I have joined the iPhone Generation

[thewayne]

Would that be the iGen? Or the Legion of iPhone Somethings?

Anyway, I like it. I got a 4S. I had planned on getting a 16 gig as I had been using an 8 gig iPod Touch, and I saved up to afford the 32 gig with minimal discomfort, and my wife gave me her credit card and bought me a 64 gig. Wow. Talk about space! I have a huge amount of music and podcasts, and needless to say my program collection has slowly been growing.

Things that I like:
Audio quality. I am blown away by the telephone audio quality! It's really amazing, even cell-to-cell conversations sound better than landlines. Of course it is probably more a reflection of the crappy phones that I've had in the past when I thought they were pretty good. I am truly gobsmacked at how good the audio is. And the audio for listening to music without external speakers or ear buds is also not too bad.

Speed. I had noticed that some programs were getting kind of slow starting on my iPod, like The Weather Channel and an RPN calculator program that I like. Now they open very fast. That's pretty sweet.

Ease of use. I haven't really had to look up anything to find out how to do something, but I've been using an iPod Touch for over two years, and the difference is whether one has a cell phone added in. Apparently custom ring tones is new to the 4S/iOS 5, so that's cool, though I haven't used it yet. I wanna get the Flint Phone ring tone. Apparently it's easy to create your own ring tones through Garage Band if you have a Mac, and I do.

I like the way that it pauses music playback when a call comes in and resumes it when it ends. And now I want to get a new car stereo that supports BlueTooth linking! It'd be cool to do away with the audio cable going in to the dash.

One thing surprised me: I didn't know there's a new type of USB. I'm not talking 2.0 vs 3.0, but there's now something called, IIRC, Adaptive USB. I guess it couples intelligent power charging into the equation, and it's a requirement for the iPhone and later iPod Touches, and I assume iPads. So I had to buy a new cigarette lighter adapter, all of $10 for a Duracell adapter at Walgreens, and it has two USB ports.

The multi-tasking is nice, though I'm not sure that I would really call it true multi-tasking. You open a program, let's say sudoku, go back to the home screen(s) and check email, then go back to sudoku. The game is in the exact state that you left it in, and there it will remain until you force it closed or restart the phone. Kinda nice. Since it stays open in the background, and at least for my sudoku program, in sort of a sleep mode (the game timer doesn't advance when it's not in the foreground), I consider it more of a rapid task switcher than multi-tasking.

Siri. The voice assist is quite interesting, and very effective. I can say “Play Elton John” and it will search my music library and start playing. Likewise I can tell it the name of a play list or podcast to play and off it will go. Yes, I've played with the various easter eggs hidden within. One thing that I like is that you DON'T HAVE TO SAY 'SIRI' EVERY TIME YOU USE IT. Out of curiosity I once told it to 'wake me up in 20 minutes' and it set an alarm. I've had less success with setting recurring appointments, it's either a matter of practice or it's a little beyond Siri's capabilities right now.

The Retina display and cameras. The display is very impressive. I've watched a few short videos on it and it's very nice. The cameras: they seem OK, I haven't downloaded any and seen how they look on a bigger monitor, I also need to see how good the image stabilization is. One thing that I did not like was it was too easy to accidentally flip the camera from photograph to video. The flash seems effective, and you can get (and I got) a flashlight app that will turn the LED on constantly. Obviously this can eat your battery big-time, but it should be useful.

Things I don't like:
iCloud. Bleh. I set it up, it sounded like the ability to sync contacts and notes could be cool. I ended up losing my entire address book and screwing up my calendar something fierce. I finally got myself disentangled from it and got those to systems back to what seems like normal. It's a little unnerving to go to your phone's favorites list and all you see are numbers, no names, then going to your address book and finding it empty. I had to do a major amount of work updating my outgoing cell phone's contact list into my Mac's address book to port it over, and iCloud really confused things there. I probably ought to go through and do another double-check.

One thing that I need to figure out: how to mute the phone ringer while still allowing the alarms to be audible.

Comments

[silveradept]

Glad you're feeling good about the device. Perhaps when it comes to all carriers, more people will adopt. For now, though, I'm pretty happy with my Android phone - I don't really like having to go through iTunes to load things on a phone or iPod.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

A lot depends on what you're used to. Having used an iPod Touch for over 2 years, using iTunes was not a problem. My former boss, turkey that he was, had an iPhone and bought an Android because he wanted to program for it. I asked him how he sync'd it after he'd had it for a couple of weeks, and he got a blank look on his face and admitted that he never had. A couple of weeks later I saw him again (the joy of telecommuting) and he said that he'd installed the sync software and that it was total garbage. He ended up finding an add-in for iTunes and syncing from there.

I picked up the Kevin Kline/Linda Rondstatt/Angela Landsbury version of Pirates of Penzance last month and ripped the audio from it into an MP3. I wanted to cut it into tracks but Audacity couldn't handle it, so I have a two hour long MP3. I was listening to it today on my iPhone while I was making cookies, just had the phone laying on top of the microwave and let it play. My wife came in, did a double take looking at the phone, and said 'those are some really good speakers!' They're not great, but they're pretty darn good when you consider the form factor limitation.

Oh, found out my last point about muting the phone ringer while allowing the alarms to be audible is a non-issue. There's a mute switch on the side of the case, and if you turn it off, you'll still hear the alarms unless you turn the volume all the way down. So that was cool.

[silveradept]

Yeah, familiarity does help. And is probably more important than your philosophy.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of aspects to philosophy, and personal philosophy can change over time. When I was younger, the hacking aspect of Android would have probably had more appeal. But after decades of patching operating systems and rescuing servers, I crave reliability. Open vs closed isn't really a consideration for me as they can co-exist, and Android isn't quite as open as a lot of people would have you believe, nor is iOS as closed. Nothing is ever as clear-cut as radicals would have us believe.

[silveradept]

That's true. As a user rather than a hacker, I tend to like the idea, though, of not being walled off, assuming that I can manage it. Of course, if push really comes to shove, we'd find out just how much proprietary stuff there is in our world, and that would be pretty sad.

So yes, it's always more complicated than that.