Using Windows Phone 8.1 for 8 Months...

so I recently got myself a Nokia Lumia 930 running Windows Phone 8.1 I originally got it for the sole purpose of exploring the Windows Phone hacking community but apparently the Windows Phone hacking community is completely dead yeah oops all right so the hacking community is dead I thought why not use this phone as my main device for one week that one week apparently turned into eight months so today I'm going to be talking about how I use Windows Phone 8.1 for eight months and my experiences using this device [Music] now before I show my experiences with this phone I really wanted to emphasize the point that I'm not gonna be trashing on the platform it was innovative in many ways and I actually really liked this phone I bought it at a time when I was adopting to a lot of microsoft services like my Windows 7 PC my surface pro 3 running Windows 8.1 I had basically the whole office suite I was using onedrive I was using Bing wait and like a bunch of other Microsoft products so I thought okay well maybe this won't be as bad as I thought it would be and it turns out it wasn't that bad now let's talk about the first few months and honestly these were one of the best few months I've ever had with a mobile platform iOS was starting to get still with it using the same formula over and over again with a bunch of icons on a screen without taking any advantage of the hardware whatsoever one of the most unique things about Windows Phone are the live tiles now live tiles are just big app icons that show information about a particular app on your home screen like look at this I'm looking at weather information on my home soon without actually launching the app and this applies for pretty much every single app that supports this feature which is a lot of apps I can look at my subscriptions my mail my messages it's so convenient to have this all on my home screen rather than looking at the information and the app itself next let's talk about dark mode now I know iOS got dark mode this year and Android a couple of years ago but in my opinion Windows Phone utilizes dark mode the best just because it's native to the operating system it's been a thing since Windows Phone 7 and as a result pretty much every single app has dark mode built into it and this is great considering that other platforms have consistency issues with dark mode sometimes and besides when I got this phone there wasn't a dark mode for iOS and I couldn't imagine one coming until I was 13 so it was really nice to have this in my hands now this is actually the first time I've transitioned to a display that's larger than four inches and I thought it was gonna lose one-handed functionality altogether however the transition was a lot easier than I thought it would be Windows Phone 8.1 makes sure that a bunch of app elements are at the bottom of the screen where I can actually reach not at the top of the display where I can reach anything I'm looking at you iOS in addition to that there's also the sliding UI that Windows Phone 8.1 provides going from menu - menu is so easy because I can just slide from one menu to another one-handed usage is so easy on Windows Phone 8.1 even on a big display and going back to iOS I've never seen the reason for everything to be at the top of the display now I like my consistency and Windows Phone 8.1 hits it out of the park when you switch from app to app you'll notice that each app has a similar user interface with its similar animations and same kind of user interface where you slide between each menu this is really cool and it makes each app feel consistent with one another and it makes each app actually feel native to the operating system and the built-in sounds in Windows Phone 8.1 I don't know about you but Windows Phone 8.1 sounds are definitely the most satisfying sounds I've listened to it's definitely really hard for me to explain audio so I'm just gonna let you take a listen I don't know they're just so satisfying to listen to for some reason so that's a brief overview of the UI Windows Phone 8.1 definitely one of the most unique and interesting user interfaces I've seen in a very long time but now let's move on to some other Windows Phone 8.1 features that I've really liked over the past few months let's first talk about the lockscreen at first it might seem like any ordinary lockscreen that shows your time your date and your notifications at the bottom but do not be fooled there's actually a lot more customization behind this lockscreen one of the cool things is that you can set an app as your wallpaper and that's pretty cool because app developers can actually take advantage of this for example I chose being as my app wallpaper and this allows Bing wallpapers to change every single day on my lockscreen and again there's a lot more apps you can choose as your wallpaper you can choose whether to show weather information on your lockscreen that's actually really useful now let's jump down to this section the notifications you can choose one app to show detailed status of notifications and then five other apps to show quick status that's just so the number notifications you have for that particular app at first this might seem limiting but this does prevent the issue of notification clutter everywhere on your lock screen which I think we know other platforms have issues with that next let's talk about Action Center I find this as a cool combination of Notification Center and control panel and iOS on the top you'll see four toggles that you can customize to your liking that changed phone settings although this might seem limiting again it keeps it simplified and also you can change this to your liking so I don't find this as a big deal and also the Notification Center which is I mean it's a Notification Center it is not really much going on but there's a cool clear-all command which is pretty useful and at this point when I saw all the customization features that Windows Phone provided I've realized how much more customization it has over iOS like iOS has virtually no customization and Android does have a lot more customization than Windows Phone but Windows Phone just has the perfect balance of customization that and I've never thought about the need of wanting more customization over my phone like this is absolutely perfect for what I need it for and the keyboard man I don't know about you but the keyboard and Windows Phone is such a charm to use I think it just has to do with its reliability with every key knowing exactly where and when you're gonna type you might look at this keyboard at first and be like why are the keys so big but don't be fooled these are actually really good placements for the keyboard it makes it really easy to type and there's also the small stuff like the swipe feature that I've actually used a lot the satisfying keyboard sounds and one of my favorite parts the copies paste and selection tools I can't tell you how many times on iowa's I've tried to select some text and it ended up selecting something else and trying to make a copy and paste is a nightmare Windows Phone manages to make this process really easy I just I just double tap some text and there you go it starts selecting there's a copy one that appears automatically and a paste button that's always on the keyboard and I find this really useful this is also the first time I've transitioned to an oled display from an LCD and i gotta tell you the transition is remarkable the blacks actually look black and not just a milky gray color the live tile is actually look like they're floating on the display which is really cool in addition to the colors just popping a lot more sure this is a hardware thing but Windows Phone takes advantage of the OLED display in such a way that it makes Windows Phone looks so much more characteristic if you look at iOS aside from the dark mode it doesn't look like it takes advantage of the LED display at all quick give me one place in Iowa's where it actually takes advantage of the OLED display yeah I guess I could mention how this phone has a Snapdragon 800 clocked at 2.2 gigahertz and four cores and two gigabytes of RAM but even with these specs the phone still runs buttery smooth even though animations in Windows Phone 8.1 have always been a bit long the animations themselves are still really fluid there were like no stutters or freezes while I was using this phone for the past eight months and understand that we're loading times when you're launching an app but this is still way better than freezes and crashes on the phone that's been getting updates for like five years and this is the good thing about releasing continuous updates for major releases of an OS it's like you're not bogging down the phone with too many features to the point where it gets slow but you still have an up-to-date operating system which is nice even if support for this operating system is pretty much dead and here's another one of my favorites is Windows Phone 8.1 the seamless integration with your Microsoft account now for reference I'm going to be using a surface pro 3 running Windows 8.1 so this is basically Windows 8.1 to Windows Phone 8.1 I don't know about Windows 10 I'm pretty sure there's some small differences but regardless let's talk about it first up is the Microsoft and Microsoft Office app synchronization between both devices this can include Microsoft Word PowerPoint Excel OneNote and onedrive and even though you can do the same thing on Android and iOS the UI actually looks identical on both devices so it's really nice knowing that when I go from one device to another it has the same exact user experience but then again you can do the same thing on Android and iOS so let's move on third-party apps from the Windows Store whatever I do on a third-party app on one device manages to sync exactly the same way on the other device and vice versa this is really nice considering that I use these apps sometimes and I always switch from device to device so again that's really nice but here's the craziest thing I managed to switch to Internet Explorer as my main web browser yeah this is because whatever tabs I have opened on one device manages to keep open on the other device and it also syncs my favorites and my bookmarks and all that stuff so yeah I managed to use in to explore as my main web browser I don't anymore but 8 months man 8 months there's also the other things like the calendar reminders my contacts but my favorite part is how when you put both devices side to side they look exactly the same I mean just look at this it's live tiles switching on both devices I don't know something about this makes me really happy I think it's the fact that Windows Phone 8.1 feels like a Windows 8.1 computer and a miniature size it's just really nice to see both of these devices right next to each other knowing that the live tiles to flip the same way and they're both syncing to each other all the time and here's a fun feature Cortana now I actually got this phone when some of Cortana's functionality was discontinued and looking back at it I really wished I used some of her other features but I think some of her important functionalities are still present in this phone and I consider Cortana more as a quick action menu rather than a voice assistant you know those times when you have to take out your phone you have to do something quick such as setting a reminder doing a quick search online that's what I consider Cortana with Cortana you can set reminders you can do a quick search look for places in your by and all that stuff and it's really nice to have all of this in one menu considering that makes doing things much quicker and it causes less redundancy and another small but cool feature a lot of windows phones actually shipped with a dedicated button to the camera app so this makes it really easy to just take out your phone take a picture and move on with your life but the story doesn't end there because the camera app is like customization heaven for people you can adjust the white balance the ISO the shutter speed the focus and brightness and so on like I have never seen so much customization over a camera app in such a long time so seeing this for the first time kind of blew me away and I actually use it a lot throughout these eight months so that was pretty nice and here's a little bonus we all know that Google Jen contribute much to the Windows Phone platform so it was pretty much on the user to find a good YouTube alternative and here's one I really wanted to talk about my tube now it's $0.99 but the trial has very little limitations and honestly the $0.99 is pretty much worth it I prefer this app to the stock YouTube app it's ad free it has a really good user interface that works really well with Windows Phone and my surface pro 3 you can download video which I've never seen before there's no trash YouTube recommended which I found at the really big problem going back to the stock YouTube app you can pin subscriptions and other videos to your Start screen which I found extremely useful and it's simple to use this is all I need from a YouTube app and I found this as the best alternative to YouTube I've ever seen before but putting all these great and amazing features to the side I felt like I stood out from the crowd a lot more with Windows Phone Windows Phone just had a lot more personality than their counter platforms and I feel like this is something that Apple and Google just doesn't understand like they gotta add some really good and creative features to their phone soon because if they just keep adding emojis to the iPhone we're gonna reach a barrier and it's not gonna be good for the company but why I left Windows Phone 8.1 after 8 months is what we'll be talking about next I feel like I got my Windows Phone 8.1 device at the worst time possible i got it in july of 2019 and I used it for three months without any issues until I reach October 2019 when the Windows Store finally shut down now here's the problem with this if I uninstalled an app I can't redownload the app anymore now I know the majority of the apps in the Windows Store weren't that good but knowing that you can't reinstall the apps again just created a lot of tension luckily enough I downloaded as much important apps as I could to the device before the shutdown but even then there were some tension in my mind because if my device ran into an issue and I needed to restore it I can't just start redownload the app so yeah this just created a lot of tension but simultaneously the Microsoft account servers also shut down what this basically means is that if you sign out of your Microsoft account on your Windows Phone you can't log back in this virtually eliminates all benefits of Windows Phone for me and this just created more and more tension for me luckily I kept using it because I still had my apps and I was still logged into a Microsoft account even after the server's shut down so I kept using it and then at some point my tubes stopped working for some reason there was no more video playback now I kept using the phone but it got kind of annoying when I have to start using the web version of YouTube I mean it worked but it was a little bit less convenient for me but then I finally reached my last straw one the MSN apps finally shut down in February of 2020 these were vital apps I need my MSN News app to check the news and I need the MSN weather app to look at the weather and losing these apps this this is basic phone functionality that I'm losing and as sad as it was it was time for me to finally find a newer iPhone now couldn't I have just upgraded my lumia 930 to Windows 10 mobile sure I could have gone MSN app support and I could have gone my Windows Store back but at this point third-party app developers even my tube have stopped releasing updates for Windows 10 mobile and there was really no point to stick to the platform anymore so as sad as it was it was time to get a new phone and I needed to move on so it's June of 2020 and I finally left my lumia 930 for an iPhone 11 Pro however putting things into perspective it's definitely an end of an era for Windows Phone 8.1 I've noticed when I was using my Lumia 930 I was a lot more productive than I ever was on iOS and this is mostly because of the lack of junk food entertainment slash social media on Windows Phone I was so much more conformed to getting things I needed to get done on my Windows Phone rather than getting distracted with a YouTube video or a reddit post if you want to know about more of what I'm trying to say please watch this why we needed Windows Phone a faceless speculation video by John Jay 3000 he does an excellent job explaining this concept of distraction less phone usage with Windows Phone but in summary I was just a lot less distracted with Windows Phone and there was a lot less flashy entertainment with it I've always been a light phone user sure I've been comparing phones I've been jailbreaking but that's not really part of productiveness and besides that's a hobby of mine in terms of being productive the most I've ever needed from my phone is texting calling checking my email and at most just watching a YouTube video I've never needed it for any more than that in terms of productiveness I've always done all my work on a computer and honestly the transition to the iPhone 11 Pro is pretty underwhelming the only big feature that got me excited was the bigger screen in a small form factor there wasn't really any other notable change that got me excited as an ordinary phone user both the Lumia 930 and the iPhone 11 Pro had oled displays they're both pretty fast and they both have half decent cameras sure the iPhone 11 Pro does that better in some regard but the difference isn't big enough to justify the fact that the iPhone 11 Pro is miles better than the Lumia 930 if anything the transition to iOS was effectively worse I've lost all the perks of my tube and now I have to adapt to this garbage YouTube recommended section there's still a lifeless UI with a bunch of icons and a screen and this is the same exact layout we've had for more than a decade like I can't believe they haven't changed this yet there's all this extra iMessage stuff like come on this isn't supposed to help me text better this is supposed to distract anymore and the sheer abundance of things that are at the top of the screen that makes it harder for me to do one-handed usage like one-handed usage is virtually gone for me the Notification Center is still messy and the control center is at the top right of the display look what kind of design choice was that and within the stock Mail app there were delayed mail notifications and I couldn't fix it and it got to the point where I had to switch to the outlook app that Microsoft provided in the App Store and it all comes down to the lack of control you have over iOS unless you jailbreak luckily enough for me I've managed to jailbreak my phone and I'm having no issues however this isn't the same for other iPhone users now reflecting on everything I've just said I can tell why people in the Windows Phone render are having a hard time transitioning to iOS and Android like when you in their shoes you can definitely see why it's difficult to transition now are the issues really that bad not really I guess I just wanted to make the point that Windows Phone was a good platform for the right user I guess here's a good summary of what I'm trying to talk about iOS has a great app support and it's very stable however the user has poor control over the operating system Android on the other hand also has a great app support but the user has full control of the operating system but it can sometimes be unstable but like this could be phone dependent Windows Phone on the other hand has a lack of app support but it has a good balance control over the operating system and it's extremely stable and that's exactly why I liked Windows Phone the most the lack of app support didn't affect me as much as it did for others it definitely overtakes Iowa six as my favorite mobile operating system of all time the whole video might sound bias and honestly it is but ultimately this is how I truly feel of course I still have a driving passion for iOS but Windows Phone will always have a special place within me oh that's sounding too sensational it's with a heavy heart that I leave Windows Phone it had a perfect balance of everything I needed from a mobile device from features to lack of distractions to productivity it's all there for one tenth of the price of the iPhone 11 pro the platform had so much more personality which I have never seen before in another platform I'm sad to see this phone hadn't grown to a larger audience it had great potential and I hope to see others take inspiration from Windows Phone to make something better when dos 1 was the perfect platform for me it was the perfect phone for me [Music] [Music]

Channel: TrigrZolt

Views: 149,271

Rating: 4.918026 out of 5

Keywords: Microsoft, Windows, Phone, Mobile, Windows Phone, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 8.1, Microsoft Phone, Windows Phone 2020, Using windows phone 8.1 in 2020, Using windows phone 2020, Windows Mobile 2020, Microsoft Windows, Windows phone 8, Using windows phone 8 2020, Windows Phone review, Windows phone review 2020, Windows Phone end of support, Is windows phone usable in 2020, review, informational

Id: iy6LtCS4ILI

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/benabus]

Shame people weren't this excited about WP back when it wasn't dead :(

[u/win2008workstation]

Tears man. That's all I am going to say. Awesome video review!

Your reasons for sticking with the platform initially are basically the same as mine. We are very similar. I am literally the W10M version of you, except I have an Elite X3. I have tried countless times to switch but I can never fully accept change. 95% of what I need in a phone is fulfilled by my Elite X3 so it just boils down to UI, which of course Windows is the best in my opinion. App support has always been crap. It's not like we used to have apps and now all of a sudden they are gone. We never had proper support... EVER. Sure Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp was around, but the issue was we never got any feature updates. We were always left behind. So even when we had an app... It was horribly outdated. The point I'm trying to make is anyone who has been using a Windows Phone as a daily driver since 2016 has been aware of these short comings.

Like you, I am most productive on a real PC. I've always just viewed a phone as a "basic viewer for consumption". Email, news, text, videos, music. That's all. Another big reason why I never use a phone is I hate typing on a touchscreen for extended periods. It's perfectly ok for short use. I am typing this comment on baconit right now and I'm literally at my limit for typing. Most of the times when I post on this sub its on an x86 pc because it's far easier. Since I hate typing on a phone, switching to Android or iOS would introduce the same problem.

Anyways great vid. I can't type any more. Lol

[u/[deleted]]

I wish win phone starts again...maybe catch on the budget market..and slowly move up.

[u/xsdf]

Glad you were able to experience the innovation windows phone 8.1 brought to the phone scene. If you're interested you could try upgrading it to windows phone 10. I would say that 8.1 really was amazing and very well designed but after awhile it started lag behind modern features.

Windows phone brings in a lot of these features but it's not without it's issues. It tends to break some of the previous ui design choices that made 8.1 great in favor of new features, and the Nokia 930 has even more noticeable lag because of the new operating system.

[u/ItzAlvinMCXW2]

I feel bad it had to go, But I watched the video and loved it.

Bravo..

[u/AndyP1230]

Me feeling nostalgic on an iPhone 4S iOS 6. Back in the day, everything just works, even on iOS. But now looking at the new iOS 14, just a big meh. Windows Phone had always been ahead of time but people just don't care and demand too much, when the other two platforms give the same features at present time I just know it's fucked up. WP was too good for people.