iPhone 4S eh?

12 years of Verizon Wireless, almost all of them with Motorola phones, except for my ill-fated stint with the LG Dare, and I finally jump over to iOS.

Well I'm sick of things that start with 'i' It's starting to feel a bit too last decade. But iGiveUp. Anyways, 2 weeks with the thing and I "get it". It's a wonderful platform for getting consumers to spend money. Particularly for Apple to make money. The UI and the experience is for the most part a polished affair. Coming from 2 years of Droid goodness, I can appreciate the efforts there. As a software engineer, I can appreciate the obvious tradeoffs made between functionality, simplicity and quality. I get a sense that "make it simple, make it work" were the guiding themes here.

I've been a big fan of most of the Moto-phones I've owned over the years. The v60i in particular will always stand out for having been pretty, sturdy and in possession of the most ridiculous battery life of any phone I have had (and sadly it probably will retain that record). One thing Motorola never got right to me though was the camera software. It was always decent in sunlight, and always horrid in low light. And it was consistently horrible. The Droid even...always grainy. And nothing was more frustrating to me than watching the software try to adjust the picture, usually swapping quickly from what looked like a great adjustment job only to settle at grainy ridiculousness....le sigh! The LG Dare was my attempt to stay on Verizon, and it had a decent camera (at least for the time), but the underwhelming experience nearly drove me to AT&T until the Droid came out. Verizon's first truly open phone. It was a worthy competitor to the iPhone. 2 years later, it's slow and out of date, and I found myself confronting a few choices:

- Sort through whatever the high end Android combinations are (potentially another Moto - though I think some of them are getting unnecessarily big - and the camera *still* isn't better) and watch a newer, "better" phone come out every month.

- Finally fulfill my iPhone curiosity and give in to the hype.

So I gave in, and said I'd give it a try. There's a few things I imagined would happen that came to pass. All of them involved spending money, in large part to Apple. First I upgraded Mac OS X so I could get iCloud (30$), then I went to the Apple store and bought a case using the mobile app which allowed me to scan/purchase right from the phone and walk out the store - no lines (which was pretty cool...and 30$). Then I downloaded the Starbucks app and scanned my latte purchase using it (never got it to read off the Droid - awesome - and i had to reload my card for another 25$). Then I contemplated paying 15$ to update iPhoto to get iCloud integration. Then I thought about this for a minute...

It's so genius really. So easy to spend money. Get em in the ecosystem and make em pay for the features. And then I think about the Droid. Well it's not as polished on the UI side and the app store is a free-for-all. But even 2 years ago, my photos sync'ed via Picassa for free and were accessible on the phone. Easy Gmail integration already had me used to free cloud service support. Granted Google has been a tad unpredictable with their offerings, but I never felt some compelled to shell out the coin, nor did it ever seem so easy. I miss the google nav app. I've yet to find anything to come close really. I like the iTunes music integration though. That is unsurprisingly as slick as its always been. And I like iMessage.

I also like the Apple contacts management a tad better than Google's services. It just feels more naturally organized. Of course, Google has been getting better (and for free...I expect some day I'll have to pay Apple to upgrade when they figure out a better way of doing things). I was surprised to find I had to dig a bit to figure out how to integrate all the stuff from my Google cloud into my iPhone. Seemed the answer ultimately is export from Google and import into iOS so that you can take advantage of iEcosystem integration capabilities. E.g. off the G-crack and onto iCrack. I'm not fully switched yet (e.g. my G-Calendar), but its a good excuse to clean out my contacts finally.

I also miss the "back" navigation on Android. But I also found Android was inconsistent with maintaining state of apps. So far iOS (which makes you go back to the home screen generally) has consistently maintained state, so I'm usually right back where I left off (even if I had to jump to get there).

It's pretty early on, so hard to say where I end on it, but no regrets at this point. And it's just so damn pretty! LOL. The camera btw...I love it!