I honestly hadnt looked at any WP8 stuff yet, but can someone answer something for me. What am I looking at? Can you set those boxes as you like? Do you have to fill them all up? its too confusing for me, but if its possible to only choose a few things to put on and change the size of the boxes, I think it looks pretty good.
This is the Start screen. Basically what your phone opens up to when you unlock it. Can swipe up to scroll in a vertical motion through whatever is pinned on it. Theres a separate list of every app if you swipe to the left in alphabetical order. Basically, you pin the apps you want quick access to on the home screen. Tiles can come in 3 sizes, 1x1, 2x2, and 2x4. So you could have a bunch of little icons taking up the whole screen or a bunch of large ones which display more information on them, like having the email app flip over to show the last email title received. You can put as much or as little live tiles as you want, but since they are important without a unified notification center youll want your main apps on there. Its a very fluid way of getting through a lot of data in very little time.
Its much better to watch in person, with all the live tiles and rotating pictures, etc. It really is a beautiful OS that Android and Apple should take cues from. Think being late to the game helped MS a lot in crafting the UI, its unique and it works extremely well.