Woke up early. Can’t get back to sleep. Started pondering my iOS experience so far.
Stuff I’m missing from the N1:
The iPhone is curiously inelegant for an Apple device. It’s just a brick. The N1 has the slimming curves at its edges of an Air; the iPhone is just an extruded rounded-corner rectangle. Awkward to hold.
It’s also stupidly slick. A case almost feels mandatory for this, to give it some friction in my hand. I keep feeling like I might drop it at any moment.
I am really missing home screen widgets. Enough that I’m tempted to jump through hoops to downgrade the OS and jailbreak it, or to return it after my trip and order an N4. Despite all of Android’s fiddlyness. This surprises me. But having my calendar right there filling most of my first home screen was NICE; it gave me an ambient awareness of what I had coming up in my life.
Also the decision to make all the icons cling to the top of the screen is kinda maddening. I’m used to having them arranged down near the bottom, where they’re easier to hit with my thumb without stretching it and making my hold on the device more precarious.
The connector is super-strong, making for a crappy “throw it in the bedside dock, pluck it out when needed” experience. Plus it doesn’t even bring up the clock app when it’s in the dock.
I still vastly prefer the stock Android autocorrect over the iOS experience. Having the list of possible words and the ability to cancel autocorrect quickly, always in the same place right above the keyboard instead of one faint blue word floating around near the cursor, is so nice.
Really there’s just lots of little places where iOS seems less thought through, for all that it’s the oldest and theoretically most mature smartphone OS. Like the way the keyboard is always uppercase. Tiny little aggravations. It was awesome compared to dumbphones but now it kinda feels like the Minimum Viable Product.
I mean, you can’t set a contact to always go to voicemail. That’s not even smartphone functionality. Dumbphones can do that. But not the iPhone.
Plus side: much stronger software and hardware ecosystem! Most stuff on the Android store is awkward and ugly. iOS’ store is full of sleek, polished things. It doesn’t help that Google has revamped the look of Android with every release, either; things are really schizophrenic there.
If I downgrade and jailbreak I can fix a bunch of these. I think I’m probably going to, after some research. Though the length of time it’s taking to find one for iOS6 is worrisome for the long-term viability of that strategy.
Edit the next morning. Oh wow I hate that it limits you to 30 seconds for ringtones and alerts. Luckily this is enforced by iTunes, not the phone, and there is a kludge-around; basically you give iTunes an m4r file (m4a, just rename it to m4r) that it thinks is short enough, sync that, show iTunes’ copy of the sound in the Finder, then drop the real file over it. Then you disable ringtone synching in iTunes, apply, turn it back on, and apply – bingo, long ringtones. What can I say, it is VERY IMPORTANT for me to be able to have my ringtone be the ENTIRE opening theme from the c64 port of R-Type instead of thirty seconds of it.