HTC 8X - A very nice phone, but Microsoft really killed it

Yesterday was the first day since 2007 that I am without an iPhone. My nice iPhone 5 was sent for replacement under warranty for a faulty on/off button. It has served me well since last September, but the button failed and because it was not purchased here I had to sent it overseas.

After debating for a while about buying another iPhone for the interim period, I decided I would use the time to really see what it's like to use one of my other phones as the real workhorse.

I have with me what I believe to be 3 of the top end phones. In the picture below from left to right, the HTC 8X, Blackberry Q10 and a Samsung S4.

My first attempt is to use the HTC 8X as the main phone. Picked up a nano to micro SIM adapter, stuck my SIM card in there and set it up in a few minutes. Added my email accounts, pulled in my contacts from the cloud and was up an running smoothly. I have been on the HTC for over a day now and have the following to say for the phone.

Pros:

• The phone is really well built. Feels good in your hands and has a quality feel to it. The screen is really nice and has really black blacks.
• To my utter and total surprise it paired well with the BMW bluetooth kit and did something no other phone has done before for me which is transfer contact photos as well to the car. This feature alone got me really excited.

Cons:

• What started off giving me a big smile, namely the in-car use turned out to be one of the biggest disappointments. Making or receiving calls in the car was next to useless. Audio would become all garbled after a few seconds on the phone. At first I thought it was a network issue, but turns out it is a problematic bluetooth stack in the phone. I tired using the SIM in other phones, and other SIMs in this phone. Always same result, good calls on other phones, garbled audio on the HTC 8X.
• While the interface looks nice and pretty, usability out of the box is not really well researched. Colors are not well coordinated. For example, setting black background (which is the default) makes highlighted text illegible. Try reading purple on a black background!! Even applications that get their color scheme over ridden by the Operating System become illegible. Examples are Viber and WhatsApp where the text on the bubble is hard to read because the text is black and the bubble dark blue. I took me a while to find a theme and a change of background to white to make the applications barely legible.
• Coming from the iPhone, there are things I take for granted. For example, applications have badges to show new messages etc. On the Windows side you get a notification bar for a few seconds then it disappears. The applications apart from SMS and email don't have a badge, so you need to open them up to check if there is something new. So if the phone beeps, and you don't click on the notification bar immediately, you have to go hunting which applications caused the beep!!

So after a bit over 24 hours, I am totally convinced this is a great phone that has very poor software. Microsoft really didn't get this one right. Even though Windows Mobile 8 has been out for almost a year and I have the latest updates installed this software feels just too much of a pre-beta to be my main use phone. I can understand and accept some issues early on in the life of a mobile platform, but things like bad color choices, unreliable bluetooth and lack of any way to know which application just beeped just speak of very poor user interface design and lack of rigorous testing.

I will keep using this phone for a few more days, just to be sure I have tried out all my use cases and then move on to the Blackberry. Anyway, my decision right now is made. There is no way on earth Windows Mobile will be my main phone!!