iPhone 5 reactions

In My Humble Opinion
121

I think you’re right - in terms of what is possible and may be expected in the handheld phone format, there isn’t a lot of ‘wow’ left to be had by anyone.

I realise that’s the sort of statement that may make me look silly in hindsight, so to expand:

Greatly improved battery life would still help, even more durable construction would be good, but it would still be a smartphone.

More intelligent interaction with the user and smarter integration with the user’s life is possible, but that’s just apps and OS.

So what’s left? Flexible screens? Brain interfaces? Those would make it a fundamentally different device.

122

Battery life isn’t going anywhere until there is a major breakthrough in battery tech. The battery in my phone is as big as it can be without making the phone larger, and the battery in my iPad consumes something like 60-70% of the interior space.

Which on the other end of it, given increasing power consumption (4G, I’m looking at you) means battery life is never as good as people demand.

123

Exactly.

Apple makes great products. Those products look good, are ergonomically pleasant, and work well. But too many Apple users, either through ignorance or wishful thinking, assume that no other products come close to matching them. Claiming that no Android phone works"reliably and simply" is nothing but bald-faced ignorance, and reminds me of Mac users who constantly rag on Windows with criticisms that haven’t been valid since the release of XP.

If you like your Apple products, that’s great. They’re excellent products. My wife loves her Macbook Air. The iPhone 5 looks like an fantastic phone. But you don’t need to misrepresent the competition in order to make yourself feel better.

124

I am a professional cell phone technician. I’m not parroting Apple anything. iPhones are much easier to use and have many, many fewer headaches. I apologize I can’t cite anything since bug tracking is proprietary information to my company, but I’ve never had to use the phrase, “I’m sorry, we’re aware that this feature does not work consistently / reliably / intuitively on the iPhone.” There’s many features on many flagship Android phones with significant issues. This even includes Nexus devices, although much less so.

125

Such as?

The only technical feature I’ve had not work consistently and reliably on my android devices is my 1st gen Asus Transformer will unmount the microSD card seemingly at random. Which is annoying, and I’m 100% certain no iOS user has had that happen to them, but I’m not about to chalk that up as advantage Apple. :wink:

So what sorts of features are you talking about?

126

Missed the edit window:

This includes issues with phones that will lose service for minutes to hours at a time, frequent dropped calls, failed SMS delivery, intermittent SMS delivery to the wrong recipient, individual innocuous apps that will cause major system freezing, failure to alert for incoming calls. I could go on.

This isn’t to say Android is awful. I willingly, knowingly used Android devices for years. But if you don’t think that iPhones are much easier to use and less prone to errors, you’re burying your head in the sand. Android devices have issues; some are caused by carrier / manufacturer tinkering, some come from the OS itself. All require patience and tech know-how to overcome.

127

Rogue apps fucking everything up sometimes I’ll buy, but the rest of what you’re describing is major deficiencies in the radio firmware and phone and sms system apps. Colour me skeptical that these reception and telephony issues are actually phone OS related in any regard.

And if they are, I’m sure that major deficiencies in such basic functionality would be well-documented in technical literature. Perhaps you could point me in the right direction to review such literature?

128

I’m not talking about “android OS” vs. “other parts of the phone.”

The products the consumer buys have these problems. When we, as a large carrier, contact the manufacturers about them, we are told, “these are known issues; they may be addressed in further software updates.”

You cannot defend Android as a product by saying, “XDA devs probably has a ROM that will correct the issues if you’re willing to void the warranty and waive carrier technical support.”

129

I’m not. I mean, I’m happy to fix my own phone that way if need be, but I absolutely don’t think that the presence of a howto on xda means there isn’t a problem. The presence of a howto on xda probably means there is a problem. For the devices I have, I’ve never seen a howto on xda for how to fix significant problems with basic functionality like telephony or sms. Granted, I don’t read the sections on xda for devices I don’t have, so maybe some Android phones really do suck as phones.

Look, you’re alleging that “many features on many flagship Android phones” have significant issues, and when asked what features these are you indicate lack of reception, dropped calls, and broken SMS. Perhaps you can point me to some evidence of this, instead of just using your post as your cite? Because I’m just completely unaware of complaints that Android phones suck at basic telephony and SMS, and you’re now also alleging that manufacturers know their phones have broken SMS but don’t care?

Something doesn’t add up here.

130

As mentioned, any information I have access to is corporate proprietary; anything I could would be an instant termination and possible personal lawsuit.

The problems I’m mentioning aren’t universal, mostly. Many users will never experience them. But they’re not infrequent, either. Many of them are pretty reproducible. An example I can give is that numerous Motorola flagship models had a bug in which the keyboard would begin crashing any time the spacebar was used. I have no idea what percentage of users this affected, but I fielded a call or two about it almost daily for months. My company has at least one or two thousand reps in my same role. So I’d wager we probably fielded, conservatively, at least ten thousand calls about this same issue.

131

I haven’t heard of basic problems on high-end Android phones either and have certainly not experienced them. In fact it’s probably the iPhone which has had reception problems till recently. At my workplace I have a colleague with an iPhone 4 and his reception is clearly worse than mine.

And actually the iPhone was never “head-and-shoulders” above other smartphones. When it first launched, it had a spiffy touch interface but lacked a large number of important features which were common on other high-end phones: GPS, 3G, video-camera etc. By around 2010 the iPhone caught up with those other phones on hardware but by that time Android phones had caught up with the touch UI and had a rapidly growing app ecosystem. Certainly phones like the HTC Incredible in 2010 were at least as good as the iPhone.

IMO the first smartphone with a truly satisfying experience was the Galaxy S2 in 2011. Great all-round hardware, a responsive touch experience, a more powerful UI than iOS and a bigger screen for browsing, gaming, viewing videos. At that point the 3.5 inch screen on the iPhone just felt cramped and unsatisfying, and the wall of icons UI was increasingly stale.

132

The iPhone 1 was lousy, underspecced, and only interesting due to the good web browser (much, much more usable than any competition at the time). Totally with you there.

Every release since then has been well above the competition if you look holistically at the UI, app support, actual performance, and physical design.

There’s been good Android phones, and the Galaxy S2 was pretty solid, but I’d be really, really hard-pressed to call the S2 and the 4S equals unless screen size is a major factor for you.

I say this not as a fan of Apple; I’ve never owned an iPhone and have no plans to. I’ve used numerous Windows phones (both WP7 and WM) and Androids, personally. But working with these devices eight hours a day professionally and probably a couple more a day personally, I do have a little bit of awareness of what I’m talking about.

Android phones can be very, very good. They have lots of advantages. Ease of use and bug-free performance? Not their strength.

133

Honestly ease of use is not something I associate with iOS. The UI is so limited that a lot of stuff that is easy and useful on Android is barely possible in iOS. For example one of the most useful widgets I have is my calendar, right on my main page where I can scroll up and down without having to enter the app.

Or take for example uploading a photo to Dropbox from the photo gallery. I just long-press, pick share, dropbox and upload. Is this even possible on the iPhone? I bet you have to go into the Dropbox app to upload stuff, right?

I am not a fan of the ergonomics of the iPhone 4/4S either. It's feels like a box of cards and the back feels slippery. Phones like the GS2 feel much better in the hands. And screen size matters a lot as implicitly admitted by Apple when they moved to 4 inches. 80% of what I do on a smartphone including reading, maps, games and videos is much better on a larger screen. I really wouldn't want a screen less than 4.5 inches and IMO 3.5 inches is a really poor size for a high-end smartphone.
134

Sounds like you could just as well be describing “antennagate”, or the iOS5 battery bug, here.

I think it’s certainly fair to say Apple pays great attention to detail, but it’s a bit unfair to suggest that they always “just work”. They work, except when they don’t, like any other flagship Android device. We can cherry pick bugs and issues from any OEM (and I could point out a number of them for Android which were lower profile), but Apple certainly has their share.

Credit to Apple for smashing some of those bugs, by the way, whereas the carriers have too much influence on Android (which is my bigger concern; not so much that bugs exist, but how they are addressed).

135

I have the Samsung Galaxy S III which is the phone that was making Apple poop its drawers. I’m not seeing much in the Apple iPhone 5 specs that make it a compelling buy over phone that was introduced 3 months ago. The Android OS has been flawless for me so far. The Galaxy S III is a marvel of engineering and made the 4S look like a goat cart compared to a starship.

My daughter is comparing the Galaxy S III to the iPhone 5 re purchase. She may go with the iPhone because she has an iPod touch she likes, but she also likes Galaxy as a superior piece of engineering.

136

No, this is exactly what I’m saying is incorrect. Every phone has issues, iPhones included. That doesn’t make everything the same.

As somebody who works all day with cell phone issues, I can really, really vouch for the fact that iPhones have fewer. They work more reliably. Nothing’s perfect, and iPhones DO have some headaches (above and beyond what you’ve mentioned, even). But, as a consumer product, the reproducible, common, major errors really are fewer.

This shouldn’t be shocking or suprising. Apple is the biggest player in the industry. They invest more resources than any other company into their product. They control their product end-to-end, and individually vet add-ons.

If iPhones weren’t more reliable, that would be crazy.

137

Still not enough room for all my music. Still no interest in a smartphone.

138

Go to Google. Type “the process com”. Do those happen with the iPhone?

139

I applaud Apple’s design practices, and I trust that they are making the right desicions. I eagerly await my iPhone 5. In the meantime, I would like to deffend some criticisms about the design, as they pretain to my own thoughts as a design-oriented thinker.

Screen size
Apple doesn’t care so much about the size of the screen as they do about the distance your thumb can stretch when holding it in your hand. The iPhone 5 has more screen real estate, but it doesn’t come at the expense of ANYTHING. Making the screen any bigger means the user can’t hit the upper corners with their thumb any more.

No NFC
Before Apple adds this feature, it needs to be useful. I’ve never heard anyone talking about this feature in the real world. I agree that it will be like QR codes. They are everywhere, but no one uses them. Most people don’t even know what they are. As for the things NFC can be used for, I like this quote from a ArsTechnica comment: “it’s not even clear NFC is the best way of doing those things. Bluetooth, wifi-direct, and even just IP will provide a lot of the same functionality.”

Not enough of an upgrade
Compared to the iPhone 4s, no the iPhone 5 is not a significant improvement. But compared to the iPhone 4, it is worth the cost of a contract upgrade. Compared to the iPhone 3GS, (which is still a strong selling phone, despite it being 3 and a half years old) it is a huge upgrade. Most people don’t replace their phones every time a shiny new one appears. Most people upgrade when their contract is up, or maybe a year or two after that.

Lacking in specs compared to other phones
Judging by this link, the iPhone 5 offers a trade off of screen size verses physical size, and is otherwise identcal to the rest of the bleeding edge phones. Also, the A6 chip is a custom, in-house design, not just an off-the-self ARM chip packed into a SoC, like the A4 and A5. What other phone maker is making the phone, software, and CPU all together?

The iPhone’s design is too boxxy
A Year ago, I agreed with this. The sharp boxy edges kept me away from the iPhone 4 and 4s. Until, that is, I actually held one in my hand, beside my curvy 3GS. I thought my hand would grip the more ergonomic back of the iPhone 3G/S design more easily, but infact, the edges of the newer design provided a nicer feel. I wonder how many people complain about this particular design aspect that have never held one in their hand and put it through its paces? I almost purchased an iPhone 4s that day. I held out for the 5’s inevitable launch.

Thats about it. One last thing, I have nothing bad to say about android, except that saying that Android is beating Apple because of its higher market share is foolish. First, there is room for more than one platform. Second, how much of that market share is taken up by crap-ware encrusted, entry level, “free with contract” POS android phones, versus the higher end models that are actually good? Third, it doesn’t matter anyway, because everyone should buy what they prefer. I’ll be thrilled with my iPhone 5, and I hope you Android users enjoy whatever new things you get next too.

140

Not all yet, but a lot of major cities. It’ll grow with time, I’m sure. It also loads in patches as you scroll, and before the area fills in, the base grid displays the topographic rise and fall of the landscape. No big whoop, just thought it looked neat.