I picked mine up on launch day, and I have no regrets at all. I came up from the Trophy, and I'm glad I did. Yes, there have been a few problems - I've experienced reboots and lockups - and I have figured out that they have all been associated with being linked to bluetooth at the time of the lockup, so I'm convinced it's tied to a bug in the bluetooth stack, which I'm sure will be addressed in the upcoming Portico update. It's the first time I've ever used LTE, and wow.... Tethering my laptop, I've gotten nearly 20MBPS down and more than 10 MBPS up. As for the OS, I was sold on it two years ago, so I'm not sure where to even begin. I like the refresh, the ability to resize the tiles is great for me. Kid's Corner solves the recently-discovered problem of the grandson installing games that we'd never let him play on my wife's Trophy, then uninstalling them so that no one would know he'd done it. He didn't know that there was a purchase history online.... Hehehehe.... You're busted, kid.
The backup features are handy - I hard-reset my phone twice last weekend, and let it reinstall all of the apps without having to do it myself like I did with WP7. That was nice. It would still be nice to have app data backed up, too, but hey, one step at a time, right?
But I guess some of these are OS things I'm telling you, when you've used the 8x, so you know those.... So to compare the differences between phones.... I've not used an 8x, but I compared them in the store. To me, I like the screen on the Lumia better. The resolution is lower, but unless they're side by side, I don't see the difference in that regard. What I do see is blacker blacks. I also realize that they have the same size battery and this one can be changed, while that one can't, and this screen has fewer pixels (less power) and a lower power using technology, so overall the two phones, used side by side, for exactly the same purposes, the Lumia will last longer on a charge.
The app exclusives, to me, are a big thing. I do use Nokia Drive, and while some complain about it, it hasn't "steered" me wrong yet (pun intended). There are other apps as well that I use, too, and the photobeamer app is nifty. Not one you'll use every day, but if you want to show off your pictures to a friend, there's nothing like taking their computer to
www.photobeamer.com, opening the app on your phone, pointing the camera at the QR code, and showing the pics from your phone on their computer screen at a larger size. That's nifty! I've used the Nokia Music (free music) a good bit, and like that you can download the streams for offline listening (no data use), and city lens is cool too (nice for in big cities especially, but can be used elsewhere as well). I'm not sure what the difference is with the Nokia version of Groupon or Foursquare, and just the other day they put out Nokia Xpress, an app for reducing data use by compressing and saving pages for offline reading, which I have only tinkered with a bit so far. There are others that I haven't used yet, as well, but they do have a good cadence going for the updates, as well.
I did have a problem with recording video to a 64GB Class 10 card, but I discovered that if I switched the settings to record to the phone before recording video then it records smoothly (just remember to switch back to recording to the card after I'm done with video), no problems at all. Less storage, so shorter recording times, of course, but I don't record much video, so for me that's fine. I haven't tinkered to see if there were any solutions for recording successfully to the card, since I'm also hoping that they solve that one with the update.
Other than those glitches, no complaints, and I don't regret going with the 822 over the 8x at all. My only regret is that Verizon doesn't have a 9xx or higher yet, but if you look in the upcoming forum, you'll see MacPhisto and Honestabebread telling of what they hear is coming, and it's definitely going to get good by Easter. :grin: