Calling all Windows Phone users: Help me like Live Tiles!

[bearxor]

So, I'm about a month in to my trial of Windows Phone 8. I finally got a L920 I liked and got a screen protector on it and one of those nice hard rubber Nokia cases. I plan on leaving the iPhone at home sometime this week and try not to rely on it as a "crutch" for things that WP8 either can't do or that I don't know how to do yet.

So there's one aspect of WP that I don't think I'm quite "getting" and that is live tiles. I'm not quite sure if it's that I had an unrealistic expectation of what they're supposed to do or if I just don't get how to really use them.

I had expected live tiled to provide a constant "at a glance" look at information and content. I have found the reality to be not as impressive.

Take email. I can make live tiles for each of my accounts. If I make them 4x2, I get the account label and a preview of my last received email. But this takes up way too much space, IMO. No problem, right? Make the tile smaller. But, if I make the tile 2x2, all I get is the account label and a count. This makes the tile nearly worthless. So I make it 1x1 and I get the count but now no clear label. This becomes an issue if you have multiple accounts if the same type that use the same icon. Its like a choice of having a lot of tiles that are huge and have to scroll forever or more convenient with no information.

Then there's things like the update frequency. I downloaded Weather Flow, which has a great live tile in every size. In this case, I like to keep it in a 4x2 config at the top of the screen. I went in and set it to just use the current location. I get home tonight and look at it and its still set for Charlotte, even though I'm in Rock Hill and have been for a while and the tile says it was updated just a couple minutes ago. I had to actually open the app for it to detect it was in RH and then the live tile updated but the unlock screen didn't.

So, as you can imagine I'm pretty confused and not really quite "buying in" to the idea of live tiles quite yet. So I want to put this out there. What do some of you Windows Phone users out there use live tiles for and how do they fit in to your flow? What are some useful apps you know of that have great live tiles?

 

[notposting]

Disclaimer, I use WP7 (until Thursday!).

Anyway, yeah. The background tasks on WP8 have a 30 minute cycle I believe, and I have seen the HTC weather tile on my phone take awhile to update. I think it's shy and only wants to update when I'm not watching. On WP7, we only get one size for email tiles, but I also have all of mine linked into one inbox.

I don't have a lot of interesting live tiles on my phone. The people cycles through contacts, the HTC one has the weather, the pictures gallery cycles through favorites (pics of my son ), a tile for my wife, the Zune one just shows the last artist I played, calendar etc.

Most of the others (email included) will just pop up with a number for notifications.

 

[TheStu]

Yea, when I was using Windows Phone 7 (used it for about a year), the advertised feature of the live tiles, the whole 'at a glance'-ness... never really worked for me. I was ok with it since my needs are pretty simple. I don't get much email, for example.

It was other features of the OS that kept me using it, like Local Scout, the fairly well implemented back button, the fluidity of the interface, that sort of thing.

 

[shortylickens]

I had WP7 for a year. The tiles were nice but really they just made me long for androids widgets.
Went back in and got a note 2. I love the default full screen email widget and theres a ton more to download.

My biggest complaint with windows phone is they were rarely clear and up front about which apps could make use of a live tile. You had to keep adding shit to your home screen and hope for the best. And telling me I have 3 or 4 unread emails is nice, but they also do that on the unlock screen. I like having a widget which lets me SEE the damn mail. And my calendar too. And news.

Android might require a little more work, it took me a couple months to finally get all screens how I like, but in the end it lets me do a lot more.

 

[pantsaregood]

I'm not familiar with Weather Flow; I use Amazing Weather HD, which actually has a background task associated with it that keeps your location updated if you so choose.

Live Tiles for SMS, Facebook, Twitter, and other such things are nice, as they'll update you with whatever information you choose. MetroTube has a fairly nice tile, as well.

The tiles aren't hyped as a huge selling point like they were back in 2010. Microsoft pushed them back then because Android and iOS did look very stale at the time, and the idea of your SMS icon telling you how many messages you'd missed was relatively new.

Windows Phone is, as of now, a third platform that excels in some things and is a bit behind in others. The "smoked by Windows Phone" campaign Microsoft did wasn't inaccurate - they just happened to choose things that Windows Phone was particularly good at.

WPCentral's forums have some good app lists, if my memory serves me correctly. You may want to check there.

 

[spdfreak]

I don't know how many email accts you have, but leaving them 4x2 and towards the top of your start screen is a pretty effective way to use the live feature if they are the most important app. I think you might be exaggerating a bit when you say "scroll forever". WP8 scrolls so fast and smooth I can't imagine it is a real problem. Just put the stuff you need to see at the top and the stuff you don't use very often below with small tiles. I played around with tile size and placement for a couple of days until I got the layout that works best for me and honestly, you do need to get used to any new system for several days until it becomes 2nd nature.

 

[bearxor]

Thanks for responding everyone, sorry I haven't been on in a couple of weeks to get back. Long story short, I only lasted a day on WP8. I simply couldn't use it as a daily driver. Keep in mind though, that this was after two months of carrying a WP8 device and about 30 days of that device being my main phone. I'll have more down at the bottom but wanted to respond to some things in the thread first.

My biggest complaint with windows phone is they were rarely clear and up front about which apps could make use of a live tile. You had to keep adding shit to your home screen and hope for the best. And telling me I have 3 or 4 unread emails is nice, but they also do that on the unlock screen.

Yeah, the whole functionality is so random and not useful at all outside of some very specific things, like weather.

Live Tiles for SMS, Facebook, Twitter, and other such things are nice, as they'll update you with whatever information you choose. MetroTube has a fairly nice tile, as well.

This was always my biggest fear with Windows Phone and why I hesitated so long. It seems like you simply HAVE to have a social networking life in order to make decent usage out of it. As someone without a facebook or twitter account, it always made me think twice about trying WP. It seemed like you would be missing out on half the functionality.

The tiles aren't hyped as a huge selling point like they were back in 2010. Microsoft pushed them back then because Android and iOS did look very stale at the time, and the idea of your SMS icon telling you how many messages you'd missed was relatively new.

No it wasn't. The SMS icon on an iPhone alerted you to the number of missed messages since launch in 2007.

Otherwise, I think the live tiles aren't a marketing point anymore because they seem almost useless.

I don't know how many email accts you have, but leaving them 4x2 and towards the top of your start screen is a pretty effective way to use the live feature if they are the most important app.

Right, and that's fine, but I have three email accounts and having 3 4x2 tiles would take up the entire first page. Not only that, but it doesn't cycle through my email, it just shows the last one that came in. If it cycled (quickly), it might be a different story, but on the other hand, if I'm waiting for it to cycle, why don't I just go in and read it?

I think you might be exaggerating a bit when you say "scroll forever". WP8 scrolls so fast and smooth I can't imagine it is a real problem. Just put the stuff you need to see at the top and the stuff you don't use very often below with small tiles.

I think the point was, then how is it any different from a iPhone. If all I'm doing is putting 1x1 shortcuts on my front page and simply scrolling to get to what I want, how is this functionally any different from iOS? It came to the point where, for a couple of days, I had simply removed all my pins from the start screen and was using the app launcher as my start screen. The downside to that was that the tiles don't update at all, even with a count of unread messages like they do on the pin page.

So, although my WP8 trial was a flop, there are a lot of things I did like about it. First off, the camera on the 920 is great, especially in low light (not that anyone didn't know that). Taking pictures side by side with my ip5 made for shots in the dark that looked like the room was brightly lit. The downside to this is the shutter speed, which stays open way to long for the two stage camera button to be useful. Almost every long shutter photo i took by using the camera button was blurry, simply because pressing the button moved the camera and the OIS wasn't able to compensate. Photos that had a fast shutter were great, but if the scene was properly lit, I couldn't make out too much of a difference between the L920 and the iP5. Touching the screen worked great in low light shots though.

One thing I really loved was selecting things. Having your email open and being able to tap the left side to not only select that email, but to begin to select other emails in order to do things like delete them felt intuitive. I've caught myself trying to do it a couple of times on the iP5.

I loved the start screen integration for Bing. I use Bing Desktop on my work machine just to get a different background image each day and that brought the same functionality over to my phone. What I didn't have much luck with was other start screen integration. The only other one I found useful was WeatherFlow but the downside on that was the background images were a static set. I'd really, REALLY love to see a Yahoo Weather like app on Windows Phone that give you the current readings and temperatures on the start screen, but pulls a photo based off your location from flickr or something to use as your start screen.

What I did have better luck with was the start screen notification area. Where you can pick an app to give you a headline update at the bottom of the screen. The CNN app worked really well here and it was pretty nice. It was, IMO, a nice compromise from a full blown widget.

I did love the typography that Microsoft employed throughout the device. Fonts are clear, beautiful and minimalist. It looks like Apple's going that direction with iOS 7 though.

I'm torn about the headers at the top of apps and stuff. On one hand, it looks really nice but, on the other, it's terribly inefficient compared to a navigation button. I can either constantly swipe to the side to get to the heading I want to be in, or touch a button at the bottom of the screen to get where I want. I'll pick the one touch.

And, though I've known this for some time, my experience with WP8 simply confirms that I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, HATE, HATE, HATE, HATE capacitive buttons.

I'm actually keeping the L920. I threw it in my nightstand and will still poke at it every once in a while. I'll definitely try some new software updates and when WP8.1 hits, I'll be able to test it out again.