Recommended Apps for Windows Phone 8

True Calendar 8

The native WP8 calendar sucks, it defaults to viewing one day, but doesn't fit it onto one screen, it doesn't have a week view at all, the month view is pretty much useless because you can't read the appointments and if you try to click on them or click on a day it switches to the crappy day view.

I can't recommend True Calendar 8 highly enough, it possibly has too many configuration options, and you can only have a maximum of one account each of Google, MS and Facebook, but apart from that it's pretty much perfect and is what the native calendar should have been.

Ocell (Twitter)

Ocell is buggy, crashing and refusing to load tweets relatively often, however in my experience, and given my demands, it is still by far the best WP8 Twitter app that I've seen. My demands mainly being configurable, swipeable columns, mainly consisting of my lists, just like Tweetdeck and then Hootsuite let me do.

Flickr Central / Flickr Booth

Flickr Central and Flickr Booth are both very good apps. They both allow you to automatically upload images, periodically update the lock screen image from particular pools of Flickr photos and view activity on your photos and your contacts' latest uploads. They also both improve on the manual uploading of images.

Flickr Central has a better photo page and a better page for showing you activity on your own photos, however it doesn't show replies to your comments on other people's photos.

UPDATE Aug 2014: I don't know if it's WP8.1 or what but recently I've been finding FC's auto-upload buggy and I can no longer share photo URLs and the developer is no longer responding to emails.

Flickr Booth has a nice tile for the start screen that can show you recent uploads from your contacts or activity on your photos. It also allows you to specify what album to auto upload from and what date to start uploading them from. However the lock screen image rotates too often IMHO and only uses your 10 most recent favourites.

The official Flickr app sucks, mostly because the logo and title always cover half the screen. Yes, really. It's also missing auto uploading and uploading multiple images from the share context menu.

Flickr Auto-Uploader

Flickr Central's auto-uploader stopped working for me, and then so did Flickr Booths. I uninstalled Flickr Booth in order to reinstall it only to find that it was no longer available in the store. I have now written my own Flickr Auto Uploader for Windows Phone which has the added bonus of being able to upload videos and high resolution images from Lumia 1020s, as well as the option of choosing any albums to upload from.

Phone Tracker

I don't expect this will be on everyone's essentials list, but I really like having a record of my location, mostly so that I can geo-tag my photos. Phone Tracker is just the ticket, very simple and straightforward, it can upload kml files nightly to SkyOneDrive. My only two complaints are that a) it puts the files in the root, cluttering them up, it would be much better if it used its own subdirectory and b) time stamps are saved without a time zone, which is a real pain in the arse.

SMS to Speech

Not an app, but the other day I found a setting which covered an app that I used to find very useful on Android, Settings -> Speech -> Read incoming text messages aloud. Unfortunately it's crippled somewhat by the fact that it asks you whether you want it to read the text message or not. Somehow I don't think that's going to be very practical when I'm riding through London :-/

Others

Authenticator for accounts that use such two step authentication like Google and MS. Has a handy copy feature. TV Guide for UK TV schedules.

Obviously

Facebook, Instagram, eBay and Whatsapp. Although I wish Whatsapp would use different colours for different people in group chats.

MIA

Firefox. I'd also really like a decent IMAP client. The native mail client is fine for basic stuff, but I'd really like something that handled folders with more finesse. Note that Mail Plus is not an email client, it's for sending emails with attachments.

HTC One Cracked Camera Glass

Just under a month after getting my HTC One I put my hand in my pocket to stroke it and felt a sharp edge. Taking it out of my pocket I discovered that the material covering the camera had cracked. I have done nothing out of the ordinary to cause this, and have certainly treated it better and had it for a much shorter period of time than all of my previous phones, none of which have broken like this.

I am not alone in this. In fact there is a list of approximately fifty people with the same problem on XDA. That thread is full of flames, conspiracy theories and wild theories, but at the end of the day a considerable amount of the users reporting the issue have either posted a photo or have accounts older than May.

HTC said that physical damage is usually not covered by warranty, and that if I decided not to go ahead with the repair after hearing their quote (which others have reported will be $90) I would still have to pay £25 postage to get the phone back. Citizen's Advice said that under the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 Three are responsible for supplying me goods that are of "satisfactory quality" which should last a "reasonable" amount of time, however they are really not interested and say that I should have noticed if there was something wrong with the phone when I bought it.

UPDATE: I took Three to court (quite easy to do online) and won by default when they continued to ignore the situation. They only paid up (the full price of the phone) when I threatened to send in the bailiffs.

UPDATE: I paid HTC a total of £85 to repair the cracked camera glass. There are now many walk throughs, including videos, showing you how to replace the glass yourself, which could be much cheaper.

Service With A Scratch

About a month ago my phone (an HTC Touch HD) started to behave oddly, often not having reception in residential areas and not being able to make calls or send text messages even when it did. Being used to fluffy (l)user support calls I gave it some time and eventually compared the reception of my phone to my friend's HTC Diamond Pro. The reception of my phone was undoubtedly, markedly worse so I started the returns' procedure, which apart from an amusing email ("The quotation has been resolved... Don’t worry, we’ll keep you fully informed.") and phone call ("What does 'The quotation has been resolved' mean?... This line's very bad... isn't that a bit of a problem for a call centre?") went smoothly and my phone was picked up and fixed under warranty, without question (despite the fact I'd bought it on eBay) in 5 working days. However the screen has been scratched and the unlock code wouldn't work as they'd changed the main board and hence the IMEI number. So I called them up again (I have to say that it really is a lot more pleasant and less stressful to speak to a native English speaker) and again they agreed to take it back to fix it without question, they will even collect it this very afternoon. So I am left with an overall sense that HTC offers good service, despite the fact that if their phone hadn't broken in the first place, and then hadn't been scratched while being repaired I wouldn't have had to go through their returns procedure, no matter how quick and pain-free it is.

UPDATE