SBA Disaster Loans Aid Homeowners, Renters | Bankrate.com

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Highlights

• The SBA offers low-interest loans to homeowners and renters.
• Loans pay to repair damaged homes and fix or replace damaged possessions.
• Primary residences are covered, but not vacation and second homes.

For homeowners and renters adversely affected by Superstorm Sandy, there may be help from a surprising place: the U.S. Small Business Administration. While the SBA may be best known for helping entrepreneurs launch small businesses, the agency also offers streamlined, low-interest loans designed to help homeowners and renters get back on their feet after a natural disaster such as Sandy.

"The purpose of the program is to help repair or replace property to its pre-disaster condition as quickly as possible," says SBA spokeswoman Carol Chastang.

In the initial aftermath of Sandy, the SBA has issued more than 134,000 loan applications to homeowners, renters and businesses. Businesses can apply for a similar but separate program.

But according to Chastang, the number of applications for SBA disaster loans is likely to grow higher as the Northeast begins the slow process of rebuilding from one of the region's most destructive storms.

"One thing to keep in mind is that we're still very much at the beginning of this process," Chastang says. "One week after the storm, and the region is still a disaster area, which can make it difficult to get damage assessments."

Qualifying

To qualify for SBA disaster loans, homeowners and renters need to live in a county that has received a presidential disaster declaration and where individual disaster aid is offered. Parts of Connecticut, New Jersey and New York have received federal disaster declarations in the wake of Sandy.

Renters and homeowners can file claims for their primary residence, but second homes and vacation homes aren't eligible under the SBA disaster loan program, although those properties may be eligible for relief under the SBA's business loan program.

Homeowners may borrow up to $200,000 to repair disaster-related damage to their homes. Renters and homeowners may borrow up to $40,000 to repair or replace personal property (such as furniture, appliances, etc.) lost or damaged as a result of the storm. Both renters and homeowners are prohibited from using the money to improve their property beyond pre-disaster conditions. However, homeowners may be able to borrow?an additional 20 percent to make?improvements that lessen the risk of property damage in the future.

The primary criterion for issuing the loan is the homeowner's ability to repay. Typically, that means the SBA will consider the applicant's income statement, says Chastang.

Terms

In most cases, qualified homeowners and renters will be able to borrow SBA money at a 1.688 percent interest rate. Homeowners who have substantial means and are easily able to repair their property on their own are still eligible for a loan, but they may be offered the loan at 3.375 percent, Chastang says. "The vast majority of qualified applicants will get the lower rate," she says.

The term, or length, of the loan is determined case by case, depending on ability to pay, and it can be up to 30 years.

What about insurance?

While many people living in Superstorm Sandy's path doubtless had some level of insurance that may cover their losses, Chastang says it's still a good idea to begin the SBA loan process if you think you qualify.

"A lot of people think that it'll just be taken care of through their insurance," Chastang says. "But in the case of a major disaster, insurance companies tend to get overloaded, and it can take a long time for those checks to arrive."

If the homeowner or renter does collect on an insurance claim, that money is used to offset all or a portion of the loan amount.

Applying

While paperwork may be the last thing on the mind of a displaced homeowner or renter, Chastang says the SBA disaster loan application is designed to be as quick and streamlined as possible.

"It's a four-page application that covers a lot of basic information, and there's an additional form that authorizes the SBA to check (Internal Revenue Service) tax returns to verify income," says Chastang.

Down the road, homeowners will have to show title to the property, but according to Chastang, it's understood that in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, many homeowners won't have access to those documents.

Right now, Chastang says the typical application takes about 10 days to close and another five days before the check arrives. But in many cases, the process moves much faster.

Homeowners and renters can apply online at the SBA website or call (800) 659-2955. They can also email for information by writing to DisasterCustomerService@sba.gov.

Investigate other programs

While the SBA can help a number of homeowners and renters hurt by Superstorm Sandy, Chastang stresses that it's important to investigate all programs and to register.

"These programs are designed for specific situations, so it's possible that if you don't qualify for one form of relief, you may qualify for another," says Chastang.

To help people make the most of the disaster programs available to them, Chastang recommends they register at DisasterAssistance.gov, which is a clearinghouse for all federal agencies and programs.

Source: http://www.bankrate.com/finance/weather/natural-disasters/sba-disaster-loans-aid-homeowners-renters.aspx

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Lending Statutes For Payday Loans - Business Debt Relief Blog

Lending Statutes For Payday Loans

Last Updated on Wednesday, 14 November 2012 04:14 Written by Ebiz Wednesday, 21 November 2012 06:14

The state stature regarding payday loans for which are single -payment short term loans are as follows. These loan lenders hold personal checks for future payments or use the process of electronic debits to personal checking accounts for payments.?There are thirty eight states that have specific statures allowing

the payday lender to exist but there are eight states that do not have any standards for payday lending. These eight states do not have lending sutures nor do they require any lenders to put a cap on interest rates on these loans.

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In 2012, twenty two states were in the process of introducing payday lending legislation. For example: Delaware set a five loan limit per 12 month period for borrowers; Louisiana requires that the lenders send data to the Office of Financial Collection information and data concerning their operations, functions and customers of deferred tractions and small loans for a period of one year beginning on Jan 1 2013; Nebraska provides that the director of Banking and Finance shall collect fees, charges, cost and fines under the Delayed Deposit Services Licensing Act and remit them to the state treasurer.

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Your Payday Loan Information Should Alyways Be Confidential

Oklahoma? demands that certain information remain confidential; Tennessee requires lending institutions be licensed through a multi-state system; Utah modified the check cashing and deferred deposit act to require an interim committee and a local forum to settle payday loan disputes. As you see, they are all different. The state adds the legislation to suit their dire individual needs to protect the consumer.

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There have always been regulations imposed on short term lenders as to how much interest to charge, how many times a loan can be rolled over, how much the borrower can be granted, the fees charged, the practice of disclosures being explained fully to the customer, the process of default on an auto title loan concerning the disposition of the vehicle and the balance of the loan and the right of the borrower to change his/her mind etc. The short term or alternative lenders, however, were not forced to comply with these fair lending practices.

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These lenders would find loopholes and prey on the downtrodden consumers and their urgent need for cash. Most of the borrowers would soon send up in a down ward loop of debt and paying more than twice the amount of the initial loan amount. The interest on these rollovers would reach up to 1000%. The state heard the cry for help and began to require these lenders to be licensed and provided them with strict regulations to follow, or their business operations would need to shut down.

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The state statures are not inclusive because of the urgent need for legal legislations to help the consumer obtain a safer loan, but as the alternative lenders can still find loopholes, more legislation is being presented to put better safeguards on these loans for the consumers. ?Even with all these stricter legislation measures controlling these short term loan, the borrower still need to take the responsibility of the loan costs on his/her own shoulders. The borrower needs to fully understand what he/she is signing and not be negligent in their haste to merely secure the funds.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2012 at 6:14 am and is filed under Debt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Source: http://blog.ebusinessdebtrelief.com/debt/lending-statutes-for-payday-loans

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Revamping Retirement System A Priority For Incoming House Speaker

(Source: WillWeatherford.com)

TALLAHASSEE (CBSMiami/NSF) ? Incoming House Speaker Will Weatherford said the current pension system is ?old and archaic?, and he wants to change it.

Weatherford, a Wesley Chapel Republican, proposes making the state retirement program for new employees more like it is for private sector employees.

According to the News Service Of Florida, he said new state employees should be required to enroll in 401(k)-type plans instead of counting on regular pension payments from the state.

Most large corporations have moved to such plans, which help them control retirement costs while also placing more responsibility on workers to make investment decisions. ?It (pension costs) is a ticking time bomb in every state and in every city across the country, and it?s time for us to get real and do what the private sector has done,? Weatherford told reporters, as he prepares to formally begin presiding over the House next week. But trying to change the pension system likely would be controversial.

The Republican-controlled Legislature in 2011 approved a plan to require workers to contribute 3 percent of their salaries to the retirement system ? a move that has touched off a legal battle now at the Florida Supreme Court. Rep. Dwayne Taylor, a Daytona Beach Democrat who has served as a trustee on his city?s fire and police pension board, said requiring new employees to enroll in 401(k)-type plans would jeopardize the actuarial soundness of the pension system.

That is because fewer people would be paying into the system, while it would still owe benefits to retirees and workers who would be entitled to the more-traditional pensions.

?There?s a domino effect when you start tinkering with the system,? Taylor said. The Florida Retirement System includes state employees and many local-government workers, such as teachers.

Weatherford said he would have to look at whether his proposal would also apply to local governments. People in the retirement system currently can choose whether to enroll in pension plans or 401(k)-type plans, though most have chosen pensions. As of Aug. 31, 540,352 active employees were in the pension plan, while 107,040 were in a 401(k)-type plan.

Under Weatherford?s proposal, already-hired workers would continue to be able to choose a pension of a 401(k)-type plan, which might help avert legal problems. The key question in the court battle about the 2011 law is whether the state can force already-employed workers to contribute 3 percent of their salaries to the retirement system.

Opponents have not legally fought the requirement for new employees. The financial health of public pension plans has been a major issue in numerous states.

Florida?s pension plan has an estimated balance of $125.1 billion, though, on an actuarial basis, it is not fully funded. An October report from state economists said it was funded at 86.9 percent.

Any changes to the retirement system are closely watched by groups such as public unions, and Weatherford?s idea could touch off a political fight. The unions and their legislative backers argue, in part, that pensions and other benefits are a way to make up for lower salaries that workers earn working for the government instead of in the private sector.

But Weatherford said pension costs are a ?real problem for the state long term.? ?I think when it comes to pensions, this is not anything radical,? Weatherford said. ?Ninety percent of the private sector has a 401(k)-based plan.?

Source: http://miami.cbslocal.com/2012/11/17/revamping-retirement-system-a-priority-for-incoming-house-speaker/

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Despite Myanmar reforms, much remains to be done

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) ? In the west, terrified villagers flee burning homes after an explosion of ethnic and religious violence. In the north, refugees from a civil war cower in chilly camps, desperately short on life's basic necessities. And in dank jails, hundreds of political prisoners languish behind bars, wondering when they'll ever be freed.

This is not the Myanmar that President Barack Obama will see when he becomes the first American head of state to visit this pagoda-studded country on Monday. He wants to encourage the stunning democratic transformation Myanmar has undergone since last year, but there are concerns his visit may be premature.

The nation's warp-speed revolution is fragile. Its nascent transition has already been bloody. And much unfinished business remains: from repealing harsh laws that helped silence a generation of pro-democracy dissidents, to overhauling a political power structure still tipped heavily in favor of army rule.

"If President Obama doesn't put his full weight behind further urgent reforms in Myanmar, this trip risks being an ill-timed presidential pat on the back for a regime that has looked the other way as violence rages, destroying villages and communities just in the last few weeks," said Suzanne Nossel, the U.S.-based director of Amnesty International.

White House officials cautioned Thursday that Obama's visit to Myanmar, also known as Burma, should not be viewed as a "victory celebration." They reiterated that urgent action is still needed, particularly on freeing political prisoners and ending the unrest in western Rakhine state.

"This is a moment when we believe the Burmese leaders have put their feet on the right path and that it's critical to us that we not miss the moment to influence them to keep going," said Danny Russel, Obama's top Asia adviser.

There is little doubt that the reforms in Myanmar have come quicker and gone farther than anyone here dared dream.

Just a few years ago, this was a place denigrated by Washington as an isolated "outpost of tyranny," a country led by a xenophobic clique of army officers so distrustful of the West that they rejected foreign aid even when Cyclone Nargis killed more than 100,000 people in 2008.

Even when the junta ceded power to an elected government early last year, few considered the prospect of real change. The vote, boycotted by the main opposition, was considered neither free nor fair, and the new president, Thein Sein, was a former general.

But Thein Sein's government surprised the world. It freed hundreds of political prisoners, though not all of them. It signed cease-fire deals with numerous rebel groups. It abolished a draconian system of media censorship. It revamped finance and investment laws. Aung San Suu Kyi ? the longtime opposition leader who spent most of the last two decades as a prisoner in her own home ? is now an elected lawmaker with an official voice in government.

Today, the consensus is the reforms are irreversible. But that doesn't mean "the future is necessarily bright," said Myanmar historian Thant Myint-U, the grandson of the late U.N. Secretary General U Thant.

The problem is "not with the political leadership at the top," he said, "but with the enormity of challenges facing this country after decades of war, repression, and international isolation."

Myanmar is a country where oxen still haul carts of wheat past simple houses made of bamboo and dried leaves, much like they did centuries ago. Its education and health systems are neglected, in tatters. And although the country exports electricity, its infrastructure is so poor and mismanagement so high that only about 25 percent of people living here have access to electricity.

The nation's best and brightest are abroad: A 1988 crackdown on democracy protesters forced a generation of skilled labor to flee. Refugees ? hundreds of thousands in Thailand alone ? continue to live in camps, still too uncertain to return.

Although Thein Sein's administration has been widely credited with beginning the monumental task of turning the ship of state around, it also has seen grave setbacks.

Chief among them: the collapse of a 17-year-old truce with ethnic Kachin rebels in the north. That triggered a wave of fighting that has driven more than 75,000 people from their homes. On Wednesday, Kachin rebels attacked a prison convoy, killing two convicts and injuring 14 others, state media reported.

In western Myanmar, another 110,000 people have been displaced in a separate conflict between the Buddhist Rakhine and the stateless Muslim Rohingya. Many Rohingya were born in Myanmar, but they are denied citizenship because the government considers them foreigners from neighboring Bangladesh.

The conflict has degenerated into an anti-Muslim campaign also targeting the Kaman minority.

"Please tell Obama that we want to go home," one woman pleaded this week in Sin Thet Maw, where she fled with 5,000 other ethnic Kaman Muslims after Buddhist mobs turned their neighborhood to ashes and forced them to flee on boats.

"We have no schools, no medicines, no toilets," the 48-year-old, Ohnmar Saw, said. "We need help, and nobody is helping us."

Although the crisis in the west goes back decades, it has been exacerbated ? ironically ? by the newfound right to freedom of expression the U.S. has pushed so long for. Racist rants against the Rohingya have appeared online with increasing frequency and viciousness. The government's lifting of a longstanding ban on protests has paved the way for massive anti-Muslim protests staged by Buddhist monks, bolstering nationwide antipathy toward Muslims and setting the stage for the latest spasm of violence in late October.

The "democratic opening has allowed for repressed voices ... both negative and positive, to emerge," said Aung Naing Oo of the Vahu Development Institute think-tank, who traveled back to his homeland for the first time this year after fleeing two decades before.

But the upside is clear: "Myanmar is no longer a dictatorship," he said.

Given the new democratic equation, solving the conflict in Rakhine state will be difficult because the Rohingya are a deeply unpopular cause that few politicians will defend ? not Thein Sein, and not even Suu Kyi, whose party is looking toward elections due in 2015. Thein Sein appeared to make conciliatory remarks on the Rohingya in a letter to the United Nations on Friday, saying he would consider new rights for the minority, including citizenship, work permits and freedom of movement. But he stopped short of a full commitment and gave no timeline for addressing the situation.

There is also concern that the U.S. can do little to help.

America's own interests ? businesses are keen to tap into what is for them virgin territory rich in natural resources ? are at risk of trumping human rights. And Obama's trip is also part of a broader effort to bolster U.S. influence in a region dominated by China.

Washington's decision to suspend sanctions this year has also dramatically diminished its leverage here, said Aung Din of the Washington-based U.S. Campaign for Burma, which has called on Obama to cancel his trip.

"The risk, without political and economic pressure, is that we will not see the process of democratic change moving forward," he said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/despite-myanmar-reforms-much-remains-done-071004326.html

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Both sides appear upbeat on opening round of ?fiscal cliff? talks (Washington Post)

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HTC Windows Phone 8X (AT&T): Full Review

What's in a name? For HTC, a moniker like Windows Phone 8X shows that the company very much wants the world to think of its device as the flagship product for Microsoft's new OS. Offering a very sleek and colorful design, Beats Audio and a camera that can capture more of your friends at once, the 8X ($99 for 8GB, $199 for 16GB) is gunning to be the Windows Phone of the season. Find out if this device has what it takes to not only tear you away from Android and the iPhone, but also beat the feature-packed Lumia 920.

Design

Click to EnlargeTaking inspiration from the colorful home screen of Microsoft's new smartphone operating system, the HTC Windows Phone 8X strongly resembles a stretched oucoolt tile. We love how the blue soft-touch rear panel gently surrounds the 4.3-inch black display. You can also order the 8X in a bolder Limelight yellow.

Click to EnlargeOn the front, a 2.1-megapixel camera sits in the top right corner, next to a blue speaker bar, which stands out on the glossy obsidian surface. Capacitive buttons (Back, Start and Search) are located along the bottom.

Instead of tagging the front of the device with excessive labeling, HTC places all insignias (HTC, Beats and AT&T) on the rear panel, a nice touch. Here also is an 8-MP camera, flash and a speaker.

Along the top edge of the 8X are a power button and headphone jack. A volume rocker and dedicated camera button are located on the right, along with a pullout tray for the SIM card. The microUSB slot is tucked away at the bottom of the handset.

Click to EnlargeThe 8X's slim 5.21 x 2.6 x 0.39-inch frame slid easily into our pants pocket. It's also fairly light at 4.6 ounces. By comparison, the 6.5-ounce Nokia Lumia 920 is on the chunky side, wider and thicker at 5.1 x 2.8 x 0.42-inches. To be fair, the Lumia 920 has a slightly bigger display and a PureView camera that takes up more internal real estate.

Display

Click to EnlargeThe 4.3-inch Super LCD 2 display on the HTC 8X has a resolution of 1280 x 720 (341 ppi), which made maps, images and Web pages look great. A high-quality video of "The Hobbit" streamed from YouTube showed deep blacks and bright, vivid colors. Also, viewing angles were excellent. We could tilt the phone at extreme angles and still see the dwarves on-screen.

The 8X's 300 lux brightness was a hair shy of the 301 lux average. The Nokia 920 was only slightly brighter, at 310 lux. When we viewed the "Skyfall" trailer on the 8X and Lumia 920 side by side, the Lumia 920's screen offered better contrast and deeper black levels.

Audio

Click to EnlargeConsidering that HTC owns Beats Audio, it's only natural that this technology is included in the 8X. Beats is only activated when headphones are connected to the phone. Unlike Beats headphones, this app boosts both mid- and lower tones, but evenly, for a richer sound. When we listened to "Body and Soul" on our Monster DiamondTears headphones, Anita Baker's sultry vocals smoldered. The piano and bass were full-bodied and warm like a well-aged Bordeaux.

Pressing the physical volume controls displays a little drop-down window that lets you advance, rewind or pause tracks. At its largest, the Music + Video Live Tile shows a picture of the artist, as well as his or her name scrolling horizontally and vertically. It would be a better use of this tile if you could actually control tracks.

The rear-facing speaker on the 8X kicked out somewhat loud, but tinny sound. It was good for making phone calls via speakerphone, but you wouldn't want to use it to listen to music for extended periods.

Windows Phone 8

Click to EnlargePeople who aren't too keen on Android or iOS will want to check out the new Windows Phone 8 OS. Live Tiles are the keystone on which the operating system rests. We're big fans of the visually appealing, customizable tiles. The resizable, sometimes animated tiles are a welcome improvement over the static presentations of both iOS and Android.

There are lots of tiles users can pin to their Start screen, including people, apps, websites, photo albums, music albums, notes, directions and more. Live Tiles can now be resized to one of three sizes. Just long-press to make a tile smaller or as large as rectangle that stretches across the screen.

Click to EnlargeWhere Windows 8's Modern UI is designed for landscape navigation, Windows Phone 8 was designed with one-handed, portrait-mode use in mind. The main screens, as well as some Microsoft apps (People, Music + Videos, and Games, to name a few) only work in portrait mode. Fortunately, others that potentially involve a lot of typing (such as email and messaging) can rotate to landscape mode.

As attractive as Windows Phone 8 is, it could be easier to use. For instance, you need to press the top of the screen to see your battery life and signal strength. And while it's easy to switch apps, it takes more steps than we'd like to close them.

People Hub: Groups and Rooms

Click to EnlargeThe People hub aggregates your various contacts from Email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype and Twitter. Of course, if you're connected to all those networks, that can mean a lot of new information all at once. Two features, Groups and Rooms, let you contextualize and sort all this data. As its name suggests, Groups let you group selected contacts (say, Family or Favorites); opening that group then shows only updates and photos from those individuals.

Similar to the workgroups in Microsoft Office, Rooms lets you set up a virtual network with selected contacts to privately share photos, calendars and send messages. Inviting someone to a room was as easy as selecting them from our contacts list. From there, sharing photos, notes and sending messages was a simple matter. We can see this being a very helpful tool for both families and employees alike. We'd like to see Rooms migrate to Windows 8 as well.

As mentioned, if you link all of these social networks, your Contact List can quickly become epic in length. Fortunately, you can choose which contacts to display.

Kid's Corner

Click to EnlargeHave some content that you'd rather the kids not see? Windows Phone now sports a kid-proofing feature called Kid's Corner. Once activated in the Settings menu, adults can choose which videos, music and images are child-friendly. This content is accessed by flicking the lockscreen to the left. The rest of the content is locked by a password chosen by the user.

Although there are third-party apps for Android phone that go further than Kid's Corner, Windows Phone 8 does more for parents out of the box than Google or Apple.

Apps

Click to EnlargeThe Windows Phone Store features more than 120,000 apps and continues to grow. We were able to find popular third-party apps such as CNN, Netflix, IMDb and Evernote. However, Windows Phone has a long way to go before its apps store can compete with the massive catalogs of Android and iOS.

AT&T also makes its presence felt with its usual cast of carrierware. The HTC Windows Phone 8X comes preinstalled with AT&T FamilyMap, Code Scanner, Navigator, Radio, U-verse Live TV and myAT&T. Thankfully, you can remove these apps.

Click to EnlargeHTC offers an HTC app store and an HTC-branded hub with weather, stock and news updates from CNN and Yahoo. There's also Photo Enhancer, a photo filter app reminiscent of Instagram, and Converter, which can convert most common forms of measurement.

Although the 8X has its own Maps app, we prefer Nokia Maps, which offered more details and has separate views for satellite, public transit and traffic routes. We also liked the clean presentation of Nokia's Drive app that provided easy to follow turn-by-turn navigation. (Nokia Drive is slated to become available to all Windows Phones, but there's no ETA.)

Third-party apps include YouTube and YPmobile.

Word Flow Keyboard

Click to EnlargeThe on-screen keyboard on the 8X looks much the same as on previous versions of Microsoft's mobile OS. In portrait mode, the small rectangular keys were relatively easy to type on, as were their squarish landscape-mode counterparts. A new addition is the keyboard's predictive feature, which helped correct our spelling as we typed. We wish there was an option for haptic feedback, especially considering the three buttons below the screen gently buzz when pressed.

NFC

The HTC Windows Phone 8X has a NFC chip, which let us share photos, websites, contacts and other content by touching the phone to another NFC-enabled device. Tap & Share -- the name HTC gives to this feature -- can also be used to pair the phone to other devices.

The process has a few more steps than we would like. In order to share a photo, you have to open it, press the three dots on the screen to access settings and select Tap+Send from the Share menu options. With Android devices, it's much simpler; simply tap on the image while the two devices are touching.

Performance

Click to EnlargeThe HTC Windows Phone 8X's 1.5-GHz dual-core Qualcomm S4 CPU and 1GB of RAM delivered zippy app launches and tile navigation. On the Benchmark Free app, the 8X notched the top score of 7.9 on every test. That adds up to a cumulative score of 47.4, tying the Nokia Lumia 920, which also has a 1.5-GHz dual-core Qualcomm S4 CPU.

We also ran the WPBench app, which measures CPU, data and GPU performance. The 8X scored 233.97, compared with 226.75 for the Lumia 920.

With the screens on the Lumia 920 and the HTC 8X turned off, we pressed the camera button on both simultaneously. Both sprung to life in the same amount of time, about 2 seconds. They were also equally responsive when opening the People app.

Web Browsing and 4G LTE

Click to EnlargeAT&T continues to deliver fast speeds over its 4G LTE network. On Speedtest.net, we saw an average download speed of 13.7 Mbps and upload speeds of 6.9 Mbps. When we started browsing the Web, the mobile versions of NYTimes.com, CNN.com and ESPN.com loaded in 2.3, 3.1 and 4.4 seconds. The desktop version of Laptopmag.com loaded in a snappy 7.8 seconds.

Skype

Click to EnlargeThe new Skype app for Windows Phone 8 has all the video chatting and instant messaging you've come to expect, but now it's integrated with Microsoft's new OS. The app remains on in the background -- even when the phone is locked -- so that WP8 owners can potentially use Skype as their primary means of making voice calls. Of course, it remains to be seen if individual carriers will allow this functionality. Additionally, Skype contacts added all of our contacts to the People hub.

Over AT&T's LTE network, there was a noticeable amount of pixelation on both ends of our video chat. However, audio was crisp. In landscape mode, the 8X's wide-angle lens allowed us to fit an additional person in the shot. However, it did not rotate the image in our caller's feed.

Camera

Click to EnlargeThe 8X's rear-facing 8-MP camera impressed at almost every turn. In side-by-side shots with the Lumia 920, we saw sharper details with colors that popped off the display. A photo we took of three fall bouquets had richer yellows, reds and oranges on the 8X. However, we did notice that the Lumia delivered warmer tones.

Click to EnlargeStill, the Lumia is the hands-down winner in low-light settings. It was literally night and day, as we could barely make out our toys in the 8X shot. The 920 took advantage of what little light there was, allowing for a colorful, albeit somewhat fuzzy image.

Thanks to HTC's dedicated ImageChip, the 8X's camera snapped photos in less than a second after pressing the shutter. After you take a shot, we could share it with others via messaging, our various email accounts, Facebook, OneNote, SkyDrive or Twitter. Editing options on the phone let us perform a quick fix, crop or rotate. If you want to make heavier adjustments, an Apps link let us easily open the photo in the photo-editing programs installed on the phone.

Click to EnlargeWithin the photo app, pressing the icon that has two arrows facing in opposite directions lets you access Lenses, a fun feature that adds various filters to the camera. (Think Instagram, but there's a lot more potential as developers catch on.) Some lenses--such as CamWow--are frivolous, adding fun-house effects and such, but others such as CNN iReport let you upload video straight to CNN.

You can activate the camera from the lock screen merely by holding the shutter button for two seconds. You can also take photos without unlocking the phone, but doing so only gives you the ability to view (and delete) the photos you just took.

The front-facing 2.1-MP camera also took fairly good shots. While images captured in a slightly dim room were on the grainy side, colors were generally accurate. We liked the 88-degree wide-angle lens on the front, which is optimized for taking self-portraits. We could more easily fit more people in the frame than on the iPhone 5.

Battery Life and Call Quality

Click to EnlargeTo test the HTC 8X's battery life, we used the Peacekeeper battery test from Futuremark on medium brightness, as Windows Phone does not support our Web surfing rundown test. (Peacekeeper's test does run in the browser.) On this test, the 8X lasted 4 hours and 4 minutes, which is behind both the 8X for T-Mobile (4:43) and the Nokia Lumia 810 for that carrier (5:13). The 8X for AT&T likely had a shorter runtime because its 4G LTE radio uses more power than the HSPA+ chip inside the T-Mobile Windows Phones.

Test calls made to relatives in New Jersey and North Carolina came through loud and clear on both ends. There was no static or echoing when we switched over to speakerphone.

Verdict

Click to EnlargeThe HTC Windows Phone 8X is sturdy, sexy and svelte, and, like Microsoft's OS itself, clearly differentiated from Android and iOS devices. We especially like the 8X's fast back camera and wide-angle front camera. This handset's biggest limitations are the comparatively small size of the Windows Store and its relatively short battery life.

If you don't mind its extra bulk, the $99 Nokia Lumia 920 for AT&T is our top Windows Phone pick. It offers a superior 4.5-inch screen and exclusive goodies like wireless charging and Nokia Music and Nokia Drive. You also get 32GB of storage for $99, versus 8GB for the $99 8X. You'll need to step up to $199 to get 16GB. But if you want to travel lighter, the slim and light HTC Windows Phone 8X is a very good choice.

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limbaugh aaron smith wilt chamberlain joe arpaio