I have an iPhone – Part 1

I’ve owned many phoned over the years and for the past 6 or 7 years I’ve owned nothing but Android based phones. Android has suited my purpose very well. It’s flexible and very customization (features that I desire) and I have a lot of options to chose from. Sadly though I’ve powered down my Pixel 3 (It’s in my bag hidden away) and powered up a job issued iPhone XS.

I’ve been on the Apple hate bandwagon for so long I’m struggling to give it a non-bias opinion. I understand that people are drawn in by design aesthetics and wow factors, most marking (Apple does a wonderful job of marking) is designed to get you to buy the hardware and get you hooked to their ecosystem (the services provided that is typically tied to the hardware you’ve purchased). This is good and bad a couple of reasons, yes it’s nice to have an all-inclusive environment that served most of your needs with minimal setup, but the problem is, it’s next to impossible to leave that ecosystem or share and collaborate outside it. Personal I host my own cloud based file server and I sync my files, contacts, calendar and pictures to and from it so that I’m not so dependent on any particular ecosystem. I do though have a few dependencies I’ll cover in my list below.

I’m not ready to give up on my Pixel!

Pros:

1. Face unlock works well and clearly Google seems to think this is the way to go, adding it to the Pixel 4.
2. Granular controls for what notifications are displayed is great.
3. The user interface is simple and easy to get use to.
4. The pulsating vibrating feature is nice.

Cons:

1. I have to repurchase applications I’ve already purchased from Google.
2. Siri is ok, but it’s no match for Google Assistant.
3. I cannot add my bank card to Apple Pay for some reason!
4. Google Voice (I know, I’m hooked on a Google product) is not well integrated.
5. I struggled to try to get my old Apple ID, so I was forced to create a new one.

Stay tuned for my followup…

Written by Charles.D.