nick peelman

A day with the iPhone 4S…

So its been just over 12 hours since UPS dropped off my iPhone 4S.

It took roughly 2.5 hours to activate, since AT&T dropped the ball on having enough resources to handle the massive slamming of their activation servers. The experience so far has been phenomenal.

Compared to my iPad, everything is snappier, animations are smoother, and its just overall a much more satisfying experience. That’s saying a lot, because I love my iPad.

Compared to my Blackberry, there really is no comparison. I loved my Bold 9700, and I’m still going to miss aspects of it considerably. Most notably the battery life, keyboard, and holster. The battery life I’m almost willing to trade off, just because of how much more usable the iPhone is, but time will tell. I’m just going to have to get into the habit of never passing up the chance to charge it.

iCloud has worked beautifully thus far. Once everything synced down, I have been updating contacts and calendar events, etc., on three devices (Mac, iPad, and iPhone), and everything has been keeping up wonderfully.

Seymour is currently stuck with EDGE service, so once you get away from Wifi here the experience falls away pretty quickly.  That was one other advantage of RIM’s hardware, was it was much more adept at dealing with slow networks, thanks to RIM’s constant tweaking of things up there in Canada before final delivery to the device. The theory is that we’ll see this whole region/area upgraded and bumped directly to 4G. That move should also enable 3G HSPA+ for us here, so here’s hoping AT&T gets their head out before too long.

I had ordered an OtterBox Impact case for it last week, which has proven to be an attractive and protective addition. We’ll see how well it goes, I’ll be experimenting with carry methods and cases for a while from the look of things. Its hard giving up carrying a phone on your hip when you’ve been doing it for a decade.

Siri is truly something out of science fiction. There is much work to be done with advancing the technology; improving its resistance to outside noise, its “learning” ability, and the ability to more easily correct misinterpreted phrases or words. But even with those issues, it is still an amazing feat of engineering. And with sites like ShitSiriSays, it is quite amusing as well.

One issue that i do expect to be remedied in the near future is WiFi syncing. Currently, it isn’t working for the iPhone, but works peachy on my iPad. These first few days (or even weeks) i don’t mind the extra cabling effort for the phone anyway, so its not a huge deal. I’m really looking forward to it though, not only because I’m lazy and don’t want to mess with cables, but also because of the autonomy it brings to the iPhone. Playlist updates, new music, play counts, podcasts, etc., all happen automatically, the only thing i have to do is dock my phone once or twice a day.

Thus far I’m happy with the switch. I’m glad I waited until now though, as there are several features that just arrived with iOS 5 that I’m certain I would have been unhappy without.

Once I get some more use of it, and give it a fairer shake, I’m going to revisit my thoughts on the battery life, keyboard, and holster, and post some updated ramblings.

why i’m switching…

A lot of people who know me personally showed surprise when I would tell them that I was switching from my beloved Blackberry to an iPhone. They wondered what drove me over the edge, having previously railed against the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, and its perceived inability to compete with a Blackberry in terms of PIM (personal information management) and email. I “proved” this concept, to myself at least, in 2008 by buying an iPod Touch. In addition to not being able to type on the keyboard, the usability wasn’t there for my geeky self. The lack of context menus was just as disorienting as when I first used OS X years ago, being saddled with a one-button mouse and ignorant of the Control button’s ability to simulate a secondary click.

Flash to today. RIM is floundering; they release awesome hardware, but pair it with a subpar operating system. Despite being the only other vertically integrated phone maker out there, RIM has repeatedly showed ineptitude at delivering a good experience. My Bold 9700 has worked beautifully, 90% of the time; I might even go as far as 95%. But in that 5-10% that remains is the ballgame. Upgrades, as infrequent as they may have been, were a series of painful, drawn out, frustrating experiences. The camera app was so slow it was painful to use. The web browser, while steadily improved, is slow, clunky, and still hates most web sites. Apps like Evernote, Dropbox, etc., all end up proving frustrating to use; I don’t blame them, they have a crappy underlying platform they are dealing with. The overall slowness of BBOS, groaning under its own overhead and bulk, even on peppy hardware. The lack of decent desktop software (it took RIM roughly 2 years to get a version of BDM for Macs that supported 64-bit kernels).

In the end, it comes down to the fact that iOS has matured greatly over 4 years, and with the latest round of hardware and software, it has finally evolved into a device that can take the place of my Blackberry, even though it will never be able to replace my Blackberry. Add in the fact that I see little to no future in RIM devices, at least not with the track they’re on currently.