Switching back to iPhone SE (from iPhone 8 Plus)
After using iPhone 6S for an year or so, I preordered an 8 Plus, mainly for the camera (and, you know: addiction).
I already knew that iPhone 8 Plus was too big but I was curious about the camera. Rave reviews were floating around the web and everyone seemed to go gaga over the cameras.
The day it arrived I remember it holding in my hands and thinking boy! it does feel big. Intuitively it felt like I’ll get used to the size. My palm would grow big to adapt the size (Like it did while playing basketball in school days). But apparently I was wrong.
Using the iPhone 8 Plus felt like work to my hands. After few minutes of usage and my palms started sending signals of fatigue. Why did I use it so much, you’d argue to which I would reason — the thing was a bit too sexy for my own good. Ideally I want my smartphones less seductive over time, not more. Plain, boring, invisible, quiet, homely. IPhone 8 Plus is decidedly none of these.
Once on an airplane, I decided to use the phone for listening to music (actually, there was a monster child sitting nearby) with my noise cancelling headphones (Bose QC25) but I could not. You can easily guess why. 8 Plus was almost this close to feeling like a piece of shit.
In distraught, I side-graded to iPhone SE. I remember holding it in my hands the day it arrived and thinking: Oh boy! This does feel right. My palm seemed to accept the new change in jiffy. The shape of this thing felt humane to the core. The feel, the looks, the bezel, everything just felt right.
For couple of days it looked like everything was squeezed and there’s was not enough whitespace on the screen left but it didn’t take longer to get used to that compactness. The keyboard definitely was problematic after the switch but fingers have adapted to the squeezed layout out by now. So it’s all good now. What isn’t is the iOS 11. Apple is conspicuously trying to scrub all usability joy from this little wonder.
Software aside, iPhone SE is the best phone Apple has designed and I hope it’s the last one (with the headphone jack).
