Liam_on_Linux (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
liam_on_linux) wrote2012-09-15 04:51 pm
liam_on_linux) wrote2012-09-15 04:51 pm
The iPhone 5's new clothes: why aren't we allowed to say it's naked?
I used to have an Android phone - an HTC Desire HD - and I really liked it. Then I lost it, while my contract still had nine months to go - and it wasn't covered by my home insurance - so I couldn't afford to replace it.
Even with a newly-bought sealed fresh battery from eBay, my poor old Nokia E90 is no longer up to snuff. Its browser is ancient, current versions of Opera don't work and the ones that do are painfully slow, its Google Sync triplicated all the entries in my address book until its memory filled up, and with these things turned on, a brand-new battery lasted about 7-8h.
I got to borrow an HTC Wildfire for long enough to retrieve my backups from the HTC cloud & merge them into Google, but I was bereft without a smartphone.
But a kind friend saved the day and gave me his old iPhone. It's his old 3GS, as he upgraded to a 4GS. O2 unlocked it for free - syncing to iTunes on my Mac one day caused it to reset and accept my Orange SIM.
And it was a very odd experience. iOS is pretty and it was fun using it on Wifi, adding a handful of apps, exploring its functionality. It felt constrained compared to Android - no menu button, no back button; like using a really old-time early-1990s Mac with no right mouse button. But I accepted it; it was just... different.
Some things seemed really backwards, though. There are no widgets on the home screen. The clock always says 10:15; the weather is always sunny and 23°. The Calendar does change, though. Consistency? Who needs it?
The keyboard is atrocious - it can't even show caps or lower-case; there's an emulated Caps Lock key for this. There are no cursor keys but two levels of shift for basic punctuation; text-editing is painful. But the amazing thing is that you are not allowed to change it.
On Android, I used lots of widgets.
Some of 'em were cosmetic, like Twitter & news feeds - they didn't display enough info to be useful. However, I found quite a lot very handy - clock, calendar, weather, calculator, even things like address-book or photo-browsers.
On iOS, I have to dive in & out of apps far more often, which given that it multitasks about as well as an Amstrad PCW and doesn't have a "back" button, is a major PITA. Apps take time to open, and when you're done, you need to switch back to the desktop, then go find the next app. It's clunkier. The Apple "there's an app for that" approach, where everything is in separate apps which don't multitask worth a damn, is for me far clunkier than Android, where the home screen actually does useful work and apps actually run in the background.
Let's put it this way. I consider the iPhone way too small & its battery life indifferent. Given that these are two of the main improvements in the iPhone 5, allegedly, and given that my contract is about to end, if my phone company were to offer me a completely free iPhone 5 to keep me, I'd still pay for the chance to go back to using an Android device.
But every time I explain to an iPhone owner any of the ways that I find Android functionally superior to iOS, or in which I find iOS clunky, the Apple owner looks at me blankly (or electronic equivalent thereof) and says "I don't see it" or "that doesn't bother me".
That's fine. You are all very happy with your devices. Good. Great.
But I have come and joined in, after 5y or so on Symbian and Android smartphones, and I find the experience profoundly lacking. I can specify precisely how, in exacting detail, but iPhone and iPad owners cannot, or will not, understand.
It's fine. I am glad you are happy. It is not a problem for you all, collectively, that you have a lot of blind spots to the platform's
weaknesses - but believe me, the platform, the GUI, the apps and the experience has an awful lot of weaknesses.
Parallel example: I have perfect colour vision; I've been tested. I am somewhat short-sighted & have very slight astigmatism in one eye, but my colour vision is perfect.
And yet I am unable to perceive the phenomenon of "clashing colours". I have tried, I have looked at examples, I have had a bunch of people standing around me in the same light looking at the same object saying "that green clashes with that orange", but I see nothing. I quite like bright combinations of colours and none of them are really unpleasant to me.
This does not mean I disbelieve in the existence of the experience.
I can't sing especially well, can't play any true instrument, but I am not tone-deaf, although I'm not very good. Nonetheless, I find the
band Oasis unbearable because the vocals are consistently flat on almost every song; it's physically unpleasant to hear, like a dental drill or a failing hard disk.
Tens of millions of Oasis fans presumably are deaf to this. Hey, shit happens.
If I carefully spell out to you a flaw in the iPhone, with specific examples, "it doesn't bother me" is a legitimate response but "that is
not a problem" is not.
It has been a very odd experience, owning one. I have been an Apple fan for 24yr, a user of System 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5 with extensive experience of 10.6, some of 10.7 and a little of 10.8.
I like Macs. I like Apple hardware. I have often been branded a "fanboi" and it pisses me off.
I have spent many many hours trying to explain ways in which certain Mac software or OSs were superior to contemporaneous MICROS~1 or Unix systems (and vice versa). This means I have encountered blank incomprehension, flat-out denial, unwillingness to compromise and so on.
But coming to the phone, the reality distortion field is the worst I have /ever/ encountered. iPhone owners /love/ the things, be they
geeks or technophobes, and they will not concede an atom of inferiority in any way. I've had articles giving reasoned, step-by-step criticism of the iOS rejected out of hand by iPhone-loving editors.
It is bizarre and rather scary.
If I could afford the kit, I'd have been a Mac user for years. As it is I started moving off Windows about 15y ago and did so on the
desktop more-or-less full-time 10y ago. (My notebook lingered on Windows longer until I learned how to resolve a few lingering
power-management issues myself.)
Thus it is a considerable surprise to find that the company whose pro-level computer hardware and whose desktop OS I admire so much have pared back their mobile OS so much that I find it almost unusable.
And when I try to compare notes with people about this, they all tell me I am wrong. Not that they differ in opinion, oh no; I am just
WRONG and stupid and mad and awkward and contrarian for daring to dissent.
Suddenly, I understand what the Mac-fan-hating Windows-users have been feeling like for all these years.
I was and am a Mac user and many times have made a careful, reasoned defence of the Mac against hostile Windows users, because I was a Windows user too, and a Linux user. And yet they called me a fanboi. I'd explain the benefits of the Mac to Windows or Linux users and they'd doubt or dismiss me, but I'd explain the benefits of Windows or Linux to Mac users and they'd go oh, OK, well, we don't want that, but I guess if you do, all right.
But now, everyone says that iOS is wonderful, the best mobile OS around, pisses on everything else, and when I or a handful of others who have tried both say, but look, it doesn't do this and this and this and this, and its implementation of this and this is poor,
everyone tells us we're wrong, we don't know, it's not important, it doesn't matter, we're mistaken.
I still don't feel like I was or am a member of any cult or anything. But suddenly, it feels like everyone has drunk the Kool-aid. There
are about a dozen of us, standing outside the fishtank, talking about fresh air and freedom, whereas everyone else is in there and saying it is so nice they never want to leave.
It's just very odd. Scary and salutory. Educational, even.
Even with a newly-bought sealed fresh battery from eBay, my poor old Nokia E90 is no longer up to snuff. Its browser is ancient, current versions of Opera don't work and the ones that do are painfully slow, its Google Sync triplicated all the entries in my address book until its memory filled up, and with these things turned on, a brand-new battery lasted about 7-8h.
I got to borrow an HTC Wildfire for long enough to retrieve my backups from the HTC cloud & merge them into Google, but I was bereft without a smartphone.
But a kind friend saved the day and gave me his old iPhone. It's his old 3GS, as he upgraded to a 4GS. O2 unlocked it for free - syncing to iTunes on my Mac one day caused it to reset and accept my Orange SIM.
And it was a very odd experience. iOS is pretty and it was fun using it on Wifi, adding a handful of apps, exploring its functionality. It felt constrained compared to Android - no menu button, no back button; like using a really old-time early-1990s Mac with no right mouse button. But I accepted it; it was just... different.
Some things seemed really backwards, though. There are no widgets on the home screen. The clock always says 10:15; the weather is always sunny and 23°. The Calendar does change, though. Consistency? Who needs it?
The keyboard is atrocious - it can't even show caps or lower-case; there's an emulated Caps Lock key for this. There are no cursor keys but two levels of shift for basic punctuation; text-editing is painful. But the amazing thing is that you are not allowed to change it.
On Android, I used lots of widgets.
Some of 'em were cosmetic, like Twitter & news feeds - they didn't display enough info to be useful. However, I found quite a lot very handy - clock, calendar, weather, calculator, even things like address-book or photo-browsers.
On iOS, I have to dive in & out of apps far more often, which given that it multitasks about as well as an Amstrad PCW and doesn't have a "back" button, is a major PITA. Apps take time to open, and when you're done, you need to switch back to the desktop, then go find the next app. It's clunkier. The Apple "there's an app for that" approach, where everything is in separate apps which don't multitask worth a damn, is for me far clunkier than Android, where the home screen actually does useful work and apps actually run in the background.
Let's put it this way. I consider the iPhone way too small & its battery life indifferent. Given that these are two of the main improvements in the iPhone 5, allegedly, and given that my contract is about to end, if my phone company were to offer me a completely free iPhone 5 to keep me, I'd still pay for the chance to go back to using an Android device.
But every time I explain to an iPhone owner any of the ways that I find Android functionally superior to iOS, or in which I find iOS clunky, the Apple owner looks at me blankly (or electronic equivalent thereof) and says "I don't see it" or "that doesn't bother me".
That's fine. You are all very happy with your devices. Good. Great.
But I have come and joined in, after 5y or so on Symbian and Android smartphones, and I find the experience profoundly lacking. I can specify precisely how, in exacting detail, but iPhone and iPad owners cannot, or will not, understand.
It's fine. I am glad you are happy. It is not a problem for you all, collectively, that you have a lot of blind spots to the platform's
weaknesses - but believe me, the platform, the GUI, the apps and the experience has an awful lot of weaknesses.
Parallel example: I have perfect colour vision; I've been tested. I am somewhat short-sighted & have very slight astigmatism in one eye, but my colour vision is perfect.
And yet I am unable to perceive the phenomenon of "clashing colours". I have tried, I have looked at examples, I have had a bunch of people standing around me in the same light looking at the same object saying "that green clashes with that orange", but I see nothing. I quite like bright combinations of colours and none of them are really unpleasant to me.
This does not mean I disbelieve in the existence of the experience.
I can't sing especially well, can't play any true instrument, but I am not tone-deaf, although I'm not very good. Nonetheless, I find the
band Oasis unbearable because the vocals are consistently flat on almost every song; it's physically unpleasant to hear, like a dental drill or a failing hard disk.
Tens of millions of Oasis fans presumably are deaf to this. Hey, shit happens.
If I carefully spell out to you a flaw in the iPhone, with specific examples, "it doesn't bother me" is a legitimate response but "that is
not a problem" is not.
It has been a very odd experience, owning one. I have been an Apple fan for 24yr, a user of System 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5 with extensive experience of 10.6, some of 10.7 and a little of 10.8.
I like Macs. I like Apple hardware. I have often been branded a "fanboi" and it pisses me off.
I have spent many many hours trying to explain ways in which certain Mac software or OSs were superior to contemporaneous MICROS~1 or Unix systems (and vice versa). This means I have encountered blank incomprehension, flat-out denial, unwillingness to compromise and so on.
But coming to the phone, the reality distortion field is the worst I have /ever/ encountered. iPhone owners /love/ the things, be they
geeks or technophobes, and they will not concede an atom of inferiority in any way. I've had articles giving reasoned, step-by-step criticism of the iOS rejected out of hand by iPhone-loving editors.
It is bizarre and rather scary.
If I could afford the kit, I'd have been a Mac user for years. As it is I started moving off Windows about 15y ago and did so on the
desktop more-or-less full-time 10y ago. (My notebook lingered on Windows longer until I learned how to resolve a few lingering
power-management issues myself.)
Thus it is a considerable surprise to find that the company whose pro-level computer hardware and whose desktop OS I admire so much have pared back their mobile OS so much that I find it almost unusable.
And when I try to compare notes with people about this, they all tell me I am wrong. Not that they differ in opinion, oh no; I am just
WRONG and stupid and mad and awkward and contrarian for daring to dissent.
Suddenly, I understand what the Mac-fan-hating Windows-users have been feeling like for all these years.
I was and am a Mac user and many times have made a careful, reasoned defence of the Mac against hostile Windows users, because I was a Windows user too, and a Linux user. And yet they called me a fanboi. I'd explain the benefits of the Mac to Windows or Linux users and they'd doubt or dismiss me, but I'd explain the benefits of Windows or Linux to Mac users and they'd go oh, OK, well, we don't want that, but I guess if you do, all right.
But now, everyone says that iOS is wonderful, the best mobile OS around, pisses on everything else, and when I or a handful of others who have tried both say, but look, it doesn't do this and this and this and this, and its implementation of this and this is poor,
everyone tells us we're wrong, we don't know, it's not important, it doesn't matter, we're mistaken.
I still don't feel like I was or am a member of any cult or anything. But suddenly, it feels like everyone has drunk the Kool-aid. There
are about a dozen of us, standing outside the fishtank, talking about fresh air and freedom, whereas everyone else is in there and saying it is so nice they never want to leave.
It's just very odd. Scary and salutory. Educational, even.