 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at nothing! Actually no, there's something. This is the Windows Phone 8X from HTC. This is a Windows Phone which basically means that you already know a lot of what there is to know about the device that's inside because Microsoft locks down the platform in a big way compared to what other manufacturers do. So on Android you can find any configuration under the sun, whereas for Windows Phone you can find... I mean, okay, it's better than it was with Windows Phone 7. So you know, they've locked down certain things like what kind of processor you can use. This guy right here has 16 gigs of storage and unfortunately does not actually give you the option to upgrade it with a microSD. 1 gig of RAM, okay, it's got a Qualcomm S4 1.5 gigahertz dual core, so this is the S4 Plus platform. This isn't nearly as fast as the S4 Pro, which is in the Droid DNA that we also took a look at recently, but it should still be fast enough because of the optimizations that Microsoft has done on Windows 8 Phone to make it extremely fluid to use. So we're sort of taking this off. This is a very strange box. It's like... I thought at first that it was foam, but it's actually like a cardboard paper carton thing. Ah, there we go, eco-friendly packaging. Got it. Beats Audio is included with the exclusive built-in app, 4.3 inch Super LCD 2 screen, 720p. So this is not Super LCD 3, which is just a new iteration of the technology in the Droid DNA, and it is not 1080p unlike the Droid DNA, but I'm still really excited to try this one out just because I'm super stoked on trying out Windows Phone. What else we got here? 8 megapixel camera with an f2.0 aperture lens, autofocus, LED flash, ultra wide angle front camera. So this is part of HTC's whole image sense sort of platform here. So they've added a lot of that technology in here. So it's got their dedicated image chip, which is basically just fast video and photo processing. The 2.0 aperture lens makes a big difference. This is important because the lower the aperture, the more light the lens actually allows to pass through it. This gives you automatically better photos compared to if you had a higher aperture lens because the way the technology works is you've got a sensor on the other side that's as bigger or as small as it is, and physics dictates sort of how much light you can hit it with, and then the lens either allows more light through or doesn't allow as much light through. The higher quality of lens, the lower the aperture it's capable of running at. So they're basically just saying, yeah, we're going to use an awesome sensor and we're going to throw an awesome lens at it, as well as the whole Beats Audio branding thing. So I don't know, I haven't tried it yet, the whole Beats Audio paradigm thing that they've got going on this phone, but what I do know is that having an amped, an amped 3.5 millimeter jack on it will make a difference compared to having a non-amped one, especially if you have higher quality headphones or higher quality IEMs. This is mostly relevant for headphones though, guys. So dual core crate, ah yes, it uses an Adreno 305 GPU, which is not the most powerful that's available on that platform. It's actually weaker than a 225, but the 225 is sort of a last generation souped up one and the Adreno 305 is sort of a less powerful current gen one. There's not, there's not that many games on the Windows App Store yet, but hopefully that will change and we will need that GPU to be capable of more. In the meantime, let's have a look at what's inside the eco-friendly box. So this is, please do not misplace this label and attach to the device to claim service or repair. Got it. Then we have a micro-SIM removal tool. We have your Windows Phone 8x Quick Guide, getting to know your phone, front camera, touch screen. Ah yes, the importance of the wide-angle front camera lens. That's cool because if you're going to be using the phone for things like, see I don't even know what, see I'm such an Apple person, see, iPhone 4, right, for FaceTime or Skype, okay, alright, okay, other things. Then what you can do is you can point it at you and it'll actually, so you'll get a little bit of fish eye, but it'll see a wider, a wider image. So if you had a group of people, you know, crowded around it or whatever else, then having a wide-angle lens there would actually be beneficial, whereas if you didn't then it would not be beneficial. So yeah, front camera here, proximity sensor here, so that could be useful. Notification LED is built into the front grill here. The touchscreen is, this is awesome, the touchscreen is actually labeled on here. Touchscreen, got it. And then camera button, ah yes, dedicated camera button. This is a requirement on Windows Phone, so it's a two-stage button, which means halfway for focus, all the way to actually take a picture. Start buttons here with back and search, dedicated buttons down there, and you've got a micro USB for charging. It should however be noted that this phone does include wireless charging, but apparently it's not necessarily, hold on let me just see, is that this phone? I have notes. Okay, it's wireless charging, but it's like not quite the same as other wireless charging solutions. Guys, you're going to have to leave a comment and let me know sort of if I'm wrong about that. In fact, we'll be back in a moment to put the SIM in and then yeah. There's a micro USB for charging, which isn't necessarily my favorite connector, but it's not the end of the world. So we stealthily installed a SIM card in it while we were off camera there. So let's get started. Click get started. I can tell the difference between the Super LCD 2 and Super LCD 3 already because I did just have a chance to check out Super LCD 3. How'd you like your Windows Phone? Enable mobile data, automatically download updates, blah blah blah, Wi-Fi connection. Oh, this is speaking of what, what's your home country? United Kingdom. Where the heck was this phone intended to be sent? I wonder if, there we go. Look at that. They have Canada on there. Send my location to Microsoft when my phone is activated. That should be okay. I'm sure Microsoft doesn't care. A Microsoft account allows you to do that. You know what? We'll sign in later. Sign in later. Thank you. A few more apps still need to finish installing. So what else can we say about it? Well, number one is the fact that the biggest complaint that people have generally had about Windows Phone 8 is the app ecosystem. So there's even things like, Google only has one native app for Windows Phone 8 at this point in time. So yeah, it's not as rich as something like iOS or Android, but I personally believe that that will improve over time. So I'm, my intention as of sort of filming this video right now is to stop using my iPhone 4 outright and switch to using the 8X from HTC and find out if I can actually survive the switch in the app ecosystem that exists. So things like Maps, I'm expecting to be using Nokia Maps because Microsoft actually doesn't include Bing Maps as the default map application because apparently the Nokia one is excellent. So even other handset makers have to use Nokia Maps, which I thought was sort of a weird thing, but is I guess not the end of the world as long as you're Nokia. You know what? Let's have a look at the phone physically a little bit. They're calling it a human form, which isn't the first time we've heard that as a way of describing sort of the way that a phone is got sort of naturally flowing lines. There are no sharp edges on the phone whatsoever. So everything is very curvy here. If I actually hold it upright like this, you'll see that the edges are rounded. Rounded edges, hold it on this side. It's hard to figure out the angle. Yeah, there you go. So rounded edges again. Even the edges of the glass are actually rounded slightly. So I really don't know if you're going to be able to see that, but there's no, there's no sharp edge to it. It flows seamlessly into the yellow, actually speaking of the yellow, the yellow shell. So I picked this particular color. It's a very bold color, but there are other colors available guys. Don't worry, the 8X isn't only available in peel the retinas off of your eyeballs green, which is definitely thankful because I have sort of a unique taste in terms of aesthetics and not everyone necessarily shares it. So I just want to see if I'm missing anything else here. We'll have to do of course my obligatory iPhone 4 size comparison. So the phone itself is wider than an iPhone 4, which you'll know if you've done any research on it whatsoever because it's significantly larger than an iPhone 4, which most phones are these days because Apple seems to be falling a little bit behind in terms of phone sizes and staying competitive about them. People, the trend right now seems to be larger screen sizes. Thickness is pretty similar, but because of the curved shape it actually does feel more natural in the hand. Compared to the Droid DNA, which I had said in my unboxing is way too big for my hands because look at that I can barely reach across. I have quite small hands and that was one of the reasons that I always found the iPhone 4 quite comfortable to use. I can actually reach the top corner. It looks like because of the dead space here at the bottom with buttons, I'm not quite going to be able to reach the top left corner, but it's not that bad. I can do bottom left, bottom right, top right, and not quite top left. Hopefully I won't have too much trouble with that. UI seems very very snappy so far and this is actually my first time with Windows 8 other than, not with Windows Phone 8 other than a brief experience with it at the NCIX Tech Fair not that long ago. Live tiles can be customized in a lot of different ways to actually give you live updates about things on the fly. It includes Internet Explorer, recommended, Internet Explorer 10, which particularly for, particularly for HTML5 is supposed to be quite the beast. So let's just go somewhere where people like to go like, oh yes, Factory Direct. Oh no, not what I meant to do. Allow! No, not FACR. That's not what we want. Oh look at that. Speech recognition, go ahead. Oh, Facebook.com? Facebook.com. Okay then, that worked. In spite of all the sort of stuff that I was saying before that, so that actually won't work that well because we want to go somewhere. You know what, let's just do our usual thing. Let's go to the NCIX website. I wish it would take you straight there like kind of a, I'm feeling lucky search if you key it right into there. So browsing, oh it feels pretty smooth. Not quite as good as the Droid DNA where I can see a little bit of, I can see a little bit of pop-in at the edges and then zooming. Yeah, you can see it. You can see it a little bit there, but the Droid DNA is running the Pro chip set, whereas this one is running the Plus chip set, which is significantly less powerful. So it's got NFC. Kids Corner is kind of a neat feature that's included with Windows Phone 8, so it's not so much to protect your kids from doing anything stupid, but it's to, well yeah, protect your kids from doing anything stupid that sends a bunch of emails to everyone in your contact list, but it doesn't necessarily protect them from finding anything harmful on the internets. I think that pretty much does it. I'm looking through, ah yes, Datasense. So it's carrier dependent, but it allows the data to be compressed on the carrier side so that you don't use as much data, and it also is supposed to help you. This is a Windows Phone 8 feature. Find local hotspots that are around you and connect to them so that any background services can be running off that whenever you're in range of it. It is an LG, an LTE 4G phone, it is not an LG phone, LTE 4G phone but it is not going to be available in my region because I have the wrong carrier and this is the wrong phone and all that stuff that makes it not work. The media ecosystem is supposed to easily integrate with the Xbox Store compared to sort of previous Zoom branding or whatever else is going on, so if you buy something on here, that's a song, the minute you sit down at another Windows branded device or an Xbox, it should all be available through the cloud there, and that pretty much wraps it up. So we'll just do a little bit more close-up in terms of size comparison. I'd love for you guys to see it up against a couple of other phones. So this is a Samsung Note 2. So you can see that it's clearly absolutely ridiculous in size and has a BenQ sticker on the back which Diesel thinks is some kind of a fashion statement or something like that. Then there's the Droid DNA, so you can see it's quite a bit smaller than that. And finally there's the iPhone 4 which you've already seen. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos, and I will see you guys again next time.