Back in the saddle again.

[cajunrph]

Well it's been a long journey so far for me in smartphone land. I've owned my fair share of smart phones. I started off with the Palm Treo back in the day. Then with the first generation HTC Android phone. A Palm Pre was one of my favorite phones. The OS was slick as otter fur. Very well thought out design. It just didn't catch on. Too bad. It was a great device. My wife at the time wanted a smart phone an iPhone in particular. They had just came out. She didn't like the Treo when I had it. That was the first iPhone. I later had an iPhone 3G that I traded for a BlackBerry Bold. I think fondly of the crackberry days. That little addicting flashing light got to you. Notice I don't miss those days. Because if you pushed the Bold's limits it failed mighty. The browser was simply trash. BlackBerry couldn't figure that out. The were toast in a few years. I went back to iPhones owning every one through the 5s as well as owing all the Samsung Galaxy S phones up the 6. Well someone in the family owned it, be it myself or someone else. I would go back to ios due to frustrations with the slow Android devices and after a while I'd jailbreak the phone for more function which made the iPhone really glitchy.

What prompted me to go back to android after each iPhone was the restrictions of iPhone and the freedom of Android. I never rooted an android phone. Didn't need to I felt and it was much more involved than jailbreaking. And what prompted me to ditch Android for iPhone each time was the dog slow phones. Although on paper the current Android phones should be much faster than the current iPhone. I'm practice that doesn't happen. Especially after a year. My girlfriend has a 5c. She is still using it without many issues. My android at the time she got it was a HTC one. After a year it was so slow I switched to the 5s.

As I said before, one of the main reasons I switched from iPhones to androids was the restricted access the Apple used. You had to use their services or to without. Being Android for so long I was heavily invested in Amazon services. I have prime and bought many songs from them. While there's a way to get Amazon purchased songs on an iPhone, prime and all it's benefits were not allowed. As was checking out the iPhones at the AT&T store prior to purchasing my daughter's, I noticed Amazon Music was on the app store. What is this? Apple has allowed an intruder to the walled garden. Sure enough Prime was there too. So I says to myself "Self, I wonder if all of Google services are there too." I knew Google maps was there and Google now but I also saw that all of Google docs and drive was there. Even Google play music, movies and books. I haven't bought too much music from Google or any other content at that. I was content to stay with Amazon. Apple allowing them in is a bug plus for me.

Although Android offers much more customization than iOS, as the years went by I was less inclined to spend the time to customize the phone. This last one I left stock. Pretty much just grouping apps together on a home screen much like iOS does. Customization plus of Android therefore isn't too much for me.

So far so good for my current dip in the iOS pool. I do have Apple computers which work much better with iPhones as we all know. I think with the willingness of Apple to allow other services in while reserving their apps just for iPhones(iMessage) I just may stick around for a while. I was able to snag the iPhone I was after. The 7 plus in slate black with 256 GB of storage. Hell that's more storage than my laptop. Hahaha. Again so far so good. I think the Note 7 debacle and the perceived Verizon exclusive on the Pixel is going to hurt Android and drive more hardened veterans of Android to Apple. Apple for certain is a superior physical design. And it's highly debatable if Android offers a superior end user experience than iOS. Apple has fine tuned iOS to the point for me, there's a small difference. I'd like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and happy New Year. May it be your best one yet.

 

[Just_Me_D]

I've had mobile phones dating back to 1989. I've had just about everything. Nokia devices, Audiovox, Motorola Star-Tac, Palm Treo 600, Nextels devices, numerous Blackberry devices, almost every iPhone and others. Back then, the Palm Treo and Blackberry devices were known as PIM phones (Personal Information Manager). Anyway, I've also dabbled into the Android world. Blackberry devices have always been my favorite, with my last one being the original Blackberry Bold (9000). When I returned to using the iPhone around the time the iPhone 4S was released, that was it. I've been all iPhone ever since and because of that, people assume I'm a blind follower of all things Apple. I've simply found a product and OS that fits me perfectly and I choose to stick with it until it doesn't. Anyway, thanks for sharing your experience with us, and Merry Christmas to you and your family...

 

[Truman82]

You can get android to stay fast, just have to reset the phone from time to time. And sometimes look for that rogue app that's eating your resources. And no this isn't a troll.

 

[cajunrph]

I've rebooted it and installed many an app to clean them. None of them worked except for a complete wipe and restart from scratch. If that's what your talking about then it makes iOS all the more better. Android devices have more ram than iPhones but they still bog down. I use to think it was from the bloatware the carriers add. Not so because both the Nexus phones I had did the same thing. I did a wipe and reset once and it worked for a while. But in too short of a time it was lagging again.

 

[iOS Gravity]

I've rebooted it and installed many an app to clean them. None of them worked except for a complete wipe and restart from scratch. If that's what your talking about then it makes iOS all the more better. Android devices have more ram than iPhones but they still bog down. I use to think it was from the bloatware the carriers add. Not so because both the Nexus phones I had did the same thing. I did a wipe and reset once and it worked for a while. But in too short of a time it was lagging again.

Its got something to do with it being made using Java. Java is a pretty good language but its one of the slowest ones. Meanwhile iOS is made using C language, which is much more optimized and faster.

 

[cajunrph]

Two days into it and so far so good. iOS has really changed from the last time I used an iPhone. Not sure what it's called, I think it's the today screen, the far left screen and it's widgets are new and quite handy. I've customized the news feeds and added my favorites to it as well.

Siri is faster than Google Now. And the text to speech works better. I didn't use it much for android because it always misunderstood me. I've just used it once on iPhone so it's limited experience.

Again I didn't really utilize android to it's full customization potential. What iOS offers so far is an excellent start.

It's a good start. Merry Christmas to all and to all a great new year.

 

[trparky]

Two days into it and so far so good. iOS has really changed from the last time I used an iPhone. Not sure what it's called, I think it's the today screen, the far left screen and it's widgets are new and quite handy. I've customized the news feeds and added my favorites to it as well.

Siri is faster than Google Now. And the text to speech works better. I didn't use it much for android because it always misunderstood me. I've just used it once on iPhone so it's limited experience.

Again I didn't really utilize android to it's full customization potential. What iOS offers so far is an excellent start.

It's a good start. Merry Christmas to all and to all a great new year.

A lot of that is because of the integration of all of the software that exists on the iPhone. Because the system is built as one cohesive ecosystem all of the pieces and parts of the system can come together and work together than anything on Android.

Android fanboys will hate me for this but Android isn't an ecosystem in the sense that iOS is. Android is more like a mish-mash of stuff put together. There really wasn't any thought to how all of these different software components could work together to create a seamless ecosystem. Yes, Android is getting better in this department but you can still see where the integration just isn't quite there yet.

Its got something to do with it being made using Java. Java is a pretty good language but its one of the slowest ones. Meanwhile iOS is made using C language, which is much more optimized and faster.

Apple software for the most part is written in Objective C or Swift, both of which are fully compiled to machine code to be run on the bare metal of the device itself. What's commonly done during the compilations phase is what's known as optimization. Why? Well, even the best programmer can write bad or inefficient code. The compilers takes the code and due to the magic of the compiler it can optimize the code so that it can best make use of the hardware that the device has but this can only happen on machines that have a lot of computing power to be able to really crunch that code.

However, on Android apps don't come as pre-compiled packages. They can't. How can you when you don't know the hardware that the end user will be running it on. So what happens when an app is installed? Well... it's compiled the rest of the way from Java bytecode on the device into machine code to run on the device's bare metal. But here's the problem... we can't do nearly the same amount of code optimizations at compile time on the mobile device due to restricted computing power whereas on Apple we don't have that restriction since the app is fully compiled on the developer's Mac desktop.

 

[dchandler]

I'm not going to even get started with my phone history but good luck and welcome back to the iPhone and iMore.

 

[cajunrph]

Day three and battery life is much better. Now granted much of this is due to the newness of the phone and battery. I just plugged the in at 32%. About 14 hours on the phone. I was at work today so I wasn't using it too much. My year old Android would be at 70% or less by the time I got to work in the morning. And it would be sucking wind by the early afternoon. I'm off of work tomorrow. I'll see how it goes tomorrow when I can use it more.