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Getting Started with Your Windows Phone 8!

There's so much to explore when you get a new phone! What can you pin? How do you change the colors and ringtones? What's the easiest way to get your contacts? And where, oh where, can you get all the apps? Here are a few ideas to help you figure out where to start with your Windows Phone 8!

Customizing Your Windows Phone:
 Theme, Settings, Colors, and More!

Learn how to personalize your Windows Phone 8 Start screen by pinning things to Start, changing your theme color and ringtone, and resizing your Live Tiles. Customizing your Windows Phone Start screen is easy and in your complete control.

New Features: Live Apps, Childproofing, Back-up to SkyDrive.

See some of the most exciting new features in Windows Phone 8, including Kid's Corner, Rooms, Live Apps, and more! Joe Belfiore, Corporate VP of Windows Phone, shows how you can childproof your phone with Kid's Corner, collaborate with your family or coworkers in Rooms, use Live Apps that provide real-time information at a glance, and backup everything to SkyDrive.

Windows Phone 8 Review & OS Tour!

What's new in Windows Phone 8

Windows Phone tips and tricks

Download apps, music, and games from the Windows Phone Store. Create backups of your phone settings to guard against mishaps. Play Xbox games with friends, and get your gamer score and avatar on your phone. Get your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn feeds in your People Hub. Automatically upload your photos and videos to SkyDrive. Listen to music with Xbox Music!

FIND YOUR WAY AROUND
New to Windows Phone, or need a refresher? Start with the basics.

THE BUTTONS. You can do a lot with just a few buttons. The Start button is the center of gravity on your phone—press it to go back to your Start screen no matter where you are, or press and hold it to use Speech. Press Search to go to Bing to find whatever you're looking for (or just to browse the latest news, videos, deals, movies, and more). Press Back to go back one screen, or press and hold it to jump quickly to any of the last five things you were doing. To get the whole story, see The three buttons: Back, Start, and Search.

START. This is your command center, your front page, the place where everything is just the way you like it. You can pin all sorts of things to Start—apps, of course, but also contacts, Groups, Rooms, map locations, songs, music albums, photo albums, OneNote notes, and a lot more.

Many Tiles offer information at a glance, so you don't even have to go into the app to learn what the temperature is, how many emails you have, or whether a friend recently posted a picture on Facebook. When you pin a contact to Start, you'll get their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn updates right from that Tile, plus you'll see when they’ve called or sent you any messages. And it's like speed dial—calling, texting, or emailing them is just two taps away.