Six months with an iPhone 6, am I satisfied with my phone?

This is a sign that I am getting old and I feel that the part of me that loved customizing and optimizing the phone is dying a tragic death. How on Earth would I be able to use iPhone for 6 months and still be happy to continue using it for another year or two atleast? Or is it something else? As a matter of fact, it is! Apple’s iOS and iPhone is very very good at some and average at best at few. Where it excels is exactly what I was looking for when I was in search for a new phone last summer. Let me start with the bad part!

iOS is not ‘perfect’. Like every other smartphone OS, this one has bugs and niggling issues. Every now and then, Wi-Fi connection drops and out of the blue, the phone will be connecting to LTE or 3G. Unknowingly, I used to 200+ MB of cellular data, twice. Once, it was while on a Hangouts call and the other time was while uploading some photos to Flickr. Another issue is that I will not be able to cut the call and the only way to do that is to turn off the display and turn it back on and the call automatically drops. Onscreen Keyboards like SwiftKey are good but they are sometimes unresponsive and sometimes buggy. Sometimes, the keyboard space does not show any keys and it stays blank.

Battery backup while using iOS 9 beta was amazing. I used to get 6am to 10pm battery life but the battery backup since shifting to final release of iOS 9 is nowhere close to that. Apple could have increased the phone’s thickness by 3mm to 4mm to provide much better battery life. The bright side though is that the battery life of my previous phone, Android running Xiaomi Mi3 was not spectacular either. Neither is the battery life on my wife’s Microsoft Lumia 640. Now, the worst part with this phone is how slippery the phone is. The aluminum build gives premium look and feel but the phone tends to be very very slippery. And I am in constant fear when I am on the road. That shiny Apple logo is an invitation for robbers while I am on the road. When I used phones like Mi3, I used to have a ‘who is going to steal this’ while am outside but now, be it pure paranoia, I take extra care to keep my phone secure.

I did miss the Android’s launchers and widgets etc but then I gave in to the smoothness and ‘relative’ ease of use, application quality etc. And anyways, I rarely used widgets when I was using android due to their vampiric hold on battery juice. As of today, no other OS can match the smoothness of applications and UI on iOS and Windows Phone. If WP had closed the app-gap, I would’ve gladly went the Lumia 950 way but the gap is going to stay for at least another year. Saying that iOS applications are way better would be an over exaggeration. Yes, the applications behave better on iOS while on Android, apps talk to each other in a less restricted manner. I rarely see a half baked application on iOS and I did see quite a few (mostly those that are ported from iOS) on Android.

If I make a list of most used or top applications on iOS and on Android, the difference is barely there. So, where does the difference lie? Updates? I don’t think so! I have noticed many saying that most developers concentrate first on updating iOS apps, that new applications are first launched on iOS and then on Android and if there is time to developer another variant, it goes to Windows Phone. While Windows Phone part is mostly true, I have checked the app updates that I have received on my iPhone with the same on Android and it was the other way. I did notice that these applications are usually updated for Android a day or two before the same was pushed for iOS. Frankly speaking, there is not much different in application area. Google Now will work even when off line but Siri wouldn’t even open an application or dial a contact if the Internet connection is off or unavailable.
In short, when it comes to how an OS works, how apps work and how updates are pushed for ‘applications’, there is no clear winner here. iOS is very easy to use, Android is highly customizable! iOS apps are extra bit more refined while Android apps have better inter-operability. Siri is fun when Internet is on but Google Now works better.
So, why did I buy an iPhone? What is the reason that I will or may stick to iOS? It is time to move to the ‘good’ part.
I was using iOS 9.1 earlier on my iPhone and there were some issues with Wi-Fi connectivity, phone calls and on screen keyboard. When I checked Apple’s beta pages, there was a public beta for 9.2 and I went ahead and installed the same. Before installing a beta ROM, I thought that I have to reinstall all applications, configure each application but thanks to the iTunes backup and restore functionality, I got all the apps and the data restored. It did take more than an hour for this process but hey, it is way way better than doing it application by application, setting by setting. Also, all the messages, photos, phone call logs were restored, thanks to iCloud backup. There are tools that can perform the same in Android and I did use these tools but those are not as refined and clean as this ‘built-in’ process.
My biggest gripe about Android was the way the updates are pushed. My Xiaomi Mi3 is still on KitKat, a two year old version of Android (lets not go to rooting and installing a custom ROM, that’s a different story altogether). Now, with iOS, I can either install the latest public release of update or I can go one step further and install the beta version of upcoming update. As of now, I am using iOS 9.2 public beta 4. It does have its own share of niggles but at the end of the day, the most irritating bugs are gone.
Earlier, when I tried to manage music from my local hard drive on iTunes, it was a painful experience. The songs from the same album are divided into two or more albums of same name, sorting was a headache. When Apple announced Apple Music subscription service, I hopped on immediately and after using this for few weeks, I had decided to replace my entire music collection (90% of it being old and never listened to) with music from the subscription service. The catalogue of Apple Music is small but given how detached I was with music for past few months, the catalog was good enough for me. The process is seamless. Add music to my collection and start streaming the same or I can download the songs for offline playback.

Given the amount I am paying per month for this, I ended up saving a lot of money. When it comes to quality, this is definitely better than the services like Saavn, Wync (not in terms of quantity). Another area where iTunes is really useful is ‘application download’. Once I paired my iPhone to iTunes, all the applications that I had installed on phone were downloaded to my computer. I can also download applications to my computer and then sync the same to my phone. This feature helps a lot if you want to do a factory reset on your phone. Another way this helps is when I purchase a second phone. I do not have to download everything again. Add my Apple account on the second phone and I can sync all these apps or ‘select’ apps without much effort. Given how often I do these things, it has been a boon. I can also arrange home screens from iTunes but it is easier to do the same from the phone.
Thanks to El Capitan, I can now take phone calls from my PC (need to have a microphone), continue browsing session from phone to computer or vice-versa. In reality, I rarely do this but I may increase the usage a lot more. One reason is that the mobile phone network quality had degraded a lot and if I move into my ‘home office’, the network drops completely. With this feature, I can leave my phone in living room (where network is good) and I can take the call from work area while I am using my computer. There are some applications that provide this feature on Android too but cannot match the ease that a ‘built-in’ and ‘native’ feature provides.
Two months after buying the iPhone, I noticed chipping on back panel (not visible unless you look for it) even though I was using a protective case. I was not sure if I can approach Apple Support to get this fixed and given how ‘in general’ the service is for devices in India (for all the brands), I thought that I may have to live with this. With nothing else to do on a weekend, I decided to show the phone to customer care. I went to Apple care and after few hours, walked out with a brand new replacement device. How about that! I had nightmarish support w.r.t Nokia, Samsung. Xiaomi was better at support and service but this was stellar! Apple has a policy that however minor the issue is, if a part of the phone has to be replaced, they give you a new phone. Even if the part to be replaced is the power button or volume rocker.

Now! Will I stay Apple customer for live? I may, I may not! Things change at a rapid pace in mobile computing. There are few things that other brands must learn from Apple. Apple’s iPhone works well where it matters the most! It does not try to overwhelm you with gimmicky features and lag-inducing background processes. This phone does not come with explosively fast chip, the display does not generate millions of pixels, the camera is not about xyz megapixels. Yet, every aspect of software and hardware is so closely knit and well refined that I never ever felt the need to have a 2K or FullHD resolution display or a quad/octa core chip or gigabytes of RAM! An iPhone costs a bomb but when the OS is so refined, when I am getting updates, when I can forget about closing apps every now and then, when support is top notch, why not pay extra and be happy for 2-3 years then changing the phone every year of once every 18 months. Younger myself would’ve contradicted everything I said here. That was the time when I loved customization, loved installed different types of ROMs, overclocking or downclocking CPU and GPU and what not! What I needed was a phone that works ‘out of the box’ and the last six months using iPhone justifies that I made the right choice by ditching Android and going the iOS way.

I am a big fan of Android because this is the operating system that brought in the smart revolution. Without Android, smartphones would have stayed as ‘thing of elite’. If I am asked to vote for ‘Best smartphone OS’, I would vote for Android. If I am asked to vote for phone with best hardware, I would vote for Samsung Galaxy Note 5. But if you ask me what device I would pick for own use, I would pick an iPhone.