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cube_b3 wrote:I don't want giant screens either, the size of iPhone was the most attractive feature.
I would ideally have liked the iPhone 5 to be the same in height as the preceding phones but it isn't too long so i'm fine with it. I do encounter problems in editing texts though. I don't know why their isn't an on screen button to move the cursor.
If you hold your finger for a second on the text being edited, you'll get a pop-up magnifying glass that you can drag to move the cursor.
DaMadFiddler wrote:Honestly, it's all about the software library. The iPhone is a great piece of hardware, but there some pretty damn good (and in some ways better) Android phones out there, too. However, the one thing NONE of those phones have is the software library that the iPhone has. Even without taking the segmentation issues into account, there simply isn't anywhere near the number of quality applications for Android that you can get for iOS.
I agree, which is why it's so hard for me to just make that jump. But I don't know why it's such a hangup for me since I don't game on my phone, and even if I wanted to I could just use the iPad. And yet I bought an Xperia Play just to play the games that I couldn't on my iPhone (ie emulators). So it would make more sense for me to just buy an Android phone to do with one device what I currently do with two. But after 5 years, it's hard to bring myself to do it.
Well that, and I just updated to iOS 7, which is basically like having a new phone anyway.
I've been running iOS 7 for a few months now. It is certainly a jarring experience at first, IMO. However, my mom recently got an iPhone and whenever I help her with something and use iOS 6 again, I'm definitely glad I'm on iOS 7.
And I'm so glad they're finally done with all the godawful skeumorphic bullshit.
I love it. It makes any iOS device immediately feel less like a toy and more like a sleek professional device. I can also finally stick with the stock tones and alert sounds because they no longer all sound like they've been ripped from a baby's activity center.
That said, I know where Mel is coming from. I'm really not interested in casual games, and if I'm honest I don't really play most of the proper iOS games I own either. But if I do, they end up on my iPad. When I'm on the go my 3DS is my first port of call because I'd rather put an hour into Fire Emblem than bloody Angry Birds Star Wars 2 (ehhh).
Emulators are a bigger draw for me. The games I've put most hours into on iOS are Pokemon FireRed and Earthbound.
Well, I got an iPhone 5s on release day. Seems to work nicely, although I haven't really played around with it all that much (although, everybody at work couldn't keep their hands off of it yesterday).
Now I just need to get a chance to find some useful apps and such to install on it.
I now declare this the "tell BlueCrab what apps he should install on his iPhone 5s thread".
So I finally did it. I dropped my iphone and bought a Galaxy S4. And after two days, all I can say is fuck this shit. Android is fucking terrible. The 5 inch screen is sexy, but thats all the good I can say about it. The web browser is balls, all the apps I used on iPhone at half-assed on Android, the keyboard is terrible with no autocorrect whatsoever and I had to install 10 Android mods just to get 50% of the fuctionality of what I had back. Seriously, it has taken 3 times longer just to type this message than it would have on my iPhone. So yeah, I promised I would give it a week, but I can't imagine lasting that long before throwing the fucking thing out the window.
melancholy wrote:So I finally did it. I dropped my iphone and bought a Galaxy S4. And after two days, all I can say is fuck this shit. Android is fucking terrible. The 5 inch screen is sexy, but thats all the good I can say about it. The web browser is balls, all the apps I used on iPhone at half-assed on Android, the keyboard is terrible with no autocorrect whatsoever and I had to install 10 Android mods just to get 50% of the fuctionality of what I had back. Seriously, it has taken 3 times longer just to type this message than it would have on my iPhone. So yeah, I promised I would give it a week, but I can't imagine lasting that long before throwing the fucking thing out the window.
Once you actually use Android for a bit longer you will realise why it's superior to iOS
Skynet wrote:Once you actually use Android for a bit longer you will realise why it's superior to iOS
I used Android for over two years, and I have to say that the only thing that would make it at all better is the large number of various custom roms for various devices. Of course, that only applies if you have one of the devices that the various different roms support -- not if you get stuck with some device that nobody cares about.
Then you just run into carrier update hell and being forced to find a custom rom to even have partial functionality when the carrier completely screws you over. And of course, if your device isn't well supported (as happened with my old phone), then you end up flashing on several different ones every other week in hopes that one of them might make things work sanely again (and they never do).
I suppose if you really like to tinker to get every little thing correct on a phone, then Android might well be better. If you just want your phone to work, then iOS is vastly superior. Normally I like to tinker, just not as much as I had to with Android.
All right. After using it a bit, here are my thoughts on iOS 7:
LIKE
- new task manager, with application snapshots and "swipe to dismiss" (even if it was stolen directly from Palm's WebOS)
- "Control Center" swipe-up controls. It's REALLY handy to have these "frequent-use" controls in a pop-up menu like this.
- groups within groups
- flashlight button (it SERIOUSLY took Apple this long to add a flashlight button?)
- improved camera app
- improved Safari rendering
- removal of ridiculous skeumorphism
- AirDrop. Haven't had the need to use it much, but it's definitely a nice feature to have.
DON'T LIKE
- the white color scheme. It's visually tiring and it clashes with my black iPhone. It would be nice to be able to change the colors back to something black-based. Or, since Apple generally isn't big on customization, it would at LEAST be nice to have two or three presets (perhaps one tailored to each iPhone finish).
- Safari controls. I now have to tap the address bar to call up the controls at the bottom, so switching between tabs or calling up bookmarks takes an extra step each time.
- smaller group display area. Groups used to show 4x4 icons; groups can now be multiple pages long, but the grid is reduced to 3x3 for no good reason.
- banner notifications seem larger and more intrusive now
- album art size in the music player was increased (and is not adjustable), making fewer albums/songs fit onscreen at a time
AMBIVALENT
- impressionist icons. I'm glad they got rid of the unnecessary skeumorphism in the UI, but I'm a bit on the fence about whether they went too far in the opposite direction. This looks VERY "jet age" retro-futuristic, and some icons are a bit overly abstract.
- swiping gestures for menus. There are now FOUR different swiping gestures to call up different menus from the top and bottom, and each does something different. Seems like this could be simplified.
- the "wall of pictures" they used to replace CoverFlow. I rarely used CoverFlow and I doubt I'll use this either, but this looks much more cluttery and unpolished. I didn't care for it in iTunes and I don't care for it here... but since I don't use it anyway, it's not a big deal.
I haven't run into any compatibility issues so far... not even with some of the old first-generation games that never updated for the Retina display, much less the new aspect ratio. The only place I encountered a minor problem is with some of the older Gameloft games that use the built-in video player for cutscenes; the audio plays, but the video doesn't. However, once the cutscene ends, the game itself plays as it should. (And most of those Gameloft games are just forgettable ripoffs of other games, anyway.)