News - HTC 8X and 8S Windows Phone 8 smartphones unveiled

[Spud1]

Bit confused Spud, because I thought you'd been playing with the beta.
So...
Live tiles & Notificaiton, currently live tiles in 7.5 are push notification driven, by a cloud service, its battery effecient but yes, not live. They've added more live support in 8, and updated the notificaitons. However notifications still aren't as good as andriod.
Bing app, yeah, thats erm, screwed for choice.
4G/LTE is there, the 920 is exclusive to EE for a while because of this.
Music skipping, I'd love a goto: xx.xx for pod casts etc.
Podcast support has changed in 8.

You are right I have, although I have not played with the latest version, and thats why I can still aim those criticisms.

Live tiles will never be "live" for battery purposes - but I guess the real point is that if they are to replace traditional notifications (in conjunction with toast) then this becomes an issue. It's better in 8 I know but still not quite there.

LTE - thanks for the info I didn't know Good news.

I know the podcast support has changed but then again it was there and working well in WP7 before it went live - and indeed it works very well in the US..but its not available in the UK.

It's still not quite right or quite there - Apple got there with iOS5 imo, with their major missing feature being some kind of widget/tile interface. Android is pretty much there with 4.1, and OEMs tend to fill in the blanks here (not an option with iOS/WP).

Final judgement will come when final devices are available of course..but it's still really an incremental minor update for most consumers, and somewhat a dissapointment to some of us.

edit: Am I right btw that you really cannot skip to XX:XX in WM 7.5? I keep thinking to myself that I am doing something really stupid and that you can actually do this..especially since as I understand it the media player is very similar to the real "zune" devices? It seems like a bigger omission than Copy and Paste was.

[TheAnimus]

Yup afaik you can't skip to xx.xx which is sad because it's piss easy to implement. Unlike copy n paste which is really complex as a dev (OLE complexities...).

For me its the new VoIP stuff if it's as seamless as has been promised. I spend 4 digit amounts on my self employed work. If I can switch n save ill be very happy.

[brasco]

After my HD7 and it's terrible build quality and false advertising, it'd take something pretty amazing to make me go HTC again.

WP has a ways to go before it's truly competing with iOS and android. Shared core with Win8 should help stabilise the OS and give more confidence to the devs and we should see better apps.

+ no iPlayer is putting me off going WP again, having said that, if I get a hands on with any of these Nokia/Samsung/HTCs I may be swayed.

[bobharvey]

Having been badly burned over Windows Mobile phones, I'm still not keen on this stuff. But they do look a good size and shape, and an SD slot is a good thing.

[MattEvansC3]

Look nice but it's pretty similar to the lumia in its colourful style. Why does the s have an sd slot and the x doesn't?

Because of the casing. The X like the Lumia range use a single shell so can't be moulded with the slot, the S is mulitple case parts so can.

[MattEvansC3]

First thing that strikes me from those pictures? They both look exactly like a Lumia but with the HTC logo...it's really quite a striking resemblance.

Anyway doesn't really matter it's Windows Phone 8, which is a very mediocre update to WP 7.5..sadly still way behind the times, crippled by Bing in the UK and stuck with the Metro styling (the UI is nice, the metro Styling is not). Of course the biggest problem right now is that there are still not enough Apps available - although hopefully this will change if Windows 8T does indeed take off.

Becoming a bit disillusioned now with Smartphones - there is just nothing exciting anymore. Android is not very exciting, iOS just refuses to change and WP7/8 just has too many problems outside of the US. Have big hopes for BBOS10 but even then we have the app shortage problem until more Android devs take the 30 minutes to repackage their apps.

How can you say WP8 is a mediocre upgrade?
Nokia maps built in as standard
Skype built in as standard
NFC support
4G support
Cross platform app support with Win 8
Android style multi-tasking as opposed to the current iOS style multi-tasking
Now allowing middle-ware game engines for better quality gaming

Also Microsoft have stated they have not released all information yet as this will be released later in October. Also compared to the iOS5 update its anything but mediocre.

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Edit: You can skip to xx:xx in WP7, you just hold down the skip button and it fast forwards or hold down the prev button to rewind.

[dmzda]

These look very nice