Apple just announced its new iPhone today. I’m done with my 2-year contract and I’ve been looking around at phones recently, and the iPhone would have been one of the possibilities. Is this new iPhone a small step from its predecessor, or is there something I’m missing. Also, when it was released, the iPhone was heads and shoulders above everything else. Now, that gap seems to be razor thin, at least between it and the nice Android-based phones.
I sort of agree. I was disappointed there were no real gee-whiz-bang new features, but in truth there isn’t one that I was necessarily hoping for (except for a Verizon-compatible version). I think the new features are more to make existing owners want to upgrade, rather than converting a whole new population of users. But there might not even be enough features to make someone like yourself upgrade.
There’s also AT&T’s new pricing structure to consider. As the other smartphones have mostly caught up, I suppose it would be more a matter of carrier at this point.
Unless you want a device that also makes coffee, I’m not sure what else they can put in there. Maybe a sliding keyboard for those how absolutely must have one – but that’s not going to happen on Steve’s watch.
So I dunno – thinner, better battery, better screen, better camera. It sounded pretty tempting to me (tempered by AT&T’s really poorly timed modification of the data plan.)
Seeing as how AT&T’s service is pretty crappy, at least around here, and it’s more expensive for just the service than any others, I don’t know how iPhones sell around here.
“Here” is metro Detroit, by the way.
AT&T’s crappy coverage, service, pricing, and everything else is an anchor that Apple should have wasted no time in ditching.
I used to have AT&T when I lived in Los Angeles. When I moved out here my phone didn’t get a signal. I don’t mean it got a bad signal or an intermittent signal, it got NO signal at all. If I drove 10 miles south, I could get one bar, but even that could barely carry a call. The entire university where I work was an AT&T dead zone. Great, now I had a phone with a year remaining on the contract that was as worthless as a struck match. To AT&T’s credit, they voided the rest of my contract, but I understand that many students here were not given that opportunity. You can be sure that none of them came back to AT&T.
Seven years after I started here, the signal is barely any better. My students who have AT&T say that sometimes you can make a call outside, but if you’re in a building, forget it. My boss has an iPhone and has to hold it to the window to get a signal. And we’re not exactly in the boondocks here: there are half a million in our metro area and AT&T is constantly crowing about “the great service.” Few locals are fooled.
Got to wonder whether AT&T made a “do-or-die” ultimatum to Apple. The iPhone is a fine product but AT&T’s constant failure to improve service, and its waffling on unlimited data plans, has to be hurting iPhone sales and service plans. On the other hand, if Apple had ditched AT&T, there’s a good chance the whole company would have gone bankrupt, maybe within days. I have to wonder whether AT&T’s decision to soak iPhone users on data plans was a last-ditch attempt at raising some capital in case Apple decides to move to Verizon or Sprint in 2013. In any case, if I had any AT&T stock, I would sell it, now.
The gap is definitely closing. When I first got my Iphone, nothing any other phone could do even came close to impressing me, and it went that way for years.
Now, I’m looking at my best friend’s swype texting on her droid, and it is making me covet with all my heart and soul.
I am dedicated to Tmobile. I won’t ever leave them, they have been awesome.
… I’m in metro Detroit and my AT&T service is perfectly fine. I had Verizon before AT&T (only been with AT&T for two years) and I get a signal everywhere I did with Verizon.
I’m most excited about being able to use multiple apps at the same time. I live in an area without ATT. I mean no towers, they cut off everyone’s internet usage completely but I’m still thinking about upgrading for two reasons my phone is one of the first gen 8Gb phones so there are a lot of things that I use it for that would still be improved and being able to keep apps open as I move between them.
Are there as many Android apps as there are iPhone apps? Just wondering how the app stores compare.
The last numbers I saw recently said about 50k for Android and 200k for Apple.
200k “sanitized by Apple” apps.
You know T-Mobile has the Nexus One, right? That’s a really good phone. I’ve been digging T-Mobile as well, but with that phone, they weren’t able to cut me a deal to stay and a good friend of mine knows a guy that sells Sprint. He can get me 25% off service, so I may be switching to Sprint.
The sheer quantity of apps is meaningless. It’s the quality that matters.
Sadly, Android doesn’t exactly win on that front either. Many of the apps I’ve used were buggy and/or crash-prone – to the point that I wish I just got a normal, simple feature phone.
On my Droid, very basic things like a T9 dialer won’t work right, my contacts don’t synchronize right and are either ignored on one end or duplicated, Facebook notifications are entirely hit-or-miss, uploaded pictures aren’t rotated right, my freaking keyboard app crashes all the time for no reason, the official camera app won’t update the official gallery app without my intervention, Pandora goes blank and needs to be manually closed with a third-party program once in a while, the official Market thinks I have updates when I don’t and sometimes thinks I don’t have the apps I actually do.
The one killer feature for me was integrated Google Voice support, but even that doesn’t work right. Half the time I try to make an outgoing call, it fails for no reason and wants me to try dialing again. It usually works the second time. Then sometimes incoming text messages and voicemails are delayed by several hours.
Little unpredictable and unforseeable bugs like that have really made me lose trust in my phone as a phone, and I’ve started telling people “Sorry, I was having phone issues” way more often than I’d like to admit.
Is the iPhone any better?
Completely agree. But the # of available apps makes the # of apps that actually don’t suck a bit higher.
This is REALLY good info.
I’ve only used the iPhone. But I can honestly say that most iPhone apps that I’ve downloaded have more or less worked as advertised. That’s not to say that they’re not buggy at times, but I can’t think of even one app that I’ve stopped using because it was too buggy to run. And I’m one to very, very quickly throw out any software that doesn’t work very well.
That said, it’s not like I try out every new app in the app store. But I can say the following:
-
Pandora has never once been buggy for me. At worst, I get bad connectivity. But I live in the middle of nowhere; I can’t blame connectivity problems on apps.
-
Camera has never once not worked. There was one update where I had problems emailing pictures, but that was early on and has never been duplicated.
-
Facebook app always works, although there seems to be a completely random number on the app icon. For example, it’s said “2” for the past 6 weeks. I don’t know what 2 means. But if I open the app, it brings up notifications, status updates, and Facebook messages just fine.
-
Synchronizing works fine, with the exception of one iTunes update where it didn’t want to recognize my phone. Thankfully that went away quickly. Synchronizing is very, very slow, though, as it always wants to backup my iPhone before updating.
-
Have not used Google Voice enough to comment, though I do have (and use) a Google Voice account
-
Skype for iPhone works fine, at least it did, last time I used it, a couple months ago.
-
Games, map apps, email, weather, recipe, general productivity apps, all work great. Very few bugs. No apps that are so buggy that I don’t use.
Overall, I have a lot of trust in my iPhone and iPhone apps. The only issues I have are with connectivity, and (as I said) I live in a very rural area with not-too-great coverage, so I can’t blame that on the phone itself.
Do you have to manually refresh each section to see the latest updates?
Wait, so you have to plug in your phone to the computer to sync it? On Android, everything just happens over-the-air (except music, though there are wifi sync apps available).
Would an iPhone sync and merge my Gmail and Facebook contacts automatically?
Has the Google Voice app been approved? Last I heard, it was rejected from the App Store. On Android, it’s awesome when it works – visual voicemail and no-dial playback along with text transcriptions, free text messaging, outgoing calls from my GV number, and everything synchronized with GV in the cloud so I can respond on my PC too. It’s just not very reliable, unfortunately.
It works on Android too, but not over WiFi. Android also lets you make cheap international VOIP calls through Google Voice, but the call quality leaves much to be desired.
I wish I had the luxury of simply not using certain apps, but the ones I mentioned were all pretty important. Without 'em, there’s not really a reason to have smartphone… which I wish I knew before I started a new contract.
Well, THAT’s one thing I absolutely love about the Droid. It may work haphazardly, but it works haphazardly in way more places than the iPhone can ever dream of!
Can’t wait for the iPhone to get on Verizon.
I’d be interested in recommendations for a Not-Apple Smartphone for someone who doesn’t use Facebook or social networking, if anyone has any…
I have been very happy with my Nokia 5800
Available unlocked on Ebay for about USD$200