The rubber met the road…
July 12, 2010 by cynthia
…and got skid marks all over its butt.
Sorry for the vulgarism, but I’m watching the whole iPhone thing and thinking “whoa–now THAT’S a crash.”
The Wall St. Journal just reported that Consumer Reports (love it when the media reports on the media) will not recommend Apple’s brand-spanking new Droid-killer, the iPhone 4, to its readers.
Apparently the venerable reviews mag tested three iPhone 4s, found troubling issues with the design and didn’t buy Apple’s dismissive explanations. Along with other revelations, it’s beginning to look like the iPhone doesn’t play well when there’s real compeition. I’m wondering if we’re not kinda getting to a “mighty have fallen” scenario w/iPhone4.
I guess I’m not helping matters: I just ordered a Motorola Droid X from Verizon. It’ll arrive on my doorstep this Friday. I’m gonna test it for a week or two and if it proves out, I’ll move my phone number back to Verizon (where I got it, years ago), and that’ll be that: Gigi-the-iPhone will no longer be my main squeeze.
Wow. I feel like a rat deserting a sinking ship, but the guilt isn’t apparently strong enough to actually prevent me doing it. As much as I love the iPhone (and I really do)…
It costs too much. June’s AT&T bill was nearly $200 and I can get unlimited everything on Verizon for about half that price. AT&T (and everyone else, admittedly) is moving away from the “unlimited” charge plans…and AT&T’s “figure out a way to charge for THAT, too” attitude reminds me of an airline.
iPhone call reception/quality remains lousy. At one point Gigi consistently dropped 24 percent of her calls with no apparent geographic correlation, but AT&T insisted there was nothing wrong. The Apple Store folks told me to stop using AT&T’s 3G network, which reduced my call-drop rate to about 9-10 percent, mostly in known dead zones.
But that means I’m on the slower Edge network pretty much permanently. Since I waited for an iPhone 3G just to get the 3G network, that’s kinda disappointing.
Apple’s App Store sales model is flawed, IMHO. iPhone apps are inexpensive and a lot of them are incredibly useful (I use 3rd-party apps on this phone more than I use the ones that came with the phone)…but there is no way to test-drive an app before paying for it. About 30 percent of the apps I try have problems, one way or another, but I can’t return them for a refund.
Granted, it ain’t like it’s bankrupting me–most apps cost between $0.99 and $5–but it’s still annoying. The most I can do is spend time giving the app a bad review to prevent someone else from making the same mistake.
iOS4 is buggy as heck. As I mentioned, I upgraded to iOS4 looking for stuff like tethering and multitasking. Didn’t get tethering (mostly because I don’t want a reduced data plan that costs $15 more per month) and didn’t get multitasking. But I did get an almost immediate degradation of favorite iPhone functions:
- GPS. I rely heavily on Gigi’s GPS functions…and now they mostly don’t work. Gigi suddenly has problems locating herself in less than one square mile, which isn’t much help when you’re trying to get around downtown. According to Apple, they’re working on a patch, but it ain’t ready yet. For me, this one is a dealbreaker–if I don’t have GPS, I’m gonna be permanently lost.
- Email push/pull has gone from near-instantaneous and reliable to at best sporadic. As a friend says, “email can arrive anytime in about an eight-hour window” and that’s proving true with me, too.
- App incompatibility problems have increased dramatically. Even with iOS4 upgrades, many of the 3rd party apps I use crash two or three times as much as before, and some don’t work at all. That’s annoying from both functional and financial perspectives.
- The accelerometer, the thing that tilts Gigi’s screen to match the orientation of the phone, is about 50 percent slower and sometimes gets stuck, one way or the other. It’s not a big deal, but it is irritating.
It’s interesting how much even a slight degradation in functionality changes your usage patterns; since I upgraded to the new iOS4 I find I’m on the iPhone less and less. I had been using Gigi for about 60 percent of my email traffic–in the last week or so I’ve noticed I’m checking mail on the iPhone about a tenth as often as I did in June, and Microsoft Outlook/Entourage is open on my desktops and laptops all the time instead of only as needed.
In fact, where I would previously redline Gigi’s battery by 1pm each day unless I kept her plugged in or on the Mophie auxiliary battery pack, now I can run her all day and still have at least a third of the charge left at 10pm.
So…I went to the Verizon store to look at the Droid X and liked what I saw. It’s less expensive to run, has more features, a larger percentage of its apps are free and you don’t have to buy them exclusively from a single source if you do pay for them.
It offers turn-by-turn voice GPS, something that costs (a lot) extra on an iPhone, and just has more voice control in general, which is important in hands-free operation. Battery life isn’t great, but you can buy battery packs for the beast, something that’s always bugged me about the iPhone. You can also use memory cards with it, a lack that’s another iPhone puzzler.
The screen is huge and gorgeous (in the screens above the iPhone and Droid appear to have similarly sized screens when in fact the Droid’s is 4.3 inches to the iPhone 3/4′s 3.5 inches), with a resolution of 480×854 pixels to Gigi’s 480×320. You can turn the phone into a WiFi hotspot as needed, it’s got a camcorder and higher-res camera. And it’s from Motorola, which tickles me to death; my very favorite phone of all time, at least in terms of great call quality, was the old grey Motorola clamshell, and it was sad to see the company go sooooo downhill after that. This’ll be my first Motorola phone since then, and it’s nice to see.
It’s gonna have to be really good, frankly. I have a fair amount invested in iPhone, in terms of apps, rich media and gadgets, and much of it can’t transfer to the new phone. Plus I’ll be giving up Apple’s incredible support; I’ve gotten used to stopping by the Apple store for a guaranteed fix whenever I have a problem/question, and I hate to give that up. Verizon has a LOT to live up to.
Anyway, I have 30 days to test out the Droid X and see if I realio, trulio am deserting the iPhone camp. If I am, Gigi will either be handed down to a relative or become an iPod Touch-ish device.
So we’ll see…
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no front camera, so no video conferencing.
Can’t wait for your review of the Droid X. It is definitely on my list when my “every 2″ phone upgrade for Verizon rolls around later this year. I’ve been reading a lot about people not happy with their iPhone and upgrade to iOS4.
I’m also an iphone 3GS user with iOS4 that is getting a Droid X this week (I hope!) — Ironically, if Apple would have had iphone4s in stock, I would already have one, but because of the long waiting list I have had time to reconsider and am hoping to make the jump to Android.
Between the horrible ATT network, the rising market share of Android, the larger Droid X screen and the built in turn by turn GPS, I am hoping to like it. If not, I will return and switch the the iphone once it is off backorder
Hey, good luck Erin; I really looked hard at the iPhone 4, loved many things about it and Apple, especially the transferrable bit (my cables, media, etc., all transfer without a hitch)… but in the end the thought of re-upping with AT&T to get one did me in. Went for door #2–stick with an upgraded iPhone 3G–with the result described above. Thought about rolling back to the old iOS, then looked at my phone bill. AT&T strikes again.
@chaniarts: Given my hugely gadgetfreak nature it seems astonishing that I am not more into videoconferencing, but I once streamed an animated me just to avoid doing 5AM vcon calls overseas. (what I look like in the morning nobody should have to see) If I really need to vcon I can rejigger the phone, or just grab the laptop (which has it built-in). So it’s not a huge deal for me. Right now what I think I’ll miss most, frankly, is Apple’s support. Verizon has a lot to live up to, as I said.
good for you. I’m no apple hater [some of the things they do piss me off however] but I am an android lover, and I think you’ll be stoked with the Droid X. I got the Droid when it first came out and it’s geek candy. Especially since you can install the android scripting engine [ASE] and really muck around with some cool stuff in python [and several other scripting languages].
The apps are getting better all the time, the GPS navigation is AWESOME and there are a ton of open source offerings…
i just ran across this:
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/07/14/droid-x-actually-self-destructs-if-you-try-to-mod-it/
Chaniarts, : read the whole thing; makes me want to break out another bottle of white wine, enjoy the summer evenings unbearable humidity and heat and wonder what it is that makes them all tick so loudly… jeez.