Apple Own Me

Back in June I wrote about my break with Apple bondage.  After dealing with a bunch of bullshit with Apple and AT&T I decided to try the Android option and purchased a Samsung Infuse 4G which I have been using up until the beginning of December.

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.

iPhone Bondage

For the last few years I have silently accepted the control of my dark overlords at Apple in their evil union with AT&T.  Their draconian rules, contracts, and crappy customer service and network was kind of worth it to have a state of the art phone, that made other phones turn green with envy.  But the latest generation of Android mobile phones have finally allowed me to escape the evil clutches of Apple once and for all, and I tell you, I ain't never going back in there.

I think the iPhone story in the US is an almost perfect example of what happens when two corporations get together in an environment where consumer protection laws are weak and hardly enforced.  Two year contracts, penalty fees, a lack of choice, price fixing, DRM and even complete control over the software you are allowed to buy or download onto your phone.  Being told I couldn't have insurance, being told if anything went wrong I had to drive out of my way to find an Apple store.  My list of grievances was growing longer by the week.  And then there is always the carrot Apple dangles as rumors spread of their next great innovation. 

Early this month I decided to make the change.  My iPhone 3GS was not retaining charge as long as it should, and I was getting sick of having such a crappy camera on the phone.  My first plan was to simply buy an iPhone 4, but according to the rules I was a few weeks too early so I was to be charged $250 penalty for the early upgrade, and that simply wasn't going to happen.  I thought about going to Verizon, but you're still shackled to all the Apple rules and policies, and don't have simultaneous voice and data.  I put in an application to AT&T customer service for special permission for an early upgrade, but after a few days of deliberation my application was rejected; and I was sentenced to a flogging in the village square for my impertinence.  Okay, so that last bit isn't true, but they did tell me to take a hike.

Now in fairness to AT&T, they did give me permission to early upgrade to any non-Apple product, and to sweeten the deal they reduced by bill by $10 a month, gave me unlimited free texting, on top of my unlimited data plan.  On that basis I started to research the Android phones they carry.

When I took a look at the latest offerings and was pretty impressed with the massive AMOLED screen on the Infuse 4G, and upon more research decided I could probably live with it fairly well given that pretty much every application I used on the iPhone is available on the Android where most apps seem cheaper or free.

Escaping Apple

Escaping the clutches of Apple isn't that easy, especially if you've been a good little minion and have been purchasing all your music from iTunes with that nasty DRM (copy protection) on the music, but thankfully I had long since stopped doing that, and all my recent music purchases have been from Amazon, who use a standard MP3 file format that is completely portable.

My iPhone had somehow confused itself with my contacts, and had taken to duplicating some or all of them when I synced it, and even the application I had purchased to fix the problem had not really cleaned up my contacts properly.  So when I purchased my Samsung Infuse 4G, the AT&T staff were not able to copy the data off my SIM card.  This proved to be a minor annoyance, but an hour getting my Gmail contact list back in line proved to be all that was necessary to ensure my contacts list was up to date and on my phone.

I have recently started using the excellent Amazon cloud to store my music so pretty much all my music off my computer and iPhone was already on the cloud.  There is an Android App that allows you to play your cloud music right off the phone, but so that you can still listen to the music on a plane the same app will sync the cloud to your phone in the background so the music exists locally as well as remotely.

As to the phone itself, I can see now why iPhone rose to greatness so quickly.  It is unspeakably simple to use, Apple realized that the key to success was not simply making a kick ass phone, they had to make it simple and intuitive, and in fairness, they achieved that.  But like anything you dumb down to the lowest common denominator, that simplicity also translated to a lack of choice and functionality.  Android gives you way more choice, and this does make things harder, but for for me ultimately more rewarding.

I spent many hours playing with the phone, configuring it just how I liked it and to my relief it can do just about anything my iPhone could do, but with many advantages that outweigh anything I might have lost.

What I Love

Clearly the screen on the Infuse is just spectacular.  At 4.5 inches and in AMOLED glory it is like watching a small HD TV.  I've watched TV shows and movies on this thing and actually don't feel like I am looking at an animated postage stamp.

Some of the graphics, animated wallpaper for example, are just incredible; truly beautiful.  This graphical prowess also extends to the camera that takes excellent pictures at 8MP and video at 720P.

Together with the graphical loveliness of the phone the CPU delivers smooth and fluid operation.  With only a few minor exceptions, the phone doesn't keep me waiting.

This phone is way faster in data speed than the old iPhone, and it seems to have a better signal than my iPhone in most places I have traveled to.

I love the easy connectivity to the Amazon cloud.  It's like the iCloud, except some bastard corporation isn't setting draconian copy protection rules and being shitty about where I can keep my data.

I love the customizable nature of the phone.  For example the device ships with three different keyboards for text entry, each working very differently from the others.  And in fact I purchased an even better one for $1.99, that has incredibly intuitive and AI predictive text.

I think the voice recognition is pretty good, still not good enough to completely replace typing, but good nontheless.

From what I've seen on the Android market place, apps are far more freely available on than at the Apple store where so much stuff costs 99c and up.  In fact I pretty much have every app I used to have on the iPhone, and I didn't have to spend a penny to achieve that.  Also with Android if you buy and app and hate it, you can uninstall it within 15 minutes and not be charged.

I think the phone is very good looking, shiny black on one side like big iPhone 4, and what they call caviar black on the back, with an interesting texture.

Of course because this phone is not made by Apple, I get to use websites with Flash if I want to.

What I Dislike

I do miss the size of my old phone, clearly though if I want a massive screen like that, common sense tells you it's going to be bigger than an iPhone, although it is only 8.9mm thick.  It's not hard to carry the phone in the pocket, but one does have to be a little bit careful when holding it to ensure it is not dropped.  Because there are four touch keys on the bottom of the device, you have to be careful where you put your grip too.

The speakerphone is not as good as the iPhone, but only marginally worse.  Having said that, the call quality is superior, so I can actually have a normal conversation without using the speakerphone.  I found the call quality of the iPhone so poor, I would use speakerphone all the time, and that simply isn't necessary any more.

Some of the Android applications are still not as good as the iPhone.  In fact it seems like some of the apps I've used are old versions of iPhone apps that have been ported.  But those are few and far between in fairness.  I am annoyed that at the time of writing Skype doesn't support video chat, and Netflix has not put out an app for the Android yet (at least not this Android).  Let's also not forget too how basic the Facebook app is.  Not cool, considering the power of the phone it should be way better.

I keep hearing about the 2.3 operating system, and I hope Samsung gives me an upgrade option down the road.  Time will tell on that.  I have not really researched what makes it so good, but I do like to have the latest OS as a general rule.

I miss the visual voicemail of the iPhone, and don't really understand why Android/AT&T are not offering that yet.  Seems like something they could charge some bullshit fee for, which I'd be (almost) happy to pay.

The phone ships with a cable to attach it to an HDMI cable.  Staying in a hotel that can be handy to watch movies or TV shows from services like HBO Go on a bigger screen.  Oddly though it wouldn't let me watch shows I had purchased from Samsung (with the gift card they gave me), on the big screen.  Unfortunately, the hotel I tried it in had poor WiFi and poor cell reception, so there was some buffering issues.  I'll have to assume it works better in other areas.

Conclusion

The Samsung Infuse 4G is awesome.  Plain and simple, it's a great phone with only a few minor flaws.  Whatever flaw you might pick on though is completely outweighed by what it brings to the table.  To me it is wonderful not to be tied to Apple any more.  No more DRM, no more syncing, no more being forced to download iTunes with that fucking horrific QuickTime they force you to install.  No more not being allowed to sync my phone to both my desktop and laptop PC.  No more draconian rules about upgrading, service (forced driving to an Apple store), not being able to have insurance against loss or damage.

I know that by the end of the year there will likely be an iPhone 5, and I'm sure it will be lovely.  But despite my former love of the iPhone (it was once arguably the best smartphone on the market), I just don't care what the iPhone 5 can do.  I am not willing to trade my soul for it.  The price of admission is too high, and my skepticism extends to products like the iCloud that only seek to further lock you in to their world.

In their joint corporate greed for money and control, AT&T and Apple took a great and revolutionary product and made it unpalatable for many people.  In the meantime a handful of major corporations began a race to kick Apples ass, and to me they have succeeded.  One can never predict the future, maybe one day the iPhone 8 will be so incredible nothing else will be able to touch it.  The truth though is that just like Mac vs PC, there are dozens of companies making PCs and similarly a lot of companies that make cell phones.  The Android operating system is a powerful weapon that unites the competition against Apple, and it seems hard to imagine that Apple has the power to continually fend off attacks in the long term while staying ahead of the curve.

My 30 day trial on the Samsung Infuse is coming to an end.  I am quite happy to hang on to this device for the next 20 months, then we'll see what's out there.