Moving (Back) to iPhone

In my previous blog post I said goodbye to Windows Phone. It got far more responses than I expected, so I vowed to myself to write a follow up post about my first few months back on an iPhone.

As per the previous post, I bought a 64GB iPhone 6S, which arrived on launch day and have been using it as my daily driver since September 29th. In summary I am delighted with it, but here are my detailed thoughts from the last few months.

Positives

3D touch is great. I love being able to perform shortcuts into apps. It brings it much closer to the concept of pinning secondary tiles in Windows Phone. However, one feature of 3D touch that hasn’t been talked about much but that I find transformative is the ability to move the input text cursor anywhere by pressing into the keyboard! I actually adjusted the amount of force required to trigger 3D touch to a lower setting. Apple are usually great at getting the defaults correct, but for me I wanted to be able to activate it easier. Luckily this can be done under Settings > Accessibility. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve been excited for apps to add support for 3D touch and I miss it in those apps that don’t yet have it!

TouchID and ApplePay. I’d played with TouchID on my wife’s iPhone 6, so knew what to expect, but on the 6S it is insane. It’s a 2nd generation sensor and it’s so fast to authenticate! It basically makes it impossible to wake the phone and look at lock screen notifications as it unlocks so fast! I know this is weird, but I’ve developed a way of checking the lock screen by pressing either the power button on the side or the home button with a different (non-registered) finger :-) Anyways, it’s so fast, it makes you forget that it’s doing a biometric authentication check, so it’s at the intersection of high security and high convenience. ApplePay works wonderfully (when accepted). I like the gesture of double-clicking home to open the wallet app and then biometrically authenticating payment. I’m able to go out at lunchtime with just my phone and no wallet which feels amazingly futuristic.

The hardware is wonderful. But we knew that already as this is Apple. The device is blazingly fast, I’ve never had any apps be slow when resuming, even when going back to the first app in the task switcher. The device is lightweight (yes I know it’s slightly heavier than a 6 due to the 3D touch, but it’s much lighter than my Nokia). I initially missed the hardware back button and kept trying to tap there, but the iOS 9 feature of a software back button in the status bar is a welcome addition and I’ve re-trained myself to use that now.

Superb connectivity. The “getting started” guide that came with my iPhone suggested turning on VoLTE (voice over LTE). I did the same on my wife’s iPhone 6. With this enabled, the call quality is incredible. I literally cannot recommend this enough. It’s like digital versus a twenty year old cassette tape! Bluetooth works flawlessly with my car — something that I could never say with my Windows Phone, sadly. I love the double-sided Lightening cable — it makes plugging the phone in to charge in the pitch dark super simple (something you’ll find you do quite a lot when you have a sleeping baby). Finally — something I’ve always admired about iPhones — the headphone jack on the bottom of the device just makes sense. Plug you headphones in and put your phone in your pocket upside down, then pull it out — it’s just the correct way to do it! Headphone controls also work flawlessly for changing the volume, skipping tracks and even seeking within tracks. Just wonderful stuff.

Apps quality and availability is high. Ironically, coming from the first-party-app-starved Windows Phone to an iPhone, I haven’t installed that many apps! But those that I have installed are of extremely high quality and have first-party support (see my previous post for context). Whilst not having many installed, I at least take comfort that the “next big app” will be immediately available on iPhone should I wish to try it.

Other. The camera is great. But it was on my Windows Phone, too. But this camera is definitely better. I find it takes equally as good landscape photos as the Windows Phone, but it excels at indoor/people pictures. The front facing camera on the iPhone is of astonishing quality, making selfies with my young son of superb quality. FaceTime and iMessage are great and deeply integrated as you’d expect, more so that Skype seems to be on Windows Phone.

Negatives

Autocorrect is terrible. It’s really, really bad. I’m very surprised to be honest, but it is so much worse than autocorrect on Windows Phone. Part of it is the smaller keyboard as I moved from a 5 inch device to a 4.7 inch device, but it just gets things wrong often and doesn’t make intelligent suggestions when even one character is off! To circumvent this, I tried installing the Swype keyboard, but that was just horrible, too. In my opinion Microsoft Research’s WordFlow keyboard on Windows Phone is the finest on any platform and I miss it dearly.

Siri is disappointing. Again — this is an area I was really surprised. With Siri being the “original” voice-activated digital assistant, I expected near-best-of-breed, but Cortana kicks Siri’s virtual butt in every direction — even with the new proactive stuff in iOS9. She finds it hard to understand my British English accent*, won’t read text messages out by default (you have to ask her), doesn’t confirm some things and just acts (in error) etc.. Also, one feature of Cortana I loved was being able to type commands to her in scenarios where I didn’t want to talk to my phone. Sadly missed also. This needs to improve.

*EDIT: After switching Siri to UK English (which can be set independently from the system locale) she understands me a lot better. Nice one, guv’nor! 😉

Dull, impersonal and lifeless Home screen. I said it in my previous post and I’ll say it again — the boring home screen on iPhone is still boring. Look at anyone’s iPhone and they all look the same. I’m not a sheep, I’m a person with a personality. I’m very surprised Apple isn’t doing more here. 3D touch has improved things a little but that’s about it.