Windows Phone 8 (codename Apollo)

GerardKeating · 05-11-2012 9:25am

BostonB wrote: »

That makes no sense since you can ignore Metro and use it like Windows 7. Except faster.

Or the best of Both worlds, Dual Monitor, one with Metro and one with the viStart...

chrislad · 07-11-2012 10:28pm

Just ordered myself an 8X! Wasn't too pushed about the extra features that the Lumia 920 had, plus the big difference in weight (and the difficulty in actually pinning a date down from Nokia) made up my mind for me. Core features that I want are there, and since Nokia Maps is now a standard part of Windows Phone 8, the previous reason for me going for a Lumia (rather than a Radar, ignoring the limited space on the latter) was the excellent mapping functions.

stevenmu · 08-11-2012 12:11am

FWIW Nokia Drive isn't a part of the OS now, Nokia have made it available to the other OEMs but it's up to them to include it or not.

I'm not sure if the same applies to Maps or not.

AngryLips · 08-11-2012 10:17am

The 8X is now listed on the Three website:

http://www.three.ie/online/shop/productDetail.aspx?src=p&p=voice&pid=1775&tariffType=contract

evolutionqy7 · 08-11-2012 11:00am

AngryLips wrote: »

The 8X is now listed on the Three website:

http://www.three.ie/online/shop/productDetail.aspx?src=p&p=voice&pid=1775&tariffType=contract

89 euro on a 2 year contract. No thanks

Not with three anyway

ShadowHearth · 08-11-2012 1:34pm

AngryLips wrote: »

The 8X is now listed on the Three website:

http://www.three.ie/online/shop/productDetail.aspx?src=p&p=voice&pid=1775&tariffType=contract

459eu on prepay.... i have to say its quite reasonable... i wonder if O2 will have those?

chrislad · 08-11-2012 1:40pm

ShadowHearth wrote: »

459eu on prepay.... i have to say its quite reasonable... i wonder if O2 will have those?

Trying to get an answer on that. All I've gotten is Meteor and Three this week. No confirmation on Vodafone or O2. O2 carried the HD7 WP alright, but they didn't carry the Radar, if I recall correctly. They might just focus on the more popular Lumia range.

evolutionqy7 · 08-11-2012 1:45pm

I seen somewhere O2 posted phones that are coming this xmas. 8X was one of them.

AngryLips · 08-11-2012 1:49pm

Do HTC models suffer from build quality issues?

chrislad · 08-11-2012 1:50pm

AngryLips wrote: »

Do HTC models suffer from build quality issues?

God, no. They are the strongest and best build out of all phones, in my opinion. Their software has let them down a bit lately.

evolutionqy7 · 08-11-2012 1:54pm

AngryLips wrote: »

Do HTC models suffer from build quality issues?

Even though HTC's Windows Phone flaghships are quite tanks. I was disappointed with HTC Titan.

HTC didnt bother to fix a lot of issues that were out with the Titan. In the end my phone started randomly rebooting due to a motherboard issues, at that stage my phone went away more than 3 times and the store replaced it with a different handset all together.

Though my old HD2 and my Sensation (even though software was crap) hardware wise were quite good. HD7 was one one of the worst WP7's out there.

ShadowHearth · 08-11-2012 2:19pm

we all talk about lumia and htc lads. whats the story with samsung ATIV S?

it says it will be up in november with o2. havent heard a thing about it.

evolutionqy7 · 08-11-2012 3:19pm

ShadowHearth wrote: »

we all talk about lumia and htc lads. whats the story with samsung ATIV S?

it says it will be up in november with o2. havent heard a thing about it.

I wouldnt be too bothered about it, Omnia 7 I had previously was great. Though there was always a lack of accessories, lack of updates and lack of care from Samsungs part.

Even though i pressume it had top notch hardware, it has stinky cheap plastic look

stevenmu · 08-11-2012 4:04pm

Samsungs lack of willingness to fix or even acknowledge the bluetooth issues that many Omnia 7 users had was pretty bad. Tbh I'd be put off buying another Windows Phone device from them until it looks like they will be willing to support it properly.

BostonB · 08-11-2012 4:49pm

Nokia seem to be better at updates then Samsung.

chrislad · 08-11-2012 7:59pm

ShadowHearth wrote: »

we all talk about lumia and htc lads. whats the story with samsung ATIV S?

it says it will be up in november with o2. havent heard a thing about it.

It looks like they just put the OS in a Galaxy S3 body. Its nice looking, but it wouldn't jump out at me. I had an Omnia 7 and and Omnia W and the main reason I went for them was the quality of the screen, which is now a standard on all Windows Phones (at least the flagship ones) and the lack of software support that Samsung offered, especially once they knew WP8 was coming, wasn't the best course of action to endear them to existing, and potential, customers.

evolutionqy7 · 12-11-2012 12:25am

http://www.o2online.ie/o2/shop/coming-soon/

Ativ S on o2's coming soon section

Diddy Kong · 12-11-2012 1:10am

Microsoft seem to have more information than Vodafone available - http://www.windowsphone.com/en-IE/phones. Lumia 820 for Vodafone and 8x for 3 which is known. Still nothing on the 920 but will have to see what Nokia says in December.

AngryLips · 12-11-2012 10:15am

Picked myself up the 8X on the weekend, am very pleased with it so far.

Alanstrainor · 12-11-2012 2:18pm

AngryLips wrote: »

Picked myself up the 8X on the weekend, am very pleased with it so far.

Thinking about taking the plunge on one of these, my LG Optimus 7 has been dying for months, and I'm afraid it'll just give up one day soon and leave me stranded.

Pretty pricey on 3 though 459, so trying to prepare my wallet for the expense.

How's the camera on it? That's one of my main requirements, I'm a bit annoyed at the amount of memory though...16GB....wtf.

Torn between this and the Nexus 4, have been on the Windows Phone buzz for a year and a half now, so may want a change, but unsure.

evolutionqy7 · 12-11-2012 3:13pm

Just came back from a Three store in Henry St. Dublin.

Played around with the 8X for about 5 mins. First things first, its extremely light and quite thin. Its no amoled screen so the blacks do feel washed out, especially on windows phone. Im so used to black blacks after using an amoled screen for ages.

Few camera shots I took in store looked OK. Not a huge upgrade over what the Titan was able to do. Front camera is quite a good improvement vs previous phones. Captures quite a lot of detail.

Other than that it might be just me but it feels a tad bit slower than im used to. Lumia 800 flies with the animations where as HTC 8X seems to be a tad bit behind in frame rate, maybe its WP8 stuff, but the animations dont feel as fast or maybe its just me. Also seen an occasional half a second stutter on the homescreen when scrolling. It felt like it wasnt picking up my fingers as accurately as it should. On the other hand launching apps seemed hell of a lot faster than in WP7. Definetly making use of that dual core processor.

Anyhow thats just my impressions from messing around. Obviously couldnt try out everything cause I would need to sign in with my Microsoft account and im not going to do that.

PAYG prices are 459 for the 8X and 279 for the 8S, which isnt half bad.

More than likely my gf will be getting the 8X once it comes out on o2, even though Id tend to drift more to the Ativ S, mainly for four reasons.

2300 mAh battery vs 1800 mAh
Amoled Screen vs SLCD
16GB +Expandable Storage vs 16GB of Non Expandable.
600 (ativ s) vs 459 euros

Its a bit disappointing the Ativ S looks so crap in the design department compared to the 8X. 8X is just an amazing looking phone.

AngryLips · 12-11-2012 4:49pm

Alanstrainor wrote: »

How's the camera on it? That's one of my main requirements, I'm a bit annoyed at the amount of memory though...16GB....wtf

Camera is good, better than my old iPhone 4 but not as good as the SIII. It's hard to make a judgement call on this because I suspect part of it might have something to do with the screen quality as oppose to the camera itself. At times the screen quality comes across as inferior: pictures aren't rendered as well as the iPhone 4 with colours appearing to have a harsher contrast and not seeming as rich (I found this when transferring my lockscreen photo from iPhone to 8X). Also, high quality photos when resized to thumbnails in the PeopleHub appear as low-quality pixelated images to the eye and I'm not sure why this is. Overall though I'd say you won't notice any drawbacks with the screen 90% of the time.

My main criticism is with the internet browser which is pants compared to Safari on iOS, but I found this to be the case with the Lumia 800 too so nothing new there. There isn't much in the way of noticable differences between WP8 and WP7 apart from the customisable live tiles and this is a great improvement.

The design of the phone is really nice and the material used feels really great to touch, in fact I can't stop handling the device for that reason. It also doesn't feel oversized compared to iPhone or Lumia 800 and I think that's because the height and width proportionate to each other are similar, it's not too wide to grip and the tapered back makes it feel thinner. It's also so much less prone to slipping in the hand compared to iPhone because of the tapering and the material used. Battery life so far is so-so but, then again, I haven't really experienced a phone other than the iPhone 4 that has kept me happy on this front.

Alanstrainor · 12-11-2012 6:14pm

Thanks for that, appreciate it.

I was really hoping for a big browser improvement being honest. Since I use it a lot on my Win 7.5 device, I'm disappointed to here it's not all that much of an improvement. Think I'll have to wait it out another few weeks to see if the Nexus 4 lands on these shores.

Cheers

evolutionqy7 · 12-11-2012 7:36pm

How is the browser via WiFi. Tbh I wouldnt really trust judging the speed of it via mobile network.

My S3 is slow as christmas on 3G on Meteor, then I go home on UPC30/50MB broadband and it loads websties nearly instantly.

Three's Mobile Data Speeds and Ping arent ground breaking either so wouldnt expect great speeds on that.

stevenmu · 12-11-2012 8:13pm

I stopped in to Three on Grafton St on the way home and had a quick play with the 8X there. It's a lovely looking phone, and really nice to hold. The texture of the body feels great in your hand and I don't think there's any chance it'd slip out accidentally.

WP8 seemed super silky to me, I thought it was much smoother than my Lumia 710 (or Omnia 7), and definitely didn't seem to have the stutter mentioned above.

The screen looked great to my eyes, which admittedly aren't quite as fussy as they used to be. Definitely better than the two phones mentioned above (the 710 isn't great anyway, but the Omia 7 was pretty decent). I took a few quick photos and a bit of video and they came out really well, clear with good natural colours, despite the bright lights and shiny surfaces in the shop.

I think I'll still be waiting to try the Lumia 910 but I would be very happy with one of these if the Lumia doesn't arrive at a decent price.

AngryLips · 12-11-2012 10:52pm

evolutionqy7 wrote: »

How is the browser via WiFi. Tbh I wouldnt really trust judging the speed of it via mobile network.

Pages load very fast on wifi. My main problem is that many sites don't recognise IE10 for mobile as being a mobile browser so often displays as the desktop version. Other times they do render in the mobile format but something about the appearance still doesn't seem as sharp as on iOS or Android (I think the text often looks blockier or 20th century-internet ...or something). The first site I visited was Google which loaded in the mobile version but not in the new format that displays on iOS Safari (the version of Google.ie with the additional Google options that expand from the left-hand side). Then, when I tried to click on the link to Google News the link just outright didn't work.

I hope that as IE10 for mobile becomes more widely used websites will become better tailored to the browser but for the moment it's still a PITA.

Alanstrainor · 13-11-2012 12:25am

I reckon I'm the opposite of you, I want the full fat version of pretty much every site I use when browsing, never like mobile sites.

stevenmu · 13-11-2012 12:02pm

AngryLips wrote: »

I hope that as IE10 for mobile becomes more widely used websites will become better tailored to the browser but for the moment it's still a PITA.

Generally the big websites detect mobile browsers by using lists of known mobiles. Hopefully they'll get updated in the coming weeks.

evolutionqy7 · 14-11-2012 1:17pm

http://www.expansys.ie/samsung-ativ-s-16gb-236257/

Seems as Ativ S is available on Expansys with 5 days deliver for 624.99 for 16GB version with the 32GB version still due to come in.

Im still conpuzzled which phone to go for.

I love the design of the 8X over the Lumia 920 and Ativ S. Though experience with my Titan is bitter and I dont want to go back to HTC.

My head tells me to go for the Lumia 920 cause of great camera, exclusive apps and support and better design over Ativ S, even though Im not fond of the extra thickness, wireless charging is great, but not a deal breaker. I dont really expect any carriers to bundle the wireless charging plate for free.

From experience Omnia 7 was pretty much the phone with the least amount of hasle I ever had, good camera, solid battery life, took in a lot of abuse as well. Ativ S has the biggest battery, probably the most effient screen of the 3, its the thinnest phone of the three, even if the design of the phone is quite boring, espcially the colour choices. MicroSD card slot would be handy too. Worst part though will be 0 samsung support and there will be the smallest amount of accessories to chose from vs Nokia

Not bothered about Nokia Drive as I purchased Navigon on WP7 and as far as Im aware Navigon is updating the app to work properly with WP8. So ill have that.

evolutionqy7 · 16-11-2012 7:12pm

Looks like the 8X is available on Meteors website now. There's quite a huge difference in price vs Three as well.

Windows Phone 8 (codename Apollo)

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