The most obvious UI tweak in 8 — the one that users will immediately notice the first time they turn on their phone — is that the home screen is now more functional and flexible. Windows Phone 7 is noted for sacrificing precious real estate with a wide black bar on the right side of the home screen, but no more: version 8 spreads out, allowing the Live Tiles to occupy the entire width of the display. You can still get to your full list of apps the same way as before by swiping left (if you prefer to tap, the right arrow icon is still there — it’s been moved to the bottom of the Live Tile stack).

And speaking of Live Tiles, I think this is my single favorite change in Windows Phone 8: users can now choose from up to three sizes for each tile they pin to the home screen (some apps are limited to two). If you think of Windows Phone’s home screen as a grid four units wide and infinitely long, the available sizes are 1 x 1, 2 x 2, and 4 x 2; the latter two will be familiar to existing users, but the new 1 x 1 size is a great choice for app shortcuts that don’t need a ton of space to show live information flowing from the app (I use one for my third-party Starbucks card app, for instance). Injecting 1 x 1 tiles throughout your home screen layout really gives it some flair and individuality; I think it’s exactly what Microsoft needed to complete the look. It’s not a stretch to say that Windows Phone 8 has the best home screen — the perfect combination of flexibility, design, and simplicity — of any major platform right now.

Microsoft has always suggested that meaningful personalization is a critical element of the Windows Phone proposition. Touchpoints like highlight color (which is deeply ingrained throughout the platform) and home screen configurability have always been important to the platform — things that let users show hints of individuality while still making sure you can always tell beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re definitely looking at a Windows Phone. To that end, the lock screen also gets some welcome improvements without losing its "Windows Phone-ness" — it still has the big time and date text across the bottom, for instance. Now, though, you can let third-party apps and services plug into it to cycle the background image, which is cooler than it sounds; take Bing, for instance, which is known for its killer imagery. Apps can also make status icons available to the lock screen, and you can choose up to five icon types to show at a time: Facebook messages, Xbox notifications, unread email, text messages, missed calls, and the like.

Like the home and lock screens, Windows Phone’s soft keyboard is another element that users inevitably interact with on an almost constant basis, and that makes its design critical — particularly considering that it still (frustratingly) can’t be swapped out for a third party keyboard in version 8. You’d think that Microsoft would look to the wild success of keyboard like SwiftKey and Swype on Android and admit that the benefits to users of opening up the input method to developers outweigh the risks, but no dice. Fortunately, Windows Phone has always had a fantastic keyboard, and this version is no exception; I felt as though it was lagging me on a couple occasions, but that may have been my imagination because I never had major input problems or uncorrected errors.

In Windows Phone 8, the keyboard incorporates something from its Research division that it calls "Word Flow," which operates much like the phrase prediction technology in SwiftKey and the keyboard found in Android 4.1 — it can type entire sentences for you, word by word, by looking at what you’ve typed so far. One interesting feature of Word Flow that I’ve not seen on other keyboards, though, is contextual correction: Microsoft says it’ll actually analyze the sentence you write and make corrections based on context. The example they give is that if you type "come over fir dinner" it’ll correct "fir" to "for," but I’m not convinced — I then tried typing "that’s a nice fir tree" and it still made the same correction.