Long Story Short

For quite a few years, I have touted the Amazon MP3 store as the place where I choose to buy my music. Their downloader automatically added the purchase to my iTunes library. The MP3 was DRM free. I could download the music again from any device I happened to be on when I felt the urge to expand my library on that device. The third feature is no longer the case.

Apple has long limited the number of devices on which one could put the songs purchased from the iTunes store. Well, yesterday, I went to buy a song and Amazon popped up to tell me I needed a new downloader, which I installed. Then I got another popup asking me if I wanted this computer to be one of the ten devices that would be allowed to download my Amazon music. Apple finally caught up to Amazon in offering DRM-free music. Now that Amazon has regressed to limiting one to ten devices (as does Apple), I can no longer favor the Amazon MP3 Store over the Apple iTunes Store.

I’m an engineer.  I respect specifications, weighted rankings, and quantification.  So when it comes to choosing a new phone, I tend to get very analytical.  A smartphone may be one of the most important bits of computing technology we own.  It is the computer we always have with us.  For different people, it has differing priorities.

The first priority for me is how well it does as a phone.  I can’t tell any difference here between Google’s Android phones and Apple’s iOS iPhone.  The second priority is as a camera.  The third is to help me navigate in the physical world from where I am now to where I want to be next.  The fourth is to quickly answer questions that arise during the day.  These might range from “How did the Pirates do last night?” to “What is a photo-acoustic extinctiometer?”  (For most computing activities beyond that, I prefer the iPad, my MacBook Pro, or my Windows 7 desktop computer.  Each step up implies the need for greater computing power or screen real estate and less convenience and mobility.)  The fifth quality is a tie between how easy it is to read what is on the screen (primarily display size and pixel density) versus how easily I can slip my phone into my pocket.  Well, not quite a tie – if I can’t see it, I can’t use it.

So, over my first week off of Android and using an iPhone 5, I decided to jot down some notes.  When I missed something about my old Droid Incredible or felt that the iPhone 5 lacked something that my wife’s Galaxy S III enjoyed, I wrote that down.  When I observed something that the iPhone 5 did that was an improvement on the Android experience, I wrote that down, too.

What do I misss about Android?

• micro-USB – I have these cables everywhere.  The lightning USB cable from apple is $20!  Seriously?
• Battery life – My wife’s phone lasts for two to three days.  My iPhone was at 1% after 13 hours of light (for me) use.  It was still at 1% when I plugged it in for the night at 15 hours.
• Integration with Google Voice, but the GV app is excellent on the iPhone
• Google Voice Actions – faster and more powerful than Siri
• Google Navigation – more accurate and includes mass transit, walking, and biking – but at least now iOS has voice-guided navigation.  Apple Maps has worked well here in North Carolina, but from what I’ve seen on the web, YMMV.
• Homescreen landscape mode
• The back button – in iOS every app moves you back a different way, if it is possible at all
• Choosing apps from the web Play Store and having them magically install on my phone
• Scaling the font size – in iOS font size can only be varied in a handful of native apps – no use if you use Gmail and Google Voice
• Bluetooth that automatically connects with my Subaru without having to turn the bluetooth off then on then click on the car-media button to connect – every stinking time I go somewhere
• Screen real estate
• Google Now (Siri makes me ask for the info I want)
• Google My Tracks

Clearly the Android phone is better, right?  Not so fast.  What do I like better about iPhone 5?