David Ancell / Saturday, July 02, 2011 / Comments(0)
As Cnet commemorated the fourth anniversary of the iPhone, I bought one. Cnet reminded me why I didn’t want an iPhone when it first came out. It was hideously expensive even with a contract, and it wasn’t 3G. At the time, I didn’t want something that was all touch screen. Having the iPod and my cell phone together just meant that the device would be guzzling batteries. It just didn’t seem worth it to me. Besides, I had Pocket Quicken on my Treo, and I didn’t want to give it up.
Fast forward to 2010. I bought a Motorola Droid (and reviewed it here and here). As you can see from my reviews, I was quite impressed with it. The iPhone wasn’t available for Verizon, and I still wasn’t that interested anyway. As for Pocket Quicken, in what I would consider to be one of the worst software decisions ever, Intuit terminated Landware’s license for Pocket Quicken. I have since switched to iBank on my Mac. I was ready for a more modern smartphone.
So, why did I switch to the iPhone? The first reason is that the performance of my Droid has deteriorated as I have updated it. It has slowed to a crawl. The sales rep at Verizon said that this was happening to a lot of Android phones that were sold in the last year. Some features that I really liked have been taken away with updates to the operating system. For example, I have a Vonage phone that e-mails me my voice mail. I used to be able to open the voice mails within the e-mail program, but now I can’t. On the iPhone, however, I can. The e-mail program started giving me notifications of new e-mails when there were none. That got old!
The iPhone just seems to work so much better. It is fast and responsive, and even the touch screen responds better. I’m much better with a touch screen than I used to be, so I don’t mind not having a physical keyboard. The apps that I have tried in both flavors seem to be much better on iPhone. Facebook allows me to see who “likes” a given status. The barcode reader app seems to have less trouble reading the bar codes. I’m having a lot of fun with this.
Category: Technology