Unfortunately, this was a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence. AT&T helped screw the phone with their shitty network, but even the crap network doesn't excuse the dropped calls, lack of reception in my study, and several minutes the phone could take to get a GPS lock on anything. The phone would sometimes spontaneously get hot and turn itself off. Really nice if you were expecting a call, only to find your phone had been off for a couple of hours.
AT&T have been promising to release the newer version of the OS for the phone for some time too. But they never did.
And at the end of the day the big screen is pointless because if you have it on full brightness the phone is going to die long before you get a chance to watch that movie or do anything else useful with it.
So it was six months of disappointments and poor functionality. Finally I was sitting in a restaurant in Orlando Florida not 20 minutes from all the famous Disney / Universal / Harry Potter stuff and I could not get a signal (at least not one that worked) and I decided it was time to try something else.
When it came down to it, I don't want to lose my AT&T unlimited family plan. It is pretty competitive price wise. So faced with buying another phone on their network, there really was only one choice. The iPhone feels more solid, better built, and looks cooler than anything out there. And reviews told me that the 4S has the best camera of any iPhone yet.
So I broke down, got me an iCloud, paid the $200 penalty for an early upgrade, purchased the sucker warranty from Apple for $90. And presto, I now own an iPhone, while Apple owns me.
I decided to wait a little while to review it because it's easy to have a honeymoon period with new electronic gadgetry and I didn't want to gush about something I was destined to hate.
The phone itself looks and feels much like the iPhone 4 of course, which is no bad thing. And although I've been used to a 4.5 inch display for the past six months, the sharpness and clarity of the display made it an easy transition back to the smaller display, with the added benefit of a phone that is physically nicer and easier to handle.
Here's a summary of the iPhone 4S experience:
What I love
Okay, so Siri is fun. There's something very science fiction about being able to say, "Siri, play me a U2 song." The voice recognition still isn't Star Trek, but it's coming along. This is just about the most impressive AI/Voice recognition that I've ever seen, and my hat is off to Apple for going down this road.
The camera delivers as promised, and in typical Apple fashion, it just works. There is no F Stop, no ISO, no scene, no this, no that. Point the camera and press the button. The camera takes fabulous pictures, despite the lack of user configuration or control. It beats my Samsung Infuse big time, especially in low light.
The new processor is faster and anything I try and do on the phone just zips along nicely.
GPS is super fast and the most accurate of any smart phone I've used. FourSquare is nice and quick, which is great, because I don't want to spend two minutes checking into a location.
What I like
The battery life is pretty good. On a full charge I can do everything I want to all day, and still have plenty left when I get home. I mean battery life being good is a relative thing on a smart phone. Clearly it's not going to last a week, and you are going to have to charge it every night. But it's the best smart phone I've used.
Despite the substandard AT&T network there is some kind of dual antenna in this phone that makes it work better. So I am getting stronger and more reliable signal with this phone than I did with the iPhone 3GS or my Samsung Infuse.
Minor Grumbles
Configuration was pretty easy. Although the usual corporate pissing match made it harder than it should have been to port my music off my Amazon cloud, my ringtones off my old phone, and my contacts off my Google contacts database. In fact when it came to contacts I eventually gave up and simply retyped them all into the iCloud. Then I got a sync app to pull the pictures from Facebook. Again, I believe that if corporations played better together, this process could have been a lot simpler.
Speaking of the iCloud, again I feel like Apple have tried to over simplify it and as a result lost some of what could have been useful functionality.
Facebook has much improved their standard app, but I've still found a few minor bugs that annoy me.
In an effort to over simplify the sync process, I somehow feel like they have made it more complicated in reality. Because I have an iPad 2 for work, iTunes was trying to push apps from that onto my iPhone in a rather annoying way. Fact is, many of my apps for the iPad are work related, and I don't necessarily want them on my iPhone. Similarly, just because I put it on my iPhone doesn't mean I want it transferred to my iPad. And if I download a 4Gb movie on my iPad, I certainly may not need it downloaded again onto my work laptop.
Overall
Until the competition radically improves their product, I've just decided to stay with Apple. The 4S is an incredible phone, and so far it does all I want it to. Sure, some things are very Apple and you just have to accept control in these areas.
I can't say I'd recommend AT&T, they do after all come in bottom every time Consumer Reports does a survey. But I can't in all honesty tell that I'd be any happier with Verizon. It would take me several months comparing them side by side to know that. I travel a lot with my job, so it's not something I'd know right away.
In the end, if you can't beat them join them. I tried to break away, reject the evil corporate BS of Apple, but I wasn't prepared to accept the price I had to pay in terms of lost features and functionality.
I found one of those websites where you can sell your old phone, and in theory sold the Samsung for more than I bought it for. I'll wait until the money is in the bank before I let you know if that service worked right.
As for the iPhone 5. Now that I am back drinking the Apple Kool-Aid, I'll probably just buy it when it comes out. I mean sure, it will probably cost me the best part of $500, because I am not eligible for a cheap upgrade until 2013. But so what. I understand the business model, and I get that these modern smart phones are worth more than they sell them for with the contract. Just don't expect me to camp out on the day of release. Apple may own me, but I still have some dignity.
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