I purchased the HTC HD7 shortly after it came out so I develop for a phone in a language I knew. Out the gate, the WP7 phone had Bluetooth issues, but these were largely fixed with the Mango update. So despite the big crack in the screen, I was happy with my Windows 7 Phone.

Two years later, and contract renewal time arrives – along with the release of the Windows Phone 8 platform. Time to upgrade! WP8 should be at least as good as WP7, right?

… Wrong.

At present T-Mobile has two Windows Phone 8 options – the HTC 8X, and the Nokia Lumia 810. The lumia wins hands-down in most categories – it includes navigation, has expandable storage, has a replaceable battery. But it is ugly, clunky, has a low resolution screen, and poor battery life.

So if you want a “nice” phone you are left with the HTC 8X – which is good enough for Gwen Stefani, so it should be pretty good, right?
Right?

Wrong. It is plagued by bugs and software ommisions, and HTC is dragging their feet to fix.

1. There is no turn-by-turn navigation.
Microsoft removed the turn-by-turn directions / navigation feature from bing maps, with the idea that nokia would pick up the slack. Despite reading that Nokia opened up Nokia Drive to all WP8 devices, this phone doesn’t have it. There is no navigation. There are no turn-by-turn directions. You can get directions in a list, but they are not suited to use while driving. I have been thrown back into the pre-GPS days, and it isn’t pleasant…
2. Internet Sharing is buggy
This may be T-Mobile specific, but for the first week after activating the phone, Internet Sharing didn’t work, claiming I had to “upsell” to a $15/month extra tethering plan. Not true – the $35/month 5-gig plan I have includes tethering. This phone likes to err on the side of “no soup for you,” and for whatever reason assumes you are not authorized to share your internet half the time. Real annoying, and a real step backwards = the HD7 never rejected me, even using a grandfathered 2-gig plan.
3. Bluetooth is a travesty of bugs and incompatibility.
It seem that HTC has real problems with Bluetooth on Windows phones. This thing cannot maintain a reliable handsfree connection for more than maybe 15 minutes before the sound cuts out. Everything appears to still be connected and working, but there is no sound. You’ll be talking, an all of a sudden – silence. You must disable the Bluetooth to resume your conversation.
The A2DP (music) profile doesn’t do this, but the phone locks up entirely for a good minute after the music connection is established. I don’t know what it’s doing, but after connecting for music in my car, there is silence for a minute, and the phone will not respond to input (although the windows button still causes haptic feedback). When it does finally unlock, it responds to all your keypresses in one batch, which is pretty annoying in is self (for example, if you held down the home button trying to wake it up and pressed the power button, when it does wake up you will be prompted for a voice command as well as a “slide down to turn off”) The Bluetooth is practically unusable in this state.
3a. While the Bluetooth technically “can” support serial and PAN, this is not supported by the OS as must be implemented on an app-by-app basis. Meaning no Toyota Entune (without significant effort my Toyota), no Bluetooth tethering. This is ridiculous. All developers shouldn’t have to implement portions of the Bluetooth stack, it should be is a shared library… oh wait, Windows phone apps cannot include or use shared libraries.
4. Custom Roms may be impossible (This applies to Windows RT as well). Microsoft was wise to require the use of a standardized boot method – the phones use a UEFI bootloader. That is awesome. What is not awesome: Microsoft requires SecureBoot be used to require roms be signed by Microsoft or the manufacturer, and does not provide the user the ability to import trusted keys. Windows phones (and rt devices) could have been the future of mobile computing – the ability to dual boot as easily as a PC – but greed and paranoia ruined it for everybody. Now we must hope that some hacker find an exploit to SecureBoot that will allow malicious software… in addition to the freedom to run what you want. Really stupid move from Microsoft.

Some of these issues can be resolved by HTC with firmware updates – and likely will in time. Others will require Microsoft to get off the pedestal of greed – and who knows when or if this will happen.

Till then, I may be stuck sharing my internet with an android device to accomplish what I need. Or I could jailbreak an iPhone to get what I need. How long till I tire of waiting… who knows.