After using the HTC for a couple of weeks I have to say that I am pretty fond of the phone and WP8. Almost all the apps, I have learn to love on the Blackberry and iOS are available for WP8. The social integration I find it can be quite a burden. Standard it will post to all your accounts in one click but if you keep that in mind you can uncheck those accounts while you are making your update. I bought this phone based on the specs and how it felt in the shop and to be honest the HTC haven’t let me down.
This phone is my current daily phone so I based my findings on my current usage.
The non-native apps which I am currently using are:
- Whatsapp (messaging tool)
- Skype (VOIP messaging tool)
- Evernote (Note organising)
- 9Gag (Just for a laugh)
- Facebook (Social media)
- Parkmobile (Easy parking tool to pay-as-you-stay while not going to a parking meter)
- Purple Cherry GBC (Gameboy emulator)
- Shazam (Look up songs that are currently playing on the radio)
- Skydrive (Look into the data on Skydrive)
- Trein (Public transport guide)
- Uitzending Gemist (Watch missed episodes)
- VCE Mobile (Exam practise tool)
- NU (News)
- Angry Birds (Game)
- AE Jewels (Game)
Some of these apps are also available for Windows Phone 7.5 and 7.8.
I hope you’ll find some use in my findings 🙂
Calling and messaging
Call quality is fine, nothing to mention there. The only thing which I find quite troublesome is when you receive a call there is a slight delay (a couple of milliseconds) between unlocking the screen and answering the call. Also don’t answer Skype calls, it takes way too long (around 10 seconds) for them to get actually answered. To be more specific this is the time between you answer the Skype call and that Skype is started/resumed.
I love typing on this phone (it’s not the keyboard from a BB but it is till pretty nice!) as mentioned in media, because the screen is wider and larger then for example the iPhone 4, you get bigger keyboard buttons as well (in portrait mode as in landscape mode) which makes typing just a lot nicer on a touchscreen.
Battery life
I am A BIG fan of the battery of this phone. I was able to get 2 days of usage on a charge, after a train journey on which I was using the phone to connect to the internet with my trusty old iPad 1st gen. Listening to some music, updating my statusses, messaging, browsing and some old fashion phone calls, the battery died somewhere in the night of the THIRD day. The combination between WP8 and HTC is a good one. I haven’t made use of location services a lot during this period.
Apps
As mentioned earlier in this post. Almost all the popular apps are available. There is one minor detail though. Most of these apps are still a work in progress and do have some small problems for example making the best use of your mobile data connection (Park mobile and Facebook) or just look up a person from your contactlist ( Facebook again). I think that the most of these problems are just showing up at the moment because of the short period WP8 is available and the incompatibility with Wp 7.5 (please correct me if I am wrong on that one).
Also something I found out of the native calendar app, there is no possibility to add a timezone on to the event, for a Microsoft product I find this a big flaw…
You cannot log out of Skype and you will get notifications if you want them or not when you are having a (video)chat on your regular/other client and there is no PDF client on the phone. Because Windows 8 has the Windows Reader I assumed this would be taken through their whole product line.
I know that the apps will be updated in the future (or at least I hope) and the flaws will be taken out. But some of these are just overall annoying while you are using the phone and just adds up to the opinion you’ll create towards the phone/platform.
Music and media
The screen is just awesome, coming from a Blackberry Bold 9790 it is nice to have a big screen. Also have I mentioned that the screen is wider then your average other phone so the keys on the on-screen keyboard are bigger.
Back to media. I watched a couple of series on my way to Edinburgh from Amsterdam. The screen quality is bright enough for your whatever you use your phone for. I know it isn’t an IPS screen but you can still see a lot in various angles. The HTC is able to play most of my videos. The only problem I found while watching movies is that browsing through a movie is pretty difficult because the scrollbar is just too small for accurate browsing.
Listening music on the phone is quite average. I am using the phone with my beats by Dre earbuds, I am happy that I can use the same gestures to play music (click once for play/pause, twice for next song en triple for previous). too bad that the volume rocker doesn’t work though, if anyone knows a workaround I would love to know how to fix this :). The quality is good, the Beats Audio function gives it a nice overall boos for the people who still remembers the “Mega Bass” function on their old Sony walkman, it is a bit like that.
Browsing for music is a bit of a challenge on the htc 8s. The music which I have stored on my SD-Card is been picked up by the media player and it plays it fine, but when you want to make playlists on-the-fly it will copy those to the internal memory which is just asking for trouble with the 4GB internal memory.
Camera
Well the camera is just very nice, I find the low light photo’s not bad at all. The autofocus works like you would expect from it. The possibility to add extra lenses to the standard camera app is a nice addition. There aren’t a lot of lenses at the moment, but I think there will be more to expect in the near future.
Syncing
This is an interesting one, because I am using it with a Mac (Macbook Pro mid-2009, OS X Lion) I have to install the Windows Phone app. The overall look and feel of the app is just simple, it can do enough (syncing contact, Playlists from you iTunes library, browse the SD card). Anyone who has used the Blackberry Desktop tool for Mac will feel familiar with Windows Phone app. Too bad I was only able to sync some playlists and not al the playlists I wanted to be synced.
I would have liked if you could natively just browse the internal SD-Card reader when connected to the Mac. I have noticed that it is a bit easier on Windows 7, but yeah I am using a Mac at this moment.
Pro’s
- Battery life
- Pay with PayPal in the Microsoft Store
- Nice screen size
- Nice integration of al social media platforms and e-mail accounts
- Fits nicely in your hand
Con’s
- Non removable battery
- There are a lot of “Beta” apps (Facebook, Skype, Whatsapp, etc)
- 4GB internal memory and no possibility to move programs to your SD card.
My overall opinion
I love the phone, am still using it happily. I don’t resent that I have bought the HTC 8S as my primary phone. The only problem/option I really wish that would be fixed fast, is the possibility to move apps to the SD-Card. I am running on my last 100 MB….
Before you say you can use the Blackberry Desktop software for wireless tethering that function is only for Windows. But if you want to connect to the internet and you don’t have WIFI in the neighborhood (or you just don’t want to use that) please do read further for instructions.
