3
by TC
i am probably the last guy to go iphone. i was against it as long as i could be. first iphone was iphone 4. had many different incarnations of android before that. i left because:
- the platform is completely fragmented. unless you buy a phone from google, you will be screwed for updates. the carriers have to get the official vanilla build first, plug their specific flavor of shit into it, and then release it to customers, all of this only if they feel like it. when i bought an EVO, it was cutting edge. for the two years i had it, i received one - ONE - OS update. by the time i got rid of it, i was more than two major versions behind (2.x vs. 4.x) simply because sprint stopped releasing updates for it as they put out new devices to focus on. however...
- rooting your phone is easy and once you do that, you can install any flavor of OS build you like. this is great. however, i'm listing it as a minus because i eventually ran out of energy to be reloading my phone with something else every couple weeks as something goofy happened or an updated kernel was released or whatever. it's a tinkerer's dream for sure, but who has time for that? i did, but no longer. i wanted something stable that would be supported and updated for years.
that being said, there are absolutely things i miss about android:
- cannot customize keyboard on iphone. this is fucking stupid. apple holds their APIs close to the vest to ensure a common user experience or whatever, but this is dumb. i miss some of the android keyboards and input methods available that were far superior to iphone's keyboard, and faster.
- live home/lock screen widgets. you can go nuts and ruin this idea for sure, but i did have a couple that i used all the time. you can't do this on iphone.
- itunes is a fucking nightmare. why apple won't just let me simply copy music to my phone like it's another drive is beyond me. rather, i understand they are pointing everyone to itunes to increase revenue i guess, but holy shit. i have no interest in using itunes for anything other than simply copying music to my phone. it would be simple enough to make the phone smart enough that when i drag music to it, it gets put in the correct place/whatever so that it works correctly. they are dicks for forcing everyone to use itunes. itunes is not made for a multi-terabyte music collection that lives on a NAS.
then again...
- all of the above goes out the window if you choose to jailbreak your device. you can "fix" all of the things i don't like about apple's device with a jailbreak. i used to do this. then, the cat & mouse of "apple issues update that fixes the hole jailbreak used, jailbreak community develops new method" got old. this mean waiting for OS updates and put me back in that place of dicking around with my device more than i have time to.
overall, i'm happy with the iphone. it makes sense for me as someone who also has an imac and ipad. i never have to dick with it and i get updates. i wish i could do just a couple things to customize but i'll trade that for stability and updates i guess.