You can get this working by taking advantage of the Libraries feature of Windows and Sky Drive. Here are the steps:

1. Set up SkyDrive on your tablet and phone
2. Set your phone to upload all photos to SkyDrive: Settings > Applications > Photos & Camera > Auto Upload > SkyDrive Turned On
3. Take a picture with your phone. You will now have a Pictures > Camera Roll folder on your SkyDrive
4. If you’ve taken any pictures on your tablet you’ll have a Camera Roll folder in your Pictures library. Move all of the photos from that folder into the SkyDrive > Pictures > Camera Roll folder.
5. Delete the Pictures Library > Camera Roll folder on your tablet
6. Long press or right click on the Pictures library on your tablet and select properties.
7. Add the SkyDrive > Pictures folder to your Pictures Library locations
8. Click the “Set save location” while your SkyDrive pictures entry in the locations is highlighted
9. Click Apply to close the properties window

You now have a unified camera roll in the cloud. If you take a picture on your phone or your tablet it will always end up on your SkyDrive; you will always have access to all of your photos no matter where you are.

Would I ever switch back? I’m open to it, but Apple would have to make some changes to iOS to get me interested again:

1. A Modern UI

iOS looks kind of pokey at this point. The heavily textured and bitmapped UI elements look kind of cheesy and out-dated.  Apple needs to revamp iOS so that it looks and feels slick and modern. There’s a lot of talk about Jony Ive taking iOS in a more modern visual direction in iOS 7. That may sound good to the press and but I’m a developer. I don’t just mean that Apple needs to slap a fresh coat of paint on what’s already there. I mean that Apple needs to revamp iOS’s UIKit APIs and controls. iOS is absolutely dependent on bitmapped textures. Everything in iOS is textured with bitmapped images. If Apple’s solution to this is for Apple and third party developers to use flat images as textures on UI elements, then that’s not a solution at all. Apple needs to change how iOS draws UI elements, and that is a major change.

2. Better built-in apps

There are a lot of good third-party apps for iOS, but the apps Apple ships with iOS are pretty bad. The contacts app is just a list of contacts. The notes app is ugly and exceptionally limited. The pictures app is just a list of pictures. The music player is dreary and boring. Safari can’t render complex web apps. I’m hard pressed to think of any app that ships with iOS that is really any good. These apps were great in 2007 on the first iPhone but they seem pretty limited and old-school now, especially on the iPad. Compare iOS notes to OneNote, or iOS contacts to the People Hub, or Safari on the iPad to IE10 on Windows 8. Apple needs to revamp every app that iOS ships with.

3. Fix iCloud

SkyDrive is what iCloud should be. SkyDrive keeps all your data in sync between all your devices, but it also exposes that data through the filesystem and provides you with rich web apps to interact with that data on other computers. On top of that SkyDrive exposes object persistence and key/value storage to developers. SkyDrive does everything iCloud does, plus everything DropBox does, plus everything Google Docs does, but all in one integrated service.

4. Provide a more tablet-optimized experience on the iPad

iOS is pretty much the same on the iPad as it is on the iPhone. Apps are tablet optimized, but the OS isn’t. Apple needs to expose some more powerful and flexible functionality on the iPad that users need to make a tablet a desktop replacement. Tablets need some form of on-screen multitasking. It could be overlapping windows, or tiled windows, or snapped windows — it can be done in a lot of different ways — but it needs to be there. You need to be able to see more than one app at a time on a tablet. Not on a phone, but definitely on a tablet. Tablets need some kind of filesystem that is accessible to all apps. Apple could probably kill two birds with one stone by fixing iCloud and providing a filesystem view of the iCloud storage. Tablets need to have full keyboard and mouse compatibility, including shortcut keys. Using a bluetooth keyboard with a tablet is not a niche thing. iOS really holds the iPad back. It could be a lot more useful with a more powerful OS.

I’m not saying Apple is doomed, or that iOS sucks because it doesn’t work for me right now. Apple is doing great work, I’m excited about iOS 7 and OS X 10.9, and I’d happily recommend iOS to most users. But I like to push the envelope. I want the cutting edge, and right now that’s Windows 8 and Windows Phone, not iOS. But I could be persuaded to come back.

By fixing those 4 things I could get excited about iOS again. And who knows? It could happen. 4 years ago I said that I wouldn’t switch back to iOS until Apple added background multitasking, cloud synching, notifications, and made it easier to develop for. And I switched back when we got multitasking, iCloud, Notification Center, and Objective C 2. For now though, I guess I’m all-in on this Windows thing.

My iPhone 4 was getting pretty long in the tooth. iOS 6 was never very snappy on the iPhone 4 and it was becoming more and more noticeable all the time. The keyboard, camera, rotation, and other things were all pretty slow. I’d let my Verizon contract lapse a while ago so I had a full subsidy waiting for me. I decided to take the plunge and get a Nokia Lumia 822. It isn’t the highest-end Windows Phone, but it is a huge step up from my 3 year old iPhone 4.

I love the Lumia and Windows Phone 8 so far. The 822 is a little thick, but it feels great in my hand, it’s very light, and the screen is awesome. The software is killer. I’ve got all my files and picture synced through SkyDrive, and my music is all “in the cloud” thanks to Xbox music. My contacts all showed up thanks to Google and Facebook support, and all my email was super easy to set up. The apps Microsoft ships are great (photos, people, music, etc) and Nokia’s apps are really useful and high quality; not crapware at all. The extras it comes with are really great too: free offline turn-by-turn GPS, a year of Pandora One, free music streaming through Nokia Music, etc. And all the big name apps are available: Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Kindle, Audible, Fandango, etc.

It makes me wonder how many other people will end up experiencing a Windows 8 halo effect. I hadn’t considered Windows Phone at all, but after using Windows 8 on a tablet I really wanted to try it out. Legacy PC users may not love Windows 8 but people are buying tablets now, and Windows 8 is a really great tablet OS. I wonder if other people will pick up a Windows tablet, fall in love with it, and think “hey, wouldn’t it be great to have this same experience on my phone?”

Here are 5 features of Windows 8 that iOS doesn’t have, and that I couldn’t possibly give up:

1. Multitasking and Snap

Sometimes you just want to watch a video and write a blog post at the same time. I’m doing that right now. Real multitasking is useful and fun. Using a single app full-screen is immersive, and sometimes it is right, but other times you need to see a couple of things at the same time. Windows 8 lets you do that, iOS doesn’t. I couldn’t give it up now that I’m used to it.

2. Filesystem access

Apps are so much easier to use, and getting things done is so much simpler, when sharing data is as basic as saving and opening files. A lot of iOS apps have to do some strange and creative things to get around the lack of filesystem access. Text editors need to have Dropbox support, other apps need to be hooked up to iTunes so files can be copied into the App’s silo. It gets real complicated. In Windows 8 things are as simple as saving and opening files on the filesystem.

3. IE10

It is weird to get excited about Internet Explorer, but things change I guess. IE10 is much more powerful than mobile Safari. IE10 can render web apps that mobile Safari just can’t cope with: Squarespace, Google+, Facebook, WordPress. Everything just works in IE10 no matter how complex. On iOS you need apps to make up for the browser.

IE10 doesn’t just perform better than mobile Safari, it works better. Thumbnails are much better than tabs. Full screen is the best way to browse on a tablet. And pinning favorites is way better than scrolling through a text list of bookmarks. Mobile Safari just tries to look like a desktop app. IE10 was obviously designed from the ground-up for tablets.

4. Full keyboard and mouse support

The iPad has Bluetooth keyboard support, but it is very limited. Windows 8 has full keyboard shortcuts, multi tasking keys, and all the comforts of a laptop. And being able to use a trackpad or mouse when using desktop websites or apps is really cool. Windows 8 + a Bluetooth keyboard feels just as productive as using a laptop. On the iPad a Bluetooth keyboard makes typing a bit easier, but it doesn’t work great.

5. Modern UI

This can be broken down in two parts: how Windows 8 works, and how it looks.

After a few weeks of using Windows 8, iOS apps look kind of cheesy. They seem overly textured and tacky. Remember how web sites used to look in the 90s? Background images, and tons of bitmapped graphics all over the place. That’s how iOS looks after using Windows 8 for a while. Windows 8 apps just feel more honest and focused. The content is front and center, not tacky UI design.

The other thing I love is how Windows 8 works. It’s exceptionally consistent. Search and sharing is always in the charms bar. Any functionality that isn’t on screen is always in the app menu. Once you know how one Windows app works you know how they all work. In iOS every app is an island, and they are all designed differently.

Bonus: Microsoft Account and SkyDrive

These two features work together to be what iCloud should have been. You can access your files from anywhere. You can even use web app versions of office for accessing your files from other computers. And your data is synched between devices. It is a much better experience than iCloud.

I don’t hate iOS or anything. It’s a great mobile OS with great apps. But Apple would have to make some significant changes before I could come back. Now, that could happen. I switched from iOS to Android a long time ago for multitasking and notifications, and then I switched back when iOS got those features. But in this case a lot of the things that makes Windows 8 great are things that Apple is opposed to for philosophical reasons, things like filesystems and on-screen multitasking.

I think Microsoft’s long game is for Windows 8 to power better post-PC devices. Windows 8 is a killer tablet OS. I think Microsoft’s attitude is probably something along the lines of “The PC market is dying anyway. No sense in catering to that market.” They may throw PC users a bone here or there but it seems pretty obvious to me that Windows 8 was designed for tablets first, and tablets are on the rise.

I was skeptical, but Windows 8 promised a full computing experience on a tablet: a file system, real multitasking, better hardware support, expandability, etc. I made a list of the features I’d need to see in a Windows 8 tablet before I’d consider buying one: an x86 chip, 9+ hours of battery life, thin and light as an iPad, expandable storage, and under $500. I figured that combination of features was impossible seeing as though the Surface Pro is thick, heavy, has only a couple of hours of battery, and costs $1000. Then I came across the Asus VivoTab Smart.

The VivoTab Smart is thinner and lighter than an iPad 3 or 4. It gets 8-10 hours of battery life and a ton of standby time. It packs a dual core 1.8GHz Intel Atom processor, 2GB of RAM, and 64GB of on-board storage expandable to 128GB with a micro-SD card. The price? $450. I had to read the listing on the Best Buy website multiple times to make sure I wasn’t misreading something.

I expected there to be something wrong with the VivoTab Smart. I figured it would be slow and laggy, or it would run hot, or it would feel cheap. I’ve used a lot of non-Apple tablets and they all had massive problems lurking just under the surface. I fully expected the problems with the VivoTab Smart and Windows 8 to start showing with use. To my shock the VivoTab Smart is always super fast and smooth, really does get iPad-caliber battery life, runs cool, and generally works and looks great. After 2 weeks of constant use I can’t think of any major problems with it, and I don’t think I could go back to my iPad.

I launched LLC almost 3 years ago. It started as a tech blog but over time it changed and grew with me. The first iteration of LLC was pretty tightly focused on tech, specifically free and open source software. The second iteration broadened the scope to include more of my personal projects and other topics. For this third iteration I decided to wipe the slate clean and start over, refocused on technology. I’ll be posting about app development, software platforms, and throwing my 2 cents in on whatever nerdy happenings are making their way around the internets.