review

(Editor's Note: Our Windows Phone Central app developer, Jay Bennett, weighs in on the Lumia 920, the HTC 8X and his experience with both. PS It's his birthday today, so take it easy on him!)

With the release of Windows Phone 8 there is something of a rivalry forming between the HTC 8X, the ‘Signature Windows Phone’, and the Nokia Lumia 920, arguably the flagship Windows Phone in terms of hardware & features.

Whilst many consumers have already made their decision we know that some will still be mulling over the options, or perhaps contemplating one due to unavailability of the other.

It is to those people that I direct this article, we are not interested in fuelling the culture of blindly supporting one device (or even manufacturer) over the other, which honestly I would like to see stop. The simple fact is there are two awesome top end devices available right now and you have the luxury of choice, you lucky consumer you.

For the best discussions covering Windows Phone, our community forum is the number one place for platform enthusiasts to check out. Boasting thousands of members with hundreds of posts being submitted on a daily basis, the Windows Phone Central forum can be slightly hectic so we publish the forum roundup to highlight a number of threads that are worthy of viewing.

It has certainly been an incredibly busy start to the week here at Windows Phone Central. We published a special From the Forums yesterday that went into changes that are currently happening here on-site with the new design and backend improvements being applied, not to mention our Windows Phone 8 contest!

Today we're back with a true From the Forums, so what's been happening in our community?

We managed to spend some near and dear time with the recently announced HTC 8X and the HTC 8S. What can we say besides that we love the new look for HTC--bold colors, smooth designs, excellent screens--we see a bright and popular future for the new HTC series.

The HTC 8X features a 4.3" 720p display with a whopping 344ppi and a dual-core 1.5GHz, meanwhile the 8S features a more modest WVGA resolution but in an also outstanding design.

Don't believe us? Watch the video above and decide for yourself.

Can it be improved? Yes it can.

If you’re a regular reader (and listener) of this site you know by now that myself and fellow camera-enthusiast George Ponder have been…harsh…on the AT&T Nokia Lumia 900’s camera.  We rated it as one of the worst we’ve used in quite some time (though not as bad as Dell’s) and it often prevents us from using the phone as our daily driver. The Titan II though easily blows us away.

We’ve staked our position that it’s the hardware that is the problem on the 900 and while we still believe that to be the case it does appear Nokia has finally figured out how to best optimize its software. Of course we’re talking about the un-released Tango OS and firmware update which we detailed yesterday.

For the last 24 hours we’ve been pouring over the camera, snapping pictures in different environments and we have come to this conclusion: this update dramatically fixes the Lumia 900’s camera…

Yesterday we saw the release of the official Encyclopedia Britannica app for Windows Phone. The issue we had with the app was twofold: it fetches for $4.99 and there is no trial. On top of that, it looks like you have to pay that $4.99 a year to renew the app.

The question for many would be Is it worth it? Well, we ponied up for the app and show you what we think.

In essence, the official Encyclopedia Britannica app is well done. It’s fast, smooth and has a lot of features. In short, if you pay the $4.99 for this app you’ll get a fairly solid and reliable encyclopedia with offline saving abilities, pinnable entries to your Start screen, sharing options and a well done (but not totally Metro) UI.

But you know where this is going…with free services like Wikipedia out there, it’s hard to justify the $5 a year for this app when you can get the free and superbly done MyEncyclopedia (currently not available for some reason) app with no risk. Of course Britannica has been around forever, are considered more of an authority on issues and we understand they’re trying to redefine themselves in 2012 (the company just recently stopped printing actual encyclopedias).

So for $5 you get a solid app and are supporting a legacy company but for many of you, you’ll probably want to skip over this one as there is nothing exactly remarkable about it either except the quality of the content.

Pick up Encyclopedia Britannica here for $4.99 (no trial) in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Siri, the personal assistant found on the iPhone 4S, has been making headlines for Apple today, but for all the wrong reasons. The image above explains what's going on better than any words in this article. Should you happen to ask Siri "what's the best cell phone ever?", you'll be greeted with a surprising response. Not only does Siri choose a device that's not an Apple product, but it chooses the Lumia 900 Windows Phone. 

This result is produced by taking the mobile phone that's rated the highest by consumers and the cyan AT&T Lumia 900 just so happens to fit the bill. Siri found the above answer by using Wolfram Alpha, which lists the Windows Phone when visitors type in the same query. The launch of the Lumia 900 was met by an extremely high level of satisfaction from customers who purchased the handset, regardless of the issues that appeared.

We gave it a shot with Ask Ziggy to see what the Windows Phone Siri-like assistant thought of all this. Unfortunately, it appeared to be slightly smarter than Siri with leading us to a Bing SERP listing articles covering "top ten mobile phones", etc. Smart move Zig-meister. Smart move.

Does anyone find it even remotely humorous how the Windows Phone community (and tech media) have jumped on this story? At the end of the day, Apple can take something away from this - Siri has proven to be relatively accurate.

Source: Techtudo; thanks to everyone who tipped us!