HTC Windows Phone 8X review

Windows Phone 8 has several headline features. Third-party apps can now take over the lock screen, so you can have Facebook scroll through your profile pictures while the phone is locked, for example. You can also resize Live Tiles, making them small, medium or large. This makes sense, as some tiles, such as Internet Explorer, don’t display any supplementary information so can safely be left as small as possible. You can then make your People or Photos tile as big as possible and have plenty of room for your pictures and mugshots of your friends.

There’s also a new Rooms function. This is a more powerful version of Windows Phone’s Groups. You can create a variety of Rooms, and invite contacts to join the Room. They don’t have to have a Windows Phone, but they do need a Windows Live account. Invites are sent as a text with a link, which then goes to a Windows Live sign-in page. After that you’re informed that you have been invited to join a Windows Phone Room, and can click a link to join.

Rooms helps you share things easily with small groups of people

What you can do in a room depends on whether you have a Windows Phone mobile or not. Windows Phone 8 owners have a dedicated Rooms view showing members of the Room, and which lets you send emails to Room members, use instant messenger and share photos and notes. Users on other platforms will receive the mails, but will need to access Windows Live’s web applications and Skydrive in order to see calendar appointments, shared photos and notes.

If you’re running Windows 8 on your Desktop, everything from your Room is integrated into Windows 8’s Start apps. Rooms is a strange concept to get your head around, but we can see that having shared notes and a calendar for a limited group of contacts could be very useful.

With Kid’s corner, you can lock down your phone to only the content you want your kids to see

The other main new feature is Kid’s corner. This locks down your phone, so you can give it to your child to play with without worrying about them wiping your contacts or emailing gibberish to your boss. There are four categories: Games, Music, Videos and Apps, and you can select individual items within each category to share. You can also set a PIN, so that even if your child resets the phone they can’t access anything important.