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mothgirlwings:

Walt Disney studios Christmas card and calendar - 1951/1952

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digithoughts:

Bullet point review of the HTC 8X and Windows Phone 8

Here’s a few thoughts on the HTC 8X and Windows Phone 8. Quick version: A superbly built handset is matched with a friendly and nice looking OS, but a few missing features and lack of great apps bring down the overall impression.

Hardware:

• Build quality and finish feels superb with super nice fluid transitions between the screen glass and the body. Nicest plastic/glass combo phone I’ve held since the Nokia N9/Lumia 800. I actually think the HTC 8X surpasses the Nokia.
• The design is indeed very nice. Both in look and feel. However, the understated design gets slightly in the way of usability. Namely, the buttons are too flush with the body. Especially the on/off button. This makes it both hard to find and hard to know whether or not you’ve managed to press it. The flush buttons also make it hard to find the volume rocker in the dark or while the phone is in a bag or pocket. Buttons can be a good thing you know. If the buttons only have had just a tad more action, this would’ve been a non-issue. These are minor annoyances. Maybe they nag me so much because I like the overall look and feel so much. So close to perfection. The camera button is slightly more raised and works ok.
• I think I would be just fine with a huge phone. But I’d rather see some Android/WP8 hero devices with 3.8-4.2 inch screens. In this case, the screen is just a tad too small in relation to the overall size of the phone. However, the design covers up the size pretty good and the 8X is percieved smaller than it is, both in my hands and in my pockets. Btw: The 4.3 inch 720p LCD screen is very nice. 
• To my eyes, the camera is slightly better than the iPhone 4 but worse than the iPhone 4S/5. I think HTC could and should have given the camera a little bit more love.

Hardware/software:

• The battery life is fine in use, but the phone drains too much battery while idle (i.e. at night). It’s not ok to wake up and see that your phone has gone from 50% to 0% battery life during the night. I solved it by syncing emails etc once every 30 minutes instead of… constantly, I guess? I had this problem on my WP7 device as well.
• The browser is fast and very stable and it eats “desktop” websites for breakfast. I like it a lot. As a reference: The HTC 8X is faster and more responsive on heavy websites than my iPad 2 running on iOS 5.x.

Software:

• When a website “forces” the device to go to its mobile version, it is often to a mobile version from 1998 or something. This is especially bothering because I know that the mobile sites of twitter, gmail, google maps, facebook etc have great versions for other phones with large touch screens (iOS, Android). This is not OK. If you don’t want to build me a flashy app as you’ve done for Android and iOS, at least serve me the iOS version of your website. To get “the wrong” version of websites also makes web video a little troublesome. Too often during the test period, I got a message that I needed to download flash (on desktop websites) or that my device didn’t support the video I was trying to watch (on mobile websites from 1998). In the meantime, my wifes 2.5 year old iPhone 4 gets served with html5 video and chugs along just fine. She actually said “It just works”. I can’t tell you who’s to blame, but as a user, this makes the WP8 phone less useful. However, when the phone do get served with html video, the 8X handles it very fast and efficient. Better than all other mobile devices I compared it to (HTC One X, iPhone 4, iPad 2).
• WP8 is very similar to WP7 (as it should) and if I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t have guessed that the underlying core is brand new. UI navigation is as snappy as ever, but now all apps load faster. Overall, the Windows Phone UI is just great.
• No Spotify app? I have it on my WP7 phone… From Ars Technica: “Almost all existing Windows Phone 7 apps and games should continue to run on Windows Phone 8, unaltered. A few won’t, however. A small number of Windows Phone 7 programs were given special permission to use native ARM code instead of .NET for certain tasks. The Windows Phone 7 Skype app, for example, used native code (most likely for its audio and video compression algorithms), as does Nokia’s Counter app (because it needs to use APIs that don’t exist in Silverlight) and Spotify. Updated apps should fix these problems, given time”. Again: I don’t care who’s to blame, but users are the ones taking the hit.
• No Instagram. Microsoft says that there are over 120,000 apps in the WP Store and that they have 46 of the top 50 apps on the platform. That may be true, but many of these apps are bare minimum efforts from developers and not at all as nice, quick or useful as their iOS and Android counterparts. Also, when the next big thing breaks, you can almost be sure that it won’t break on WP8. Outside of the US, in smaller local app markets/countries, the holes in the WP8 ecosystem are even more apparent. For example, one of my local largest gadget sites listed the top 50 “must have” apps (as voted by readers), and Windows Phone managed to cover about 60% of these by functionality and just 40% if only actual brand apps were counted. Both Android and iOS covered more or less 100% by functionality. When it came to trend apps (often social quiz games and puzzles), Windows Phone had almost none.
• My weather app’s (stock Microsoft) live tile doesn’t update itself which it does in WP7. I just use the one from HTC instead, but I liked the minimalistic one from MS better. The alarm clock live tile doesn’t show the actual time of when the next alarm will go off. WP7 did this.
• Multitasking works better than on WP7.
• I really like the simplicity of the WP UI. You have one start screen with lots of customizable info and one swipe away you have all your apps in a perfect scrollable alphabetical list. That’s it. Love it. Also, even though you can bring forward almost all critical info to show up on your start screen, it’s almost impossible to mess up the good looks.
• You don’t have the ability to pin individual settings to the start screen. This is just stupid. Affects me a lot, but may not be a big deal for you.
• Why can’t I have the top status bar visible when I’m browsing the web or in an app (it’s there in some apps)? As it is now, I have to exit the browser just to see what time it is. Stupid.
• No notification center. Does not affect me a whole lot, but may be a big deal for you.
• The auto brightness works better than on my WP7 phone, but I would like to have the ability to make the screen even darker for very dark environments. The “low” setting is not even halfway there.
• As I said, I really like the WP UI. However: Oversized headers are a waste of precious mobile screen real estate. Why carry around these huge phones if half the screen is filled with headers instead of useful info? It’s especially annoying in list views such as when scrolling through contacts or updates in the people “hub”.
• What’s the state of turn-by-turn navigation on the WP8 platform? It feels as it is lagging behind the competition. Android has it, iOS has it (at least you reach your destination every other time) and WP8 devices from Nokia has it. Not so sure about other WP phones. This one comes with a navigation solution from HTC that I’m supposed to pay for. Pay for good things? Never! Just kidding. I’m just saying that as a late starter in the smartphone race, Windows Phone needs to offer more, not less than its competitors. The stock Bing app can give you directions, such as the old map app from Apple did.
• Due to a bug, I haven’t been able to buy any apps with my WP7 phone. That is all sorted out now, the registration and payment process on the WP8 device was very smooth.

I really like the HTC 8X. Too bad I have to send it back in a couple of days. I hope HTC sticks with this design language for a while and introduces a few more phones with the same good look, feel and finish as the HTC 8X.

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mothgirlwings:

 Mickey and Minnie Mouse glide “On Ice” (1935) - Walt Disney