Review: HTC 8X Windows Phone 8 handset It’s hard not to feel a little sorry for HTC. Eighteen months ago it was the darling of smartphone manufacturers having reinvented itself from a maker of unbranded handsets for the likes of O2 to an outfit boasting some of the best Android smartphones around. HTC 8X Windows Phone 8 Platform alteration: HTC's 8X Windows Phone …
According to both HTC and Nokia - who do not see the 8X as infringing on their turf, so Elop says - the colours are in order to complement the OS.
That makes a certain amount of sense to me or rather it would if you couldn't change the tile colours. Which, obviously, you can. Also, you can get black handsets but no black tiles, which sucks.
Also @Al - Skydrive makes DropBox and iCloud look like half-assed university projects. 25GB of free space and free Office? No contest.
I take your point re SkyDrive but I access my DropBox account from a Linux machine as well as my Android and Windows devices - it's the platform agnostic side of DB that appeals to me. More to the point, I already have all my cloudy stuff in DB and 75GB of space. On the plus side a DB app for Windows 8 landed last week so maybe a WP8 app isn't too far away.
I thought SkyDrive was available for other OS too - not the case?
I have a SD account (I assume, I own a WP7.5 phone) but never used it... DB does exactly what I need in a no-hassle way so I am struggling to see how any product will improve on that.
I wonder if I can set SD and DB up to monitor the same folder without them interfering?
New phone, bright lights = good result (usually).
Low light usually means blurred due to the long exposure and (for those with mechanical aperture control) less depth of field, so some bits are in focus, others not.
Keep phone in pocket for some months and the lens gets scratched (even microscopically) and often dust gets into the system. Even things that appear to be pretty much sealed still get stuff in them. Result = poor images even in brighter light.
"If your battery degrades or you need more than 16GB of storage, hard cheese."
Couple that with poor battery life compared to it's competitors (true of all HTC's handsets over the last 18 months), premium handset price for low memory capacity and dropping firmware updates after a few months. The reason for massive drop in market share becomes painfully obvious.
Unfortunately HTC seem unwilling to change the situation even when the same flaws (especially battery life and storage) are highlighted review after review. This is the primary reason I jumped ship to Samsung after ownership of 3 HTC handsets.
I must say I still like my new Desire X (Android of course, not WinPho), a lot. I used to have an HTC Desire, but unfortunately put my foot on it at night during an observing session with the telescope in France, so maybe the UI appealed to me more than the Samsung offerings. I cannot comment on battery life, however. The Desire X is definitely a much better phone than the cruddy little replacement phone (cheapest non-sim-locked android phone available in that French town at that time) I got (though to its credit it did have a dual SIM capability). The same holds for the Samsungs I had a look at recently: touch screen much better to look at and in terms of responsiveness than the cheapo phone I got.
That'll be why they're not really doing very well in general compared to other OEMs. Even in WP8 land HTC and Samsung are only 30% of sales with Nokia being the other 70% (you can see why they went with WP).
HTC are one of the backers or are involved in the Beats audio product range. So obviously they will use it on their devices. Small memory size is all about cost and they somehow must feel they have to undercut Nokia to get sales.
Poor battery life??? 49 hours on battery on my One X (O2's branded JellyBean update that was released last week) over the weekend and still had 30% when I put it on charge!!!! That's after 4 hours of actual usage (calls, emails, browsing, etc) in a low signal area! If thats poor then I would love to know what you class as "good"? My 8X also lasted similar amount of time but with slightly less battery remaining with a little less usage. Friends with me using their S3's had no battery life left at all after less than 30 hours with LESS actual usage and had to ask to borrow my handset to make a call!
Unless you use your device as a video player or have more MP3 tracks than you could possibly listen to in a week on your device, then 16GB is more than ample. My One X has plenty of storage space free on it even with over 200 apps installed (including offline maps for the whole of the UK on Maps Navigation). Takes me less time to hook up the handset to a USB cable than it would removing a back cover and then removing a Micro SD Card & placing that in a card reader! Also data speeds are faster from internal memory than a Micro SD Card.
For those saying that HTC have poor support, who are you comparing it to? The vibration motor failed on my One X just before Xmas. Phoned them on the Friday, phone collected at their expense by UPS on Monday, delivered back to me Wednesday morning first thing all sorted out!!! Samdung couldn't even replace a Galaxy S1 screen within 28 days when I made the mistake of owning one of those for a few months (got rid of it due to all the inherent issues that the handset had & screen failing twice in 6 months). Only company with better support than HTC are Apple with a store visit (15 minute rule).
The main reason that HTC are lagging behind Samdung & Apple is the marketing of their handsets. Samdung are pushing their products down everyones throats on tv adverts constantly, paying for product placement, etc. Apple are living off Jobs' legacy (although no new actual innovations since his death).
I have had my 8X for 6 weeks now and TBH like WP8 a lot. Granted that there are not as many apps on the WP store, but the apps I use on my One X are all available on it.
49 hours with 30% left and you actually used it for 4 hours including calls? I'd swap your One X for mine in a flash!
Mine never lasts more than a day and I am a light user and this seems to be the general consensus on places like XDA. HTC did improve it with the JB update, but the main thing they did was to make the auto brightness more aggressive. It is the screen that burns the juice. Once you fire up the screen you can literally watch the battery drop.
Good would be an E72. You were looking at 5 days at least with usage, but unfortunately those days are now long gone.
Samdung. I see what you did there. Very funny! <wipes tear from eye>
Exactly. Automatic No-Sale for me.
I really like HTC phones and much prefer them to any of the competition but without a removable battery or minimum 2 days of average use (which would probably include about 2 hours of ebook use) then a phone is not even on my contemplation list.
These niggles, not essential but would definitely help HTC claw back market share...
Longer lasting batteries
Louder external speaker
Louder headphone volume
2GB RAM
32GB Storage
At least one high end 'Nexus' model (although I'd probably stick with Sense as I think most of integrated apps are far superior to most Google/third party versions). In fact perhaps if they just released a Nexus style version as an OTA sidegrade for all their models then both Sense and stock lover could both be happy.
The Nexus 4 is really tempting. That's an amazing price. However I do prefer the UI of Win Pho. Particularly the big writing and icons, so I can use the phone without my glasses - and the much nicer address book (People Hub). I don't use apps often, but if I do go back to Android it'll be very nice to have the Play store again, rather than WP's rubbish Marketplace.
Contract comes up in March, so it'll be interesting to see what the carriers offer - we're on a multi-user business plan and no-one seems to offer one of those SIM-only...
You know you aren't forced to have any particular UI on Android, it's all perfectly changeable...
http://tinyurl.com/ape8wqx
http://blogs.computerworld.com/sites/computerworld.com/files/u177/android-home-screen-9-b.png
Infact there is a website dedicated to tweaking how your Android works.. iOS and Windows Phone offer NOTHING in the way of customization.
Nexus4 is not that hard to get ahold of, you can walk into a store tommorrow and get one for less than this HTC phone, or you can keep an eye on Google Play, they will have loads up again soon....
I liked the ability to customise Android, and it was nice to have all the controls I wanted on the main home screen, with others grouped on different home screens as convenient. Something you can't do with Win Pho.
On the other hand, I needed the ability to customise Android, because the stock email, calendar, and particularly the contacts app were pretty rubbish. Back in Android 2.2 days anyway. I've not really played with anything more up-to-date than 2.3.
The downside of how many apps there are in the Play store, is there's no way you can find and try all the stuff that you might like - in order to get the look you like. I don't think I saw anything with particularly large text sizes, for example, which I'd really like to avoid having to dig my glasses out when out and about. That may all have changed now of course.
I think if I could have android with Nokia Drive the People Hub, and slightly bigger buttons then I'd call it perfect.
I have an 8x primarily because Nokia faffed about with their Lumia 920 release. I really like the phone. I bought the Navigon Satnav software for it, which is good, but expensive.
I much prefer it over the Mrs' iPhone 4, although she is resisting upgrading her 4 to anything newer at the moment, even though it's out of contract.
App store is a little sparse, but I have what I need, and for games I still have my TF101. Coupled with an Xbox Music subscription who needs iTunes? or additional storage for music.
What I really want is a decent dock for it. non iphone accessories are still very hard to come buy despit ethe fact that micro usb is probably as populous as the iphone port.
Stu
No, Samsung support is noticeably WORSE than HTC's.
I know very few people who aren't techies who give a damn about SD card support. None of the recent Nexus devices have it and The Goog is deprecating support for them in future releases anyhow.
But then I've had good luck with these things. My Desire is still going (albeit with CM7.2 on it now) and I'm quite liking my One S.
Something that HTC kept very quiet about on my mozart is that the locations app was upgraded from something used to "check in" at locations to a satnav app with turn-by-turn. Only found this out after I bought my Ativ S.
I would have bought an 8X but got the ativ S instead purely for the SD card slot. I didn't want the 8S or the 820 because of 800x480 screens.
I have a lumia running 7.5. Corporate email via Outlook, just fine. And google mail, too. And if I used it, Hotmail as well (I don't). The messaging bit deals with txt / facebook / other messaging services. There seems to be an implication in this article that google mail isn't supported now, or am I just reading this wrong?
Google just killed (or will this month) Exchange Active Sync. Or at least they have for new connections, and say they'll stop allowing existing connections sometime later (can't remember if they said when).
So email will still synch, via either pop3 or IMAP (both of which WP7 can do), but you'd lose calendar synching and contacts, because Google use CalDAV and CardDAV. My recollection of setting someone's upis that iOS only does one of those 2, but I could be wrong. I guess MS will either have to put those protocols in via an update, or you'll have to synch calendars using one of Microsoft's services - or something else using Active Sync.
I'm surprised HTC don't let you use Nokia maps. Even Nokia phones don't have that pre-loaded, for some reason. You get prompted to download that from a Nokia section of the Marketplace.
I hadn't realised the Maps app (which I guess is Bing Maps) wasn't sat-nav. It'll work out routes and traffic, but doesn't give voice directions. I'd not used it before, due to having Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive.
Nice to see MS have got rid of Zune though. I was quite rude about iTunes, as clunky, buggy and not always easy to use. Then I got WP7, and had to use Zune. Ugh! Nasty, messy interface, looks like it was written in Flash, back in the worst days of 2003 and slow. Makes iTunes look easy to use, and did I mention how sllllooowwwww it is?
Do HTC do the funky colours on any of their Android phones?
Zune was awful. Hope it stays dead.
Re maps, I can't tell the difference between Nokia Maps and Winphone Maps. I prefer to use the awesomeness that is OS Maps app. Especially with the 1920s layer, it's a bit fun / sad to stand at Terminal 3 and think you used to be in a farmyard pond. Nokia Drive needs to have the maps for regions downloaded, but I can testify that it works bloody well in rest-of-Europe and no data usage.
Outside the Salford City Council offices in Swinton, Salford on the Chorley Road.
https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=manchester&ll=53.511509,-2.338962&spn=0.003669,0.009645&hnear=Manchester,+United+Kingdom&gl=uk&t=m&z=17&layer=c&cbll=53.511509,-2.338962&panoid=vyDNNiSdwG7uiL1vPr00Fg&cbp=12,194.03,,0,-0.7
I own two high end phones for both Android and Windows Phone 8. Being a firm fan of Android and HTC I took the 8X with a large amount of suspicion and curiosity. The hardware is undoubtedly solid and build quality from HTC has been improving massively over the past year to the point where I'd say they are either at the top or very near it. The big unknown was how I'd handle going from Android to Windows Phone 8.
I own a second-hand Samsung Omnia 7 so I knew roughly what the OS was about and how to get around things but there is still a lot that has changed. First impressions were a surprise to me because even though it is very familiar it felt like a different OS altogether. Snappy, no 4 - 5 second pauses while switching apps, loading apps or resuming background tasks like WinPho7. The app selection is still on the sparse side with some big hitters missing like official DropBox clients but it has improved with some really good Twitter clients. I'm sure it'll pick up over this year with the help of MS's marketing clout and developers.
At the time I got the Omnia 7 the best thing I could say is that WinPho7 had a lot of potential and with WinPho8 it feels like that has arrived. Unfortunately for MS I feel like it's what they should have released instead of 7 and many owners of older hardware will resent that MS didn't say they would be stuck on the 7.x OS until WinPho8 was almost ready to ship.
The phone itself is really nice. It has a sort of pillow shape, or half pillow shape anyway that feels great to hold with the matching HTC theme giving the tiles the look of continuing where the phone's colour leaves off. I was a bit underwhelmed by the One X's camera despite all the buzz words thrown about at the time but the 8X's camera feels, to me, a lot better. Noise is vastly improved, detail loss in lower / less than ideal light is better and sharpness is great. A hardware camera key is nice and one of the things I miss on Android.
In summary if you aren't heavily invested in iOS or Android it's well worth a look. Unfortunately there are a lot of people that will jump on the bandwagon and bash it for what it isn't rather than what it is and that's a shame. The review here is pretty similar to my own thoughts really.
"MTP's big disadvantage is Mac OSX doesn't support it, which is slightly annoying but then probably a minority of users."
My contract is up tomorrow, and I'm on the verge of selecting a new phone. Presently a Mac user, though for how long is not certain, but I think this has just killed this phone for me.
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