 This video is brought to you by our trusted partner Intel. For a limited time only, with the purchase of any unlocked Core i5 or Core i7 Intel CPU, get a free Intel beanie with a chance to win an Intel snowboard. Valid for Canadian and US customers only, some restrictions apply. For complete details, visit IntelGamingPromo.com. Welcome to Day Whatever This Is of the epic iSwitched trial with Windows Phone 8. I'm going to start with telling you guys the conclusion. The conclusion is I am not going to be switching to Windows Phone 8. I feel like there are some things that are better about it versus iOS, but there are some things that were serious problems for me that would make it so that I would actually... You can see I'm holding an 8S now, because I spent the last week of my iSwitched using the 8S rather than the 8X. The reason for that being that especially when I'm typing... On the 8X, I have small hands and I've had people say, Oh, get a note too, because you'll get... No, I'm not going to get used to it. I'm not going to get used to... My hands are actually just small and can't reach. So I wanted to switch to a phone that I can actually type one-handed with like I could on my iPhone 4, and I found that pretty much fixed. Every complaint I had about the keyboard, and the keyboard, now that I've spent some time with it on a phone that I can actually use, I like a lot better than iOS, and it's for a couple simple things. Number one is the inclusion of smileys here. That makes a big difference. And then there's your most recently used ones, and it'll just default to that every time once you select that. So you can just navigate to all the ones that you actually like, and the inclusion of period and comma here, because I do actually still care about punctuation even though I'm mostly texting. So totally got used to that, liked that about it, but I have a whole other list of stuff that's bothering me. So I've been using Raui for tweets, which is apparently... Yeah, there it is. Looks a little something like that. And I was having some weird issues with it. Like in the timeline, I'd click something here, but it would actually open up the one under it or two under it. There'd be like these weird offsets on the touch interface, and it was driving me crazy to the point where I was ready to just get off Windows Phone 8 entirely, because the stock Twitter app was horrible, and then Raui was having all these issues. But Twitter has updated their native app, and it is actually pretty awesome now. They've actually put some time and attention into it to the same sort of standard as on the other platforms. So it's really liking the Twitter experience. Although this sort of epitomizes some of... or not epitomizes, I don't know, whatever. It illustrates some of the issues I've had with Windows Phone 8 in general. A lot of the apps tend to be not that well labeled. If you're not already a Twitter user, so you haven't used Twitter on a mobile platform before, and you go, you open up the Twitter app on Windows Phone 8, what is everything? Okay, home I get. What's that? What's that? What's that? What's the difference between this and home? I don't know. So you have to actually just like dink around with it in order to figure out what anything is. And I mean, if you're an experienced Twitter user, sure. But as someone coming into it, like this just isn't... it's just not labeled well. You know, like there's these things down here, you got some like settings and stuff. And anyway, so we're done with that. Yeah, so way better. Overall, I prefer swipes to clicks. So I prefer... So one of the complaints I had early on was that I... whoops. Okay, well, let's go back to... hold on. You know what? Let's go to a song list. That'll do. As if you guys can't just freeze the frame and read that stuff anyway. So let's go to a... oh, right. I don't have the music loaded onto the 8S. Okay, fine. We'll go to a contact list. Right, okay. So the way that you navigate from letter to letter is instead of scrolling down the side like you do on Android and iOS, you click here and then click the letter of... Let me just make sure there's nothing shown here. Yeah, sure, whatever. So you... and then you click the letter and it takes... it jumps to the right spot. I actually find this not as easy to work with for a couple of reasons. Number one is that I find, like I said, I find touches less intuitive than just scrolling down the right-hand side because that's where my thumb is anyway. I'm right-handed. For a left-handed person, maybe that's not as good. The other thing is that now that I'm here, I kind of have to hunt and peck because it's going to be a long time before I memorize this grid. And if I'm looking for E, that's actually not conveniently within my reach, whereas this entire right side is within my reach. So I find that faster and more intuitive. And that goes for scrolling long lists, whether it's contacts, whether it's installed applications, or whether it's things like music. I just... I find this not as good. And then you see when you don't have something for every letter, like some of them are just kind of grayed out, and it just... it makes it more visually confusing, I find, to actually navigate it. Generally speaking, far more crashes and hangs than iOS in my month of using it. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's important to use the platform for a month before drawing any conclusions. I mean, I did the in-progress updates where some of them... I'd say things that were just totally wrong, and I'd say things that were right, but sort of more by chance than from experience with it, whereas now I actually feel like I know how to use the platform, and any complaints I have are based on, well, no, this is what it's actually like to use it for a long period of time. One thing I noticed about the 8S versus the 8X was that the space bar is the thing that seems to get shorter. It got a little tiny space bar in there, so I know I said that I do like things like the smiley face, but I mean, come on, language, why does that need to be there? So space bar would be something that I would have liked to see extended, because I find myself often hitting these instead on the condensed keyboard on the 8S. So the 8X had a slightly bigger one just because of the bigger screen. I prefer folders and desktops for navigation versus this tile interface, because tile is interesting, and I mean, okay, so you press the Windows button to go up to the top, and you can prioritize things based on size, but what I discovered is even on the 8X, which has a bigger screen, I am never going to want to make an icon like here. Let's find one that goes full size, like photos goes full size, I think. I am never going to want to make an icon, or not an icon, whatever, a tile this big, because it takes up so much space that it is just ridiculous. Maybe if it was something that I absolutely needed to have sort of in my way all the time, then fine. But as it is, if you are using those, you would get like three per scroll on your screen. If you are using the medium sized ones, you are only going to get about eight per scroll on your screen. And if you are using the small ones, even then, you are only getting about whatever it is, like 32 per screen. So you are actually scrolling to find applications, whereas when you compare that to a folder-based structure, like on the iPhone 4, where you can go folder, folder, folder, folder, folder, folder, folder, folder, and put like nine things in each one, it is less hunting for things, because you categorize them. You go, okay, I want my utilities, one click, two clicks, and I am in. Whereas if I have to go scroll, scroll, scroll to find something, I mean, even, okay, so on iOS, I might scroll from desktop to desktop, I keep everything on my first and second page, so I might have to go scroll, click, click. So I find that a little bit easier, and I say, so the argument after that is, oh, well, you can just swipe to the right and see all your apps that way. Scrolling slow, and then I still have to go click, click, potentially scroll, click to actually get into something, and the interface for anything should always be as few clicks as possible, and I find that this tile interface doesn't really achieve that for me. Dedicated camera button is awesome, every phone should have one. I'd love it if it was a little bit more stiff, because I found myself accidentally hitting it, but when you want it, just being ready to go sort of hold down a button and you're ready to take pictures is actually just kind of freaking amazing. One of the other problems for me, and I mean, mobile platforms, it's all about apps. Cloud media is not nearly, or a cloud player or whatever they call this thing, is not nearly as polished as Air Video on iOS. I found that extremely frustrating, because I do like to watch videos on my phone that I stream from my home server, so yeah. Skype integration also wasn't as smooth as it is with iOS, so I mean, check out the Skype app. Hopefully I'm doing something wrong here and someone can post a comment on the video. Oh, whatever, I'm not signed in. Well, okay, the point is, no, it's okay. I couldn't find a setting within Skype to make it so that it stayed signed in all the time and would push me chat notifications. It just worked on iOS. Hey, Apple, it just works. But no, but seriously, it just worked. And then this one, it's like I got Skype calls, but not written message notifications. I mean, that's very frustrating to me because I'd find them like hours later. So yeah, it just, okay, so what I'm trying to say is maybe there's a way to make it work. Maybe you can force it to somehow, but what I said was Skype integration is not as smooth as iOS, because you have to fuss with it, so that's very confusing. And the inability to turn off auto-rotate, honestly, is just a deal breaker for me. Like I can't function without being able to turn off auto-rotate. Even on iOS, I find it incredibly frustrating that on the phone, you can only lock in portrait. You can't lock in landscape, but not being able to lock at all, being forced to have auto-rotate on no matter what is just asinine. And then there's a huge thread on Microsoft's forums asking for it. I've had people tell me, no, you must be wrong. There must be a way to do it. No, there actually isn't a way to do it, even though it must be the simplest possible thing to integrate. So it just, it'll always auto-rotate. So what that means is if you actually want to view something in portrait mode, and you're laying in bed, you want to read something, oh, it moves around. Oh, well actually, hold on, no, I don't want to. So you have to kind of hold it like this, and then scroll through. It's just ridiculous. One thing that was way better than iOS is integrating multiple accounts. So going, okay, yeah, I want like a Hotmail calendar and a Gmail calendar, and I want some other random thing, and I want my Facebook and my LinkedIn contacts, and I want my Gmail contacts. The way that it integrates things within the People app here, as well as your contacts, as well as your calendar, is just awesome. Way better than iOS, where there's certain things that are just randomly, weirdly locked down, like iOS will grab your Google calendar, but not your Google contacts, and you have to kind of fight with it, whereas this one, you just kind of go, sign in, sign in, sign in, sign in, sign in, done. And I mean, even things like multiple entries, where you have someone on Facebook and LinkedIn, and you had them in your phone already, it'll even merge them, and then there's tools to merge them differently or unmerge them, or play around with them however you need to. Absolutely awesome. That's probably one of the high points of Windows Phone 8 for me. Nokia's Drive app was another one. I don't think I know if it's called Nokia Drive anymore. It seems to be called Hear Drive now. I don't know why they would have changed the number. Oh yeah, this is going to show where I am right now, but that's okay. It's awesome. When it finds your destination, I found it was a little bit less reliable than Google Maps, for me here in Vancouver, Canada. So there you go. It might be perfect where you live, but I found it a little bit less consistent. Internet Explorer is awesome compared to Safari. Going back to Internet Explorer, one of the things I complained about last time was needing to go in here for tabs. Apparently this refresh button can be changed to a tab button, but that still means I have to go two places for refresh, and I found that frustrating as well. So again, it's just that more clicks thing. And last but not least, see that? See the time there? Okay. So if I'm actually... I understand you want to use as much space as possible for just sort of actually viewing your content, but I think that because so many people are moving away from wearing watches and moving towards using their phones as their only real timepiece, I found that not having quick, easy access to that information, so especially battery life, there's a battery life app. I don't know if I've actually moved it onto the desktop of the 8S. No, it looks like I haven't. Having things like battery life by percentage and time and cell reception always at the top, I think, is worth it because it's just ridiculous when you're watching a video, for example. Actually, I don't know if... I don't know if this one's going to work right now. Okay, well, let's not worry too much about that here. Let's go to a MetroTube. MetroTube's awesome. I really like this YouTube app. So let's find something, and we're watching some video. So I'm used to, in iOS, just pressing on something and having the time show up for me, and I like that, so I miss that. Always knowing the time. I think that's pretty much it. So at the end of the day, I won't be switching, but what I will be doing is I will be doing an Android iSwitched with the all-new HTC One phone, so this is pretty much as high-end as it gets for an Android phone. So I'm going to give it a shot, and Slick's got a little smirk on his face going on over there because I said I wouldn't do it, but I'll be going back to my iPhone 4 in the meantime. Oh, honestly, having a newer phone really made me see how slow the iPhone 4 is now because I've gotten used to it. I used it for like two years, so that part's going to be hard to go back to. I kind of wish I had a more up-to-date phone, but so I'm going to go back to the iPhone 4 until I can get my hands on an HTC One, but this has been fun, and guys, leave a comment. If you've hung in this long, leave a comment under the video because I will be giving away an HTC 8S. I was going to give away the 8X, but it turns out someone needed it, so I'll be giving away an HTC 8S to one of the people who comments under the video. Give me like a couple weeks, and then I'll contact you, and you'll be getting a free phone. Yay! 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