My Windows Phone 8 adventure

My time with Windows' mobile OS has come and gone. Many people (yours truly included) read and talk about other mobile OS's without ever trying them. We discuss what we like about them and what we don't like, all from articles we have read from other people. The past week I decided to really put up or shut up and give WP8 a real try, using it as I would my own personal phone. Read below to find out my final thoughts about my time spent with the Lumia 521.

(WP8 Live Tiles)

As soon as you turn on the phone and swipe up to unlock it, you know you're using a Windows phone. Their live tiles really are unique to just them. You'll know right away why they call them Live Tiles by just looking at the People tile. The tiles rotate vertically to give you new pictures of people in your contacts without ever needing to interact with it. Email tiles will show you how many unread emails you have, and the text messaging tile will show you an unread amount along with a brief preview of the message. Not all tiles are Live, and it is up to the developer of the app to include this feature if they wish. Customizing the start screen is very simple. Find a tile you like, select the size that you would like it to be (small square, medium square, or large rectangle), and move it to the place on your screen you would like. You can also change the color of your theme by going into settings>theme. I noticed several times however that they have yet to completely perfect the way moving tiles effects other tiles around it. More often then not, when I decided to move a tile from one place to another, I had to completely update every other tile since they don't wrap around my update. Several times I would end up with blank spaces and off centered tiles.

(All apps list)

Windows definitely wanted to keep their OS extremely simple, swiping from right to left will reveal the only other page you have, this is where a list of all your apps are located in alphabetical order. If you wold like to 'Pin' an app to the start screen, you simply need to hold down the selected app until a drawer shows beneath it, asking if you would like to pin it or delete it. Easy? Absolutely. Sadly though, there is no way to create a folder to put on your start screen. This becomes extremely annoying when you want to group certain apps together, but can't. A good example of that is the Game tile. Windows automatically puts all downloaded games into this tile, regardless of what you would like to do with them. Games also do not show in the all apps drawer, they are placed only in the Games tile. I personally like to group certain games into folders depending on what style of game I want to play at the moment. Having every single game located in the same place can be nice, but also very irritating.

(Text messaging app)

The text messaging app is probably the one app that I had the most issues with. This is probably due to the fact that it is the app that I use the most so I see it very often. The messaging screen is very static and dull with just names and the last text sent or received. Opening up a text message reveals the conversation in different tones of the same color. The on screen keyboard was my biggest annoyance. I felt like the keyboard was rushed and not really thought out. The keys are very tall and skinny, and the action buttons were located below the keyboard. The space bar itself is a problem due to the fact that it is not centered, and pressing the comma or emoji button happened more often than not. There were multiple occasions where an accidental press sent my message, or I was brought to the attachment page because the buttons are right below the space bar.

If you've ever read anything about WP8, then you have definitely heard the outcry for the lack of apps it has in its store. While this is very true and I had an extremely hard time finding apps that I use on my G2, I don't think that the lack of apps is the biggest problem. In my opinion, the quality of the apps is by far a bigger problem. Apps that I use on Android that I found in the Windows store (Ebay, Redbox, Netflix, Slacker Radio, IMDB) were very poorly made and often times crashed. Using the Redbox app recently, it continually crashed on me throughout my search/reserve process and I was never able to reserve a movie. Slacker Radio would stop streaming music constantly and I would have to completely re-open the app and select the radio station I wanted again. With the IMDB app, I never was able to find where to view the trailers for movies that were out in theaters. These are just a handful of my app experiences, but sadly they aren't the only ones.

(Brightness Setting)

 When it was time to change certain settings (WiFi, screen brightness, bluetooth, etc.), things weren't so cut and dry. WP does not have an action center to quickly toggle these setting. Any time you would like to do that, you would have to go into the settings menu, find the setting you were looking for, select it, and then change it from there. I ended up downloading a battery tile that was like the middle man between me and settings. I still had to select the exact setting I wanted, but they were all located in the same place. When wanting to change the volume, things got a little murky. There is no distinction between ring tone and media volumes. If you want your ring tone to be at the loudest setting, when you open a game, the game will be playing at the loudest volume as well. The only thing you can change is whether you would like the phone to vibrate and ring, or just vibrate. With brightness, there is no slider or percentage tracker, just a simple low/medium/high box or auto setting.

(Facebook notifications)

With all the negatives and things that I didn't like about the OS, there are definitely parts of it that Windows did a very good job at. Fluidity of the software is definitely one of them. While browsing through tiles or the app drawer, I never saw any stutter or lag. This also rings true when going from any app back to the home screen when pressing the Windows key. The animations back were always smooth and consistent. Facebook is another aspect that it absolutely does right. Once you add your Facebook account to your phone opening up the People tile takes you to your contacts list, but swiping over reveals all your Facebook notifications. From here, you can post, like, or comment on Facebook without ever opening the app or going on the web. This makes things extremely fast and easy for the social media minded person.

There is a lot to love and hate about Windows mobile operating system. There are certain aspects that I can see why people are inclined to buy there handsets, but there are a lot of negatives as well. This article only briefly touched on the OS as a whole. But with the week I spent with it, I can officially say that it is not for me. By day two I was bored with the customization options available, along with the lack of apps and the inability to change certain aspects of it (Browser, Keyboard). It is by no means a bad operating system, but it is far from great. If you are planning on purchasing a Windows Phone 8 in the near future, I just have one thing to say; I hope you like squares!