iPhone: Slowing Changes ≠ Stagnant water

So I’ve been suspiciously glancing over at this iPhone on my desk for about a week now, waiting for it to do something to annoy me like my Android phone and…nothing.

I gave Android a really good go and like a good hacker I tinkered it to the point of perfection: rooted, tethered, underclocked for battery life, a complete toolkit of apps and utilities. Then it started to show its terminal flaws: Sometimes calendars and contacts wouldn’t sync. Swype was theoretically superior but after a year I still seemed to be “training” it. Scrolling was choppy. SSL mail cert support is shit. After 5 years you still had to run your own equalizer app to have decent bass. When you plugged in headphones it thought you wanted to voice dial someone. Finally, after moving most apps to the SD card due to need for space the use of it burned it out, leaving me with a mostly gimped device.

iPhone sitting quietly, waiting for input and only bothering you with things you want to be bothered by. Photo Credit: Yutaka Tsutano

Like the currents of the ocean, people migrate to and from different devices and as I understand it there is a move towards android due to some apparent stagnation of innovation at Apple.

I’ll agree that Apple has been playing catch-up with a number of services, including the forthcoming turn-by-turn maps, but at the end of the day, changes tend to slow as you reach the best solutions in a given area.

If you’re watching movies and extra inch of screen size doesn’t make a difference but once you turn Avengers off navigating around your phone does; the iPhone is still superior for one-handed navigation with most sized hands.

While the “freedom” to have widgets is nice, I found over time that I turned them all off, one-by-one because they offered no advantages and ultimately made my phone slower. (A few examples include the weather widget which you can add to your iPhone lock screen when jailbroken and photo gallery widget which is more quickly accessed by just going to your damned photos)

As I sit here working I actually feel a little less on-edge since getting the iPhone. I hadn’t realized the overall effect of all of these little daily frustrations, and to be liberated of them is amazing.

Looking ahead, I know the new iPhone is literally right around the corner but I’ve always been annoyed by widescreen devices. Since my 4S will run iOS 6 I feel no buyers remorse in missing out on the new model. Instead, I’m relieved to have something that just gets out of my way and works when I ask it to.