Contacts, Phone, Email, Calendar
The Windows Phone 8 contact book is part of the People Hub, which integrates contacts from different sources (email, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) and lets you watch social-networking updates scroll by. As in Windows Phone 7.5, you can separate people into groups for ad-hoc group messaging and focused social-network update lists. It's much more integrated and powerful than, say, iOS's address book. It's also more consistent than Windows Phone's buggy standalone Facebook and Twitter apps, which sometimes didn't load updates. (Microsoft says we received pre-release versions of those apps.)
New in Windows Phone 8 comes Rooms, which is a sort of supercharged group system allowing shared calendars, shared notes, and a chat room. While testing Windows Phone 8, I formed a Room with some colleagues and found it very convenient—we compared notes and made sure we all had the same event dates by using a group calendar. But, of course, to use a Room, everyone involved must have a Windows Phone, and few do.
The phone app opens up into your call history; the OS also supports visual voicemail, and the dialer has large numbers that are easy to press. If you use Google Voice for voicemail, there's no official support, but there are third-party apps that work.
Voice features aren't quite Siri-quality. Asking "what's the weather going to be like today?" gives you Web search results; asking "weather" gives you the weather. Triggering music playback didn't always work. You can dictate into email messages and text messages, but in my tests, the dictation often cut off before I was done.
Microsoft says Windows Phone 8 has an "always-on Skype," feature, which integrates Skype into the contact book and lets you receive Skype calls even when the app isn't running. Skype wasn't available on our review phone, so I couldn't test it.
Email handling here is excellent, but as with other aspects, it's better if you use Microsoft accounts. Still, I connected Google and Yahoo accounts and got my email properly pushed, shown in conversation threads with HTML formatting intact. Clicking on someone's name will give you a history of your messages with them. You can show your mailboxes individually, or join them into a grand super-mailbox.
The calendar app attractively joined my Google, Microsoft, and Facebook calendars. If you want to be able to get calendar invites, though, I hope you're using Outlook. Windows phone can't parse the .ics invites that Google and Yahoo! use, so while it'll show your Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other calendars all together in its calendar app, you have to input new items yourself or accept the invites on a PC.
I'm a little frustrated with Microsoft's predictive keyboard. The predictive engine often wouldn't kick in for third-party apps or Web forms, and it rarely suggested fixing contractions (leaving "don't" mistyped as "dont," for instance.) I wanted it to be a bit more aggressive to make up for the typos.
Internet and Web BrowserWindows Phone 8 supports 4G LTE and 5GHz Wi-Fi, along with most other common networking technologies. When an open Wi-Fi network is available, a status line pops up at the top of the screen that you can click on. It vanishes quickly, so ultimately, you'll probably want to put a Wi-Fi Settings tile on your home screen somewhere to easily connect to new Wi-Fi networks.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 10 does a great job at displaying desktop-formatted Web pages. Pinch-zooming is smooth, and you can open six tabs at once. There's no Flash, but that's less relevant than it was a few years ago. Privacy advocates will be happy that there's a Do Not Track option. But it can be slower than the competition. Connected to a 5GHz Wi-Fi network, I got slower page load times and lower Browsermark scores than on the iPhone 5 with Safari and the Samsung Galaxy S III with Chrome.
Browser speeds are one area where hardware matters a lot, though. For instance, while my Windows Phone 8 device showed slower page loads than the Samsung GS3, it had faster page loads than a Google Nexus 7, even though the Nexus 7 was running Android 4.1 with even higher Browsermark scores. Why? The Nexus 7 only connects to the slower 2.4GHz variant of Wi-Fi, and that mattered more than anything else. A fast Windows Phone will outpace an inherently slower Android device, browser benchmarks notwithstanding.
Also, remember: if you just type a search term into the browser's address bar, your search engine is Bing, and it can't be changed. Hope you like Bing.
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Reviewed by Sascha Segan from pcmag.com