Not too long ago, I wrote a bit on life with an iPhone 3G. Since then, Apple has revised the platform a few times, and I'verecently upgraded to the iPhone 4S. This makes now as good a time as any to revisit the points in my earlier post to see what has changed:
- Touch Screen - The Apple touch screen is about as good as it gets. The size is a good balance between utility and portability, the hardware is well executed, and the software is very, very fluid. That said, there's still the problem that touch screens eliminate the tactile feedback you get from physical buttons. It's harder to use the phone when your eyes aren't visually focused on the display. This limitation is innate to touch screens, but it's still annoying.
- 'Ambient Information' - iOS 5 handles notifications much more nicely than in earlier versions of iOS. However, the homescreen is still largely dead to ambient information. The only two exceptions are the numeric badges attached to icons and the calendar icon (which displays the current date). The clock icon is wrong, the weather is wrong, and the map is wrong. My hunch is that this is partially to save on battery life, but given that the iPod nano can keep an analog clock icon current, some of this limitation seems gratuitous.
- Inconvenient Portrait/Landscape Switching - Fixed with a nice lock facility in the task switcher. (Although I rarely use the lock, so maybe it wasn't a big problem after all.)
- Multiple e-Mail boxes - Fixed in iOS 4 with the unified mailbox view.
- Large e-mails - I'm not honestly sure if this has been fixed, or if I just get fewer large e-mails, but I haven't noticed this nearly as much.
- Latency - The iPhone 4S is almost completely beyond reproach. (The latency on my old 3G got terrible, with the upgrade to iOS 4.0, and the subseuent patches did nothing to correct it.)
- App Store Rejections - There seems to have been less public drama lately around App Store rejections and policy changes. However, I'm suspecting it's mainly because Apple has given a little and developers have come to grudgingly accept the limitations that Apple still imposes.
- App Store - It's grown to 500,000 (!) applications, but Apple still controls the horizontal and the vertical. Because they control the way applications are displayed, they have a huge degree of control over the exposure their ISV's get and the revenues those ISV's earn.
- Keyboard - After over three years, it's still tedious and error-prone. It works, but just. What's changed in my thinking over the last couple years is that I no longer care. For me, the iPhone is almost entirely about content consumption, and the keyboard doesn't really matter that much.
- Industrial Design - I still love the way the phone looks and feels. What's different for me is that I no longer bother with the add on case.
A couple years ago, this is where I said I wouldn't switch away from an iPhone. I recently replaced one iPhone with another, so for me, this is still mostly true; The iPhone has evolved nicely over the years, and it still fits my needs better than the alternatives. However, two things have changed in the last few years. The first is that there's now a reasonable competitor. Unlike then, the alternative to iOS isn't Windows Mobile 6.5... the modern alternative, Android, has a touch screen, a modern web browser, and a fully stocked app store. Unless Apple sues Android into submission, it has lost these things as competitive differentiators.
The second thing that's changed for me in the last couple years is more personal. As much as I like the iPhone, I can't shake the feeling that it isn't a net improvement to my overall standard of living. Amy Breesman said it well when she was recently quoted in an NPR Story: " I would almost say it's, like, a negative effect that it's had on my life. It's just kind of this rabbit hole that you're always going down.". Maybe I'd miss it more if it were gone, but I can't shake the feeling that the time spent on the phone would be better spent elsewhere. Then again, I wouldn't have known about that NPR quotation, unless I had heard it on the NPR app in my phone.