If you haven’t read why, here’s an explanation why I recently bought a new iPhone. Having spent about a week with it, here are my quick updates on the whole package:
- For a company that prides itself in top-notch quality, I have seen quite a few spontaneous reboots on my phone. This will most likely be fixed soon, and for that I will be thankful as compared to Windows Phone updates, but the fact that there are some pretty severe crashes tells me something’s not right somewhere.
- I am still getting used to the Notification Center. I like it a lot but I am trying to optimize the use of it. Together with some apps that can provide their own notification sounds (like WhatsApp does), I feel one of my bigger complaints with Windows Phone is addressed nicely. Toasts (“banners” in iOS) could be captured in Notification Center so I can always go back and look at what I may have missed. One issue though, some notifications from Facebook app do not get registered in the Notification Center but some others do. I suspect it is a Facebook bug, but it doesn’t do away with the problem I have.
- I am glad I am finally able to connect to my work WiFi
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- I am loving TouchID to unlock my phone and to make new purchases. However, it seems like restoring apps previously bought using iTunes password don’t work with TouchID so that is annoying.
- I am taking a lot of slo-mo videos although that could be only because it is a novelty. However, the huge downside there is that when I share the video via WhatsApp or upload it to SkyDrive, it does not maintain the slo-mo. That’s a bummer. I wonder what is the reason, but in the end, I am left wondering how I can easily share with non-iPhone friends and family.
As for my fears of missing key functionality as I move from Windows Phone:
- People Hub: Yes, absolutely miss it. My current workaround? Create a private twitter list with all those who I had pinned to my Start Screen, and separately, mark as “Close Friends” in Facebook all whom I had pinned to Start Screen. With Close Friends, I get notification for every post they make, which is somewhat of a compromise to achieve what I could so easily achieve with People Hub.
- Haven’t missed secondary tiles or camera yet, but have sorely missed the auto-upload of photos AND videos as well as wireless sync/download of photos and videos off the phone to PC. I cannot believe there is no elegant (read: native) solution to offload photos and videos from phone to PC. I know there is PhotoStream that sends photos to the cloud, but it doesn’t send videos. Also, there is iTunes Wi-Fi syncing, but it is only one-way from the PC to the phone. I tried Dropbox, Loom and Amazon Cloud Photos but none are as hands-free/worry-free as Windows Phone’s native auto-upload and wireless sync features. I really, really hope PhotoStream gets video support soon, even if it needs to detect Wi-Fi so it does not take away valuable cellular broadband bandwidth. More importantly, I cannot wait for wireless sync to PC so I don’t have to remember to connect my phone to the PC every now and then.
I will try to update more as I have more solid thoughts/feedback about my experience.
Filed under: Personal, Tech
