HTC 8X and Windows Phone 8 gets unfettered video tour

Although at most events where Windows Phone 8 is being ‘lite’ demonstrated, the handlers of the devices are notorious for not letting the media go beyond the Start screen. That’s presumably because Microsoft doesn’t want the entire OS shown before their big announcement—whenever that may be.

In a new HTC 8X hands on video, taken at the GITEX Computer Shopper show currently being held in Dubai, UAE, we can see the device and OS in its unfettered glory. No one is stopping anyone here...

Auto-Lock screen images via Photo Hub, Bing or HTC

The OS build is 9841, which Abbas Jaffar Ali believes may be the RTM version of the OS but we’ve already seen the emulator at 9900 and we have heard of later iterations too e.g. build 10119. Conclusion: we still don’t know what build Windows Phone 8 RTM is, though we’re trying to find out.

WP8 Keyboards

New downloadable keyboard languages

Most of the features we’ve shown you before in our emulator tour but it's still neat to see them in action. Some of the OS highlights you may want to catch are:

  • Lock Screen Wallpaper auto-updater: Bing, Photo and now we see HTC will have their own Wallpaper service
  • Download new keyboard languages – We broke that news a few days ago. Here you can see it in action, including Arabic keyboard support.
  • HTC 8X camera in action with the zippy ImageChip
  • Someone loaded our official WPCentral app on the device. Good taste.
  • Maps – You can see the new Maps, which looks like the old one but now has a downloadable, offline option (you can also check for map updates for those offline caches)
  • Family Room gets glossed over in the People Hub
  • Office 13 – We finally get to see what the new Office Hub looks like. It’s basically much cleaner looking with less focus on Tiles

Overall, a nice little video tour and we have to admit, Windows Phone 8 appears to chug along nicely on a dual-core 1.5GHz CPU.

WP Central

Someone at HTC or that show likes us

Source: TBreak.com; Thanks, Abbas, for the tip!

Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007, when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and watches. He has been reviewing laptops since 2015 and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, ARM processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.