Maps and Navigation
Bing Maps, now using Nokia's map data, seems to sit somewhere between Google Maps and Apple Maps in terms of accuracy and utility. Searches for local points of interest were accurate enough, and the OS shows detailed "cards" for businesses with information like opening hours. It did fine with business searches in the U.S., Toronto, and several U.K. cities. For searches in Spain and Nova Scotia, it showed maps but didn't give me contextual local business listings.
Navigation is a particular weak spot. By default, all you get is text-based walking and driving directions. Nokia phones will get Nokia Drive and Nokia Transit, but other Windows phones don't come with turn-by-turn voice-guided navigation. The only nav app in the Windows Phone store is the $29.99 Garmin StreetPilot, as compared with the half-dozen or more options on other platforms.
You do get Local Scout, though, and it's much more useful and interesting than it was on Windows Phone 7.5. Local Scout is for people who spend a lot of time in unfamiliar places; it shows a list of nearby restaurants, shops, and (sometimes useful) things to do. New for Windows 8 is the For You pane, which shows places around you that a lot of people, and sometimes your friends, have liked on Facebook or Bing, along with LivingSocial deals and coupons in the area.
I love this. Entirely search-driven listings are full of noise, and the For You pane filters out signal. Checking around my office, it was spot on: It picked out a few humble, yet decent, restaurants, and some places and things my friends like to eat and see. It's a great use of social media.
Photos and Multimedia
Windows Phone 8 lets you open the Camera app by holding down the Camera button, even from a locked phone. The Camera app looks very simple and clean on the surface, but it has a lot of settings you can dig into—exposure, white balance, sharpness, saturation, and such. In that way, it's once again like a balance of iOS and Android—simple on the surface like iOS, but deeply customizable like Android.
Within the Photo hub, you can see not only your own photos, photo apps, and editing tools, but also your friends' Facebook albums; that's such a good idea that various Android developers have been borrowing it for a while, but it was Windows Phone's first.
The new OS version adds Lenses, third-party apps that can jump out of the camera app to offer special features. Out of the box, you get Bing Vision, which is like Google Goggles or ShopSavvy in that it can compare prices based on photos of bar codes, or try to match images to other things it finds on the Internet. Other Lenses include one for uploading to CNN iReports, or creating really awesome panoramas. This would be a perfect place to have Instagram, for instance, but of course, Instagram isn't available for Windows Phone.
The music and video players have shucked off the old Zune moniker in favor of Xbox Music, which offers the usual array of big-name songs, movies, and TV shows at the higher end of industry-standard prices ($1.29 per track, typically). There are no alternative music, video, or app stores for Windows Phone, and streaming services are limited: Netflix and Crackle, but not Hulu, TV.com, or HBO GO, for instance. Of course, the phone will sync over MP3 or unprotected AAC music bought elsewhere, and Windows Media Player will transcode unprotected videos into phone-compatible formats.
Following the Hub strategy, you can see YouTube, Vevo, and Slacker videos and channels integrated with your own music, and you're supposed to be able to swivel over from your music to see artist bios, other artists like the one you're listening to, news and social networking updates about the artist. I found bios and recommendations for Muse and Metric but not, say, U2 or MGMT, and no news or social updates. Microsoft said it was still perfecting its database before launch. This is a great idea, but only if you have the content for it. You can see your music sorted by the usual categories, along with a Smart DJ option that makes auto-mixes based on a particular song.
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Reviewed By Sascha Segan from pcmag.com