to, 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 auto-correct 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 that I kind of go, oh, it didn't catch that. 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, hoove, where I accidentally put in a space. It does not suggest hoove to me, whereas I have seen that done in iOS, but I don't have much experience with Android on that one. So 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. Auto-correct is kind of cool. It's cool if you don't type that fast, but as soon as you want to speed up, it's not really suggesting anything fast enough for me to actually use it. 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 are probably not going to have that much trouble with it anyway. 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 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, accurate sensor is accurate and handy. Ah 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. Although this 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 an 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 going to 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. I actually have a significant amount of trouble reaching the queue and now I've gone and pressed the camera button. Sorry about that. So I find I'm less accurate if I hold it two handed or if I hold it with one hand and type with the other hand, I don't have trouble with that. Music app, okay, yep, yep, yep. The other thing about the music app is where's my now playing list exactly? I go to music and it lets me sort of navigate albums, songs, playlists. I don't have playlists. Why would I need playlists? There's your history, there's new stuff, there's apps, there's music store. Music store is cool when you have a subscription because you can basically just go okay let's play this. And it's sort of all you can eat which for $100 a year actually really isn't that unreasonable compared to actually paying for the songs individually. I mean that's 100 songs, it's 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. Play limited screen brightness settings, I think I showed that, contact scrolling. Ah yeah, same thing in contacts. 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 scroll by names like that. They want you to search so if I were to search for, hold on. So you can't use the search button here, you want to use the search button here. I wish again that this was a search button, a contextual search button as opposed to just a regular search button. So I can't scroll here but if I search for something like AccuTech Mechanic, so searching works. But it's just frustrating, it's not that intuitive. Dialing is good though. I really like the way the actual phone interface itself works. So 888-888-888-888 and you 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 kind of neat. Hold on, again I don't want to show everyone in their dog's names but check this out. So you can actually use this right here to, okay. If you have someone entered as a contact in multiple ways, so here I'll find a 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. The 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 because they 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 because 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 was like, you know, felt like, yeah, felt like a child's play thing. 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 sort of 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 is good. I like being able to, you know, pin things. I've started creating some tiles. I did find a good substitute for AirVideo 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 AirVideo works so auto-rotate always works because, yeah, you can't turn it off. So that's just playing off of a server so it's just an app you run on a server computer that, you know, transcodes on the fly and beams it to your phone just like AirVideo on iOS. Let me just see if there's anything else that I'm forgetting right now. This seems pretty detailed so far. I 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 going to close off with here. So stay tuned for my next Windows 8, Windows 8 phone iSwitched blog. 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 to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos. I swear they ripped off the Mario sound effect for the...