TechReview: HTC 8X Windows Phone

When my friends found out I have ditched my Sam­sung Galaxy S3 for an HTC, they thought I have gone mad. When they found out it was a Win­dows Phone, they slowly backed away from me before they ran, arms flail­ing in the air. But they came back; the HTC 8X proved to be too irresistible. 

Read on for the review and check the Storify feed for my expe­ri­ence as I have used it. Unfor­tu­nately I couldn’t pit it against the Lumia 920, so for the sake of cam­era com­par­i­son I will pit it against my Galaxy S3.

Build Qual­ity

“WOW” is the first word that came to mind when I first held the phone (don’t for­get I am com­ing from the S3 — a phone not par­tic­u­larly known for its won­der­ful build qual­ity). It’s almost impos­si­ble to not be impressed by the phone. 

I have the black ver­sion, which I per­son­ally found to be the most ele­gant. The other colours I saw in the elec­tron­ics shops were a bit too “pas­tel” for my lik­ing, and the ear speaker grill on the coloured phones were a bit over­whelm­ing against the black front. The Lumia 920 sports braver colours which are not over­pow­er­ing as they only frame the front. Regard­less, the HTC 8X feels good in the hand. The back side feels like rubbery-​velvet mate­r­ial — while it isn’t tex­tured, it is as though you’re hold­ing a phone cov­ered in fine cloth. The front is entirely cov­ered by beau­ti­ful Gorilla Glass, and other than an unusu­ally wide ear speaker grill, the only other notice­able fea­ture is the oddly shaped front cam­era, which I will come to in a bit.

The best fea­ture of the phone design though is the size: it is just per­fect at 4.3 inches. While I even­tu­ally got used to the S3, I needed two hands to type; the iPhone is just small, and with the new design it feels odd. The HTC 8X is in this sweet spot range of phone sizes which makes it com­fort­able for one hand or two hand typ­ing. The device fea­tures absolutely no hard edges; every­thing about the phone is curved, mak­ing it an engi­neer­ing mar­vel since there is even less room to pack in the tech wiz­ardry than a phone which utilises real estate afforded by angles. 

How beau­ti­ful is the phone, really? Almost every­one who saw it with me had to ask which phone I was car­ry­ing and had to hold it and mar­vel at its beauty. It really is a work of art.

That said, my only gripe about the phone design is that the power but­ton is at the top — and given that it does not pro­trude, it’s a bit hard to press, mak­ing index fin­ger manoeu­vring a bit of an exer­cise and habit. It would have been bet­ter had the power but­ton been on either side of the phone: the phone’s right side (your left) has plenty of room for it.

The Cam­era

There have been a few reviews that crit­i­cised the cam­era as not being good, or even sub­par; other reviews praised it. The phone’s cam­era is a cru­cial part of my pur­chase deci­sion so I had to test out the phone for myself in how I go on with my phone pho­tog­ra­phy to be able to tell. As a quick sum­mary, it can pro­duce some stel­lar shots as well as ter­ri­ble ones; you need to learn how the cam­era works, so it isn’t as “easy” as an iPhone’s.

The cam­era works a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent than ones on phones I have used, like iPhone and sev­eral Android devices. The phone imme­di­ately tries to aut­o­fo­cus, and to be hon­est it does a very decent job in guess­ing what you’re try­ing to focus on. For stan­dard image of streets, it’s fairly con­sis­tent. When it comes to macro focus, though, I was truly sur­prised with how good it was, often on par with the S3 and some­times *just* beat­ing it. The sharp­ness on the S3 was a bit bet­ter, though.

[cap­tion id=“attachment_3001” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] You can half-​press the cam­era but­ton to lock the focus and recompose.[/caption]

The prob­lem arises when you attempt chang­ing the focus by tap­ping — some­thing taken for granted on other phones. It cal­cu­lates the expo­sure from that point and cap­tures the image imme­di­ately. So you might end up going through a few shots as you try to get the focus on the point of inter­est before you cap­ture “the” shot.

A way to cir­cum­vent this issue, which I haven’t seen peo­ple talk about, is that the cam­era shut­ter but­ton works like a DSLR shut­ter but­ton — you can half press to lock the focus, and then recom­pose the frame before press­ing it all the way to read the expo­sure and take the shot. I found it to be a neat and effi­cient fea­ture that pho­tog­ra­phers would appreciate.

The cam­era app pro­vides less con­fig­u­ra­tions than the S3 but way more than an iPhone: you can edit lev­els of sat­u­ra­tion, sharp­ness, con­trast, expo­sure, ISO, white bal­ance, face detec­tion, and res­o­lu­tion /​aspect ratio. The auto white bal­ance on the cam­era defaults to be a bit on the cooler side of white. There is also an issue with the white bal­ance cal­cu­la­tion in that you may run into instances where it is a bit too sen­si­tive, mak­ing two con­sec­u­tive shots to be of com­pletely dif­fer­ent tones by sim­ply tilt­ing the phone a hair up or down, as in the two images below. It does not hap­pen often, but you can run into it more often than not on an over­cast day.

Below are some com­par­i­son shots between the HTC 8X and the S3.

The macro pho­tos are just BEAU­TI­FUL. I put it head to head with the S3 — which has amaz­ing macro capa­bil­i­ties — and to be hon­est I loved the macro on the HTC 8X. Tap-​to-​focus is of course eas­ier on the S3, but if you breathe in for a cou­ple of sec­onds and let the HTC aut­o­fo­cus, you are likely to be pleased with the results. Below are some macro on the HTC 8X.

There is no night mode on the HTC 8X like there is in the Galaxy S3, so it was a bit of a bum­mer for me. I don’t know how it will fare against the Lumia 920 but I am sure the lat­ter will do bet­ter as it is the talk of the cen­tury. That said, the pho­tos did come out very decent, if a bit smudgy. Noth­ing for print, for sure, but good enough for phone, Face­book, and email.

Finally, the front cam­era sports an odd wide-​angle lens. At first, it was awk­ward to use, but soon the awe­some­ness of hav­ing such a lens on the front made me won­der why no one has thought of that before. You can cram in a lot of peo­ple and scenery in the shot, ele­vat­ing duck­face pho­tos to a new dimension.

So to sum­marise, you need to put in some effort into learn­ing the lim­i­ta­tions and capa­bil­i­ties of the cam­era. Wel­come to photography.

The Win­dows 8 Experience

The most trou­bling issue of any­one think­ing of buy­ing the phone is the Win­dows Phone plat­form itself. To be hon­est, this was my first expo­sure to the oper­at­ing sys­tem, so I had zero expec­ta­tions other than that apps I use are either non-​existent or look plain weird.

Hon­estly, though, while the OS has a long way to go, I was pleas­antly surprised.

Now before I go on, let me explain how I use the phone. I decided to ditch iOS because I did not want a phone with screen after screen of apps and games on it; I’ve got the iPad for that and the iOS works great there, with my apps and games on a big, beau­ti­ful tablet. My switch to android a few years ago was dri­ven pri­mar­ily by cus­tomi­sa­tion and usabil­ity; I don’t need to open sev­eral apps to save a photo and upload it or email it to some­one — not to men­tion the abil­ity to email some­thing other than pho­tos, and other lim­i­ta­tions set by Apple’s sandboxing.

Hav­ing used the android plat­form for a few years. I have seen it grown into a plat­form that (for mobile) sur­passes iOS in terms of func­tion­al­ity, yet the “feel” of both iOS and android has become sim­i­lar thanks to almost iden­ti­cal designs of almost all appli­ca­tions. Win­dows Phone throws all of those out of the win­dow, giv­ing a truly unique visual ele­ment to all appli­ca­tions, which is truly sexy in my opin­ion. The OS itself is absolutely slick, mod­ern, and sexy. There is more swip­ing than tap­ping, and going from menu to another by swip­ing is truly a delight. The size of the HTC makes it extra com­fort­able, and Win­dows looks crisp on the screen. I can’t believe I am say­ing this but this made me like Win­dows again (as a note, the only rea­son I use a Win­dows PC is for gaming). 

The pri­mary apps I use are Face­book, twit­ter, and What­sApp, all of which are on the phone. There are sev­eral photo edit­ing apps which I also installed, like Fho­to­room, Lomo­gram, and Pic­ture Per­fect. I found my favourite weather app, The Weather Net­work, as well as my travel apps: Sky­scan­ner, Kayak, and Tri­pAd­vi­sor. Though there is no Google Chrome, the app Met­roG does your search using Google instead of Bing while main­tain­ing the Win­dows Phone look and expe­ri­ence, but opens the links in IE — which actu­ally is not a bad browser but is far from Chrome (some web­sites will have odd ren­der­ing on it). I use Metro­Tube for YouTube and MetroPa­per for my Pocket app. Gtasks Plus takes care of my Google Tasks, and gMaps is a very good Google Maps app (though does not use vec­tor graph­ics, but does the job very well, includ­ing direc­tions, traf­fic, and other map over­lays). For Drop­box I use BoxShot until the offi­cial app is released. Other apps I have on my iPad and have removed from the android phone, so given my approach to mobile devices it does the job, but could do bet­ter of course. It’s a chicken-​and-​egg prob­lem; devel­op­ers won’t develop apps on a plat­form with few users, and users won’t use a plat­form with lit­tle devel­op­ment on it. I hope Microsoft pushes for changes.

Mean­while, I absolutely love “Peo­ple”, a built-​in fea­ture of the Win­dows Phone which aggre­gates your con­tacts’ feeds from their social net­works even if you don’t have the apps of the social net­works installed. You can browse their Face­book pho­tos and check your email con­ver­sa­tions from there with­out open­ing any other app. You can reply to tweets, post tweets, post images to twit­ter and Face­book and check-​in into loca­tions with­out installing or open­ing any app. The inte­gra­tion is great, and should your phone­book get too clut­tered, you can choose to fil­ter out net­works with­out remov­ing inte­gra­tion. Another thing I liked a lot is shar­ing: it isn’t as thor­ough as android’s but way bet­ter than iOS; I can share a photo across a few apps I have installed, for instance, and not lim­ited to just Face­book, twit­ter, and email/​SMS. Heck, I can even share to WhatsApp. 

Another sur­prise was sync­ing: plug­ging in the phone to my com­puter opened up a sync win­dow that even reads iTunes playlists and music, which was great. First boot takes a while as it has to scan and index all pho­tos and music on your com­puter (it can take half an hour), but after that it takes a few sec­onds to get every­thing going.

[cap­tion id=“attachment_3061” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] HTC-​to-​PC Sync[/caption]

Hon­estly, I am absolutely in love with the OS. It has a fresh look which is com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the other major mobile plat­forms and the apps have a dif­fer­ent look, feel, and user expe­ri­ence. For some, it might not work, par­tic­u­larly if you’re on insta­gram (I am not). There are many apps which are not present on the OS that can be deal-​breakers, but for me (for now) it works fine. 

There is one thing I have to say, though: the bat­tery is the biggest draw­back of the phone. I have had bad expe­ri­enced with my Galaxy S2 when I had it, and the HTC 8X took me back to those days. If you’re a mod­er­ate to heave user like me, it’ll die in around 6 hours. The max I got out of it was a work­ing day (9 hours) and the bat­tery saver mode kicked it up to 10 hours, but through­out the past two weeks I will recharge the phone at around 3 PM every day and then at night. If I knew I will be out late at night, I would carry with me the bat­tery power pack I used while I was on my trip in Nepal to power the S3 when I was in remote areas.

[cap­tion id=“attachment_3074” align=“aligncenter” width=“400”] Buy it. You will def­i­nitely need it.[/caption]

Bot­tom Line

The HTC 8X is a beau­ti­ful phone. It’s sexy, slim, light, per­fect size, and ele­gant. The OS is fast, unique, and a delight to use. Apps are lack­ing depend­ing on what you’re look­ing for, but it does the job for me. The bat­tery is the biggest draw­back, so you need to be close to charg­ers and make sure it’s on full bat­tery if you’re going out. The cam­era will be frus­trat­ing at first, but you’ll be sat­is­fied when you get the hang of it. Over­all, though, I per­son­ally found it com­fort­able and great to use, but the bat­tery will be a con­stant nuisance.