A month with the iPhone
November 20th, 2011, 1:29am by JakeLike Kelvin, I too recently adopted a new smartphone platform in the shape of an iPhone 4S.I was happy enough with the Sprint FrankenPre 2 but then I got hit by two errors at about the worst time. First, it stopped retrieving my Yahoo! Mail which is a major PITA. No idea if the problem was on Palm’s end or Yahoo’s end, but no matter. Apparently the two troubled companies couldn’t make their way across Sunnyvale to sit down & solve it. Second, the phantom headphone problem returned. The phone was usable in speakerphone mode as long as I didn’t mind holding it backwards, but really. The Pre 2 was giving problems after 2.5 months, what hope did I have that it would last 8 or 11 months? To top it all off, this all hit the day after I discovered I broke my hand, and the morning I locked myself out, and had to call a co-worker for a lift. And since my phone was acting up, I rebooted so I couldn’t even kill time surfing the web! I walked home that day & stopped by the Sprint & Apple stores to no avail, but easily reserved a black 64GB Sprint phone for the next day. After a false start, I picked it up after work and BOOM! iPhone.
There are some really great things about the iPhone, some which are overstated, and some things I just miss from the Pre. Let’s take this in list form. First the great.
- It’s so responsive compared to the Pre. I slide my finger on the screen, and everything just moves. Every. Single. Time. No delays. Really easy to overlook and likely unappreciated by folks coming over from the dumb phone world. But for smartphone users– especially webOS fans– it’s almost unreal.
- The screen is great, no question. The Pre screen was fine, if a little small. Having some more pixels and acreage makes a difference.
- The camera is loads better. For lots of reasons. #1 is simply the responsiveness… it just works. #2 is the 1001 user interfaces. And editing functions. I’ve been on camera hiatus lately, but I’ll get back there. Finally, the sensor itself is clearly better. That’s not a knock on the Pre, which took good photos. But the iPhone is a cut above nearly everyone.
Then lets get to the overstated.
- Apps. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great. And yeah, with 200,000+ there’s going to be a new one like Word With Friends that I enjoy that simply didn’t exist on the Pre. But 95% of my use is Safari, Email, Messaging, Twitter, Podcaster, Facebook, Maps and other standard fare. None of those, apart from the maps, is dramatically better than the equivalent app on the Pre.
- Let’s talk recent iOS upgrades. Notifications are fine and surely a huge improvement from the old paradigm. If they don’t match webOS notifications, they’re close enough. Another is OTA upgrades. Can’t believe it took 3 years. Copy & paste and quasi multitasking (we’ll get back to that) are a few other upgrades that I had for 2+ years on the Pre.
- Battery life is good. And it mostly gets through the day, but I do have to sneak charges regularly. Certainly better than the Pre. But, at least on the Pre there was the option to swap batteries. Sure there are battery cases & other recharging options, but I’ll call this one a push.
- Siri. It’s fun. If I drove a lot, I could see it being handy. Fun gimmick right now.
- Ditto Facetime, except for the driving part.
And the things I miss
- Touchstone charging was great.
- Multitasking just doesn’t work as well, and I regularly find my downloads in Podcaster stop when the app is in the background too long. No idea if this is remediable.
- Synergy & the address book integration was definitely better on webOS. Facebook integration is a bit of a hack, and I find that most times there are multiple entries for each person– sometimes 3 or 4.
- The keyboard. The best thing I can say about the iPhone keyboard is it works. It doesn’t “just work.” Tons of typos, the screen is just too little and no tactile feedback. Maybe you can type as fast on the software keyboard, but it takes more concentration, too. On the Pre I could just hammer and ignore the screen for paragraphs. On the iPhone, if I go 3 sentences the corrected version might be so unrecognizable that I can’t be sure what I meant to write.
November 20th, 2011 at 2:49 am
yeah, Ed’s been complaining about the poor Synergy of his iPhone too. Other than having Facebook profile pics as my friends’ caller ID photos, I personally have never received any benefit whatsoever from contacts synergy. I’d estimate that I have 100% of the people I interact with directly (email/sms/phone) already in my own Google address book. If I’m going to contact someone else I know from a service like Facebook, Linked In, Flickr, Yelp, etc, I’m fine doing that from within the respective app. Calendar synergy is far more useful, and I find iOS does fine in that regard.
November 21st, 2011 at 12:22 am
There’s also the issue of getting worse call quality in my house. It’s like the 700p all over again! The best phone as phone I ever had was the Centro. Probably one reason it was so popular. Oh well, still got the landline.
November 27th, 2011 at 5:44 pm
Can’t believe it’s been a week and I haven’t had time to chime in! I actually started a reply, but never finished it. It’s funny — several of your “cons” aren’t issues for me, but for some of your “pros,” I’ve had a, shall we say, imperfect experience. Overall, I love the new OS update, but it feels like it lags a little on the iPhone 4 compared with the previous OS. And about a week after installing, I was hit by the battery issues — I was losing about 15% of my battery per hour. I ended up reinstalling the OS, and that seemed to fix things (back to using ~75% battery per day), but was a hassle. The fact that it was a week after installing tells me that it was probably some app that wasn’t ready for the new OS, and had some process running that was killing the battery. As such, I’m a little afraid that it’ll happen again, but so far, so good.
And let me know if you find a good podcasting app — I have the same issue. Didn’t have this issue with the jailbroken phone that could do full background multitasking. (If you’re interested, rumor has it that a 4S jailbreak is imminent).
The notifications are great, a suitable replacement for the jailbreak apps I had to display stuff on the lock screen. In fact, there’s not much I would jailbreak for right now, but would be nice to have free hotspot access again…
November 28th, 2011 at 2:45 am
I’ve heard a lot about battery issues with iOS5, but I haven’t noticed any effect on my iPad. Have you, or was it just on the phone?