It wasn’t so long ago that I was querying the logic behind the surge of interest in the newly released iPad. Since then, my desire to purchase Apple’s latest iGadget hasn’t increased in the slightest, despite the many positive things I’ve heard about them from geek and non-geek friends.
And as much as I’d like to shake my head at them, listing the many reasons why they should, at the very least, wait for the first major firmware update or the next iPad generation, it does make me feel rather hypocritical. Why? Simple. Despite having had many frustrations with my iPhone 3G, I still have every intention of purchasing the iPhone 4 when it hits Australia.
To date, my problems with the iPhone 3G that I still currently use have been varied. It’s slow and often unresponsive, has an unfortunate habit of losing signal strength and has an extremely limited battery life. Couple this with the average-at-best cellular capabilities of my iPhone 3G and the unfortunate reality that the recently released 4.0 operating system has slowed it down even further, and it’s a recipe for a type of Apple cake that I could justifiably never eat again.
And yet despite knowing all of this, despite having heard from many others of similar (and additional) concerns, despite chanting these facts to myself in an effort to change my mind, I still want to bite from the Apple iPhone again.
From what I’ve read and seen the iPhone 4 has fixed many of the problems I’ve had with my not-so-trusty ol’ 3G, but I still can’t fully understand my attraction. Other big name competitors such as HTC, Google and even Microsoft (later in the year) have their own smartphones on offer that are attractive alternatives to the iPhone. But therein lies the problem: whether explicitly or implicitly, they will all be using the iPhone as a point of comparison because of the popularity the Apple smartphone enjoys.
And even though the current word on the iPhone 4 street is that it hates left-handers due to a rather unfortunate design fault, I still have my beating heart set on buying one. Maybe it’s the hundreds of thousands of Apps on offer, maybe it’s because the iPhone brand is so enticing or maybe it’s because I’m too scared to step away from the smartphone I know and loathe love; but I won’t be stepping away from the product line that has had more than its fair share of disappointments for me.
If I’m not alone on this or you have some insights as to why I’m so apparently destined to buy an iPhone 4, please let me know in the comments below.
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I did my research, read articles, reviews and comparisons and I’m definitely going for the HTC Desire over the iPhone. Just because something is popular, doesn’t make it the best! Pretty much everyone I know these days has an iPhone, so I’ve had plenty of exposure to them, and they’re great - don’t get me wrong. But the HTC seems to just make all those pro-Apple arguments melt away… so I intend to own a phone that is better than the iPhone, and better yet, the only one in my little circle of iPhone-loving friends and family.
Its the apps. I have used the Desire a couple of times now since one of my best friends bought one and i was UNDERWHELMED. It was responsive but the menus and the standard apps are utterly bewildering and badly, badly named. It is a counter intuitive OS.
When i say it was responsive i mean it was incredibly fast, compared to my (now) sluggish 3g. When i first got the 3g i was shocked at how fast it was, how easy it was for the beginner to navigate, how well everything was named, out intuitive it all was. Now my iphone has been slowed down by successive OS elements not designed for it (which i have to ask ?advertising ploy or something? how could they have got it so wrong?). But I am with Pending on this one; i will be buying the iphone. It has nothing to do with what is the better phone. A smart phone has very little of phone in it for me. 90% of the use of my iphone is devoted to other uses - GPS, iBook, music, internet - and it is these features that are BETTER on the iphone.
My mate said ‘why do you need an appstore, you have 3 billion apps and most of them are sh*t’. My reply to that is that the Desire has one or two choices for a single feature, say an E-reader or GPS. We have about 10 times that number. This allows us to find the one that works for us, rather than just putting up with an interface that may not be attractive. Not to mention i know how this phone works, i like how this phone works.
I am not un-tempted by the new showing of things like the Desire, the DroidX; they are all very impressive pieces of hardware, but looking at the demo’s, looking at the WAY they work, not just their clock speed, i repeat that i am underwhelmed.
ALSO how many mega pixels is TOO many mega pixels! I mean my brother has an OLD 5 mp camera from which the photo’s blow up on my 50″ 720p screen in full resolution! WHEN will i need a photo which fits perfectly on a 5″ screen ffs? Its nice to have but to buy a phone based on the camera, especially given that they all appear to have TINY lenses is silly to me. Buy a CAMERA based on its CAMERA features, buy a phone based on nearly everything else.
@ Muffin - I have heard many good things about the HTC Desire. Perhaps I should research further to see if they can sway me from the iPhone side of the Force… or maybe you could enlighten us all here with your findings.
@ Dude from Sydney - The Apps are definitely the reason I keep coming back to when I think of why I love my iPhone. Being able to listen to music in my car, while having spoken GPS navigations thrown at me at appropriate junctures is just too awesome. Not so long ago I was reading the intro to an Apps magazine that said that there were almost 100,000 Apps available on iTunes… now there are over 200,000 and growing. That’s pretty hard to best.
The Android Marketplace is only just getting started… one of my concerns was the lack of apps, but within the first week or so of Desire being launched, the Android Marketplace hit 30,000 apps - that rate of growth is fine by me. You’re not stuck with your built-in hard drive storage, you can simply upgrade or have additional micro SD cards to hold music and/or movies… which are beautiful to watch. I like the idea of having a customizable home-screen (or 7 even), and I even like that the user interface requires a bit more computer literacy than the iPhone. Overall, the Desire suits me better than the iPhone… I prefer to have something a bit different, a bit fancier
Wow, that’s an impressive rate of growth for the Android Marketplace. I’m assuming you can also replace the battery in the HTC Desire? One of the biggest problems I have with the iPhone is the lack of a removable battery, meaning you have to send it in and have it appraised by Apple technicians, who then have to determine whether the charge has degraded enough for it to be replaced. Currently my iPhone battery lasts less than a day with normal use; not exactly ideal.