I am returning my faulty S3—vibrate is a feature I don’t want to go without. I bought from kogan and am going to use their 14 day money back guarantee.
Why not get a replacement? It’s a personal thing. I’d rather not start out with a new gadget with double the delay (waiting for shipping again) and the feeling that I have a refurbished product instead of something new. Even though refurbs go through better quality control! 🙂
Don’t read that and think it means the iPhone is better than the S3. My wife had a faulty iPhone 4 out of the box so I think both Apple and Samsung can do better at shipping working products!
Back on the iPhone there are some things I’m glad to have back—and some things I miss.
Swipe (sweep?) to type is the most noticeable. I wonder who has patents on that. The android keyboards, particularly the go keyboard, are really good. The predictive text was better and I felt more in control. The iPhone autocorrect sometimes switches words after I have moved on and I find it harder to catch that. It feels like it has slowed down—it felt quite responsive when I first used an iPhone 3G. Now I frequently find myself going back to retype a word that got changed after I typed it. Android clearly shows predictive text results as you type and it’s easy to choose between them. Since the iPhone doesn’t always give you choices, you can find yourself tapping a lot more to get the words you want. Also, the iPhone stubbornly insists on autocorrecting my email from benjamins.boyle to Benjamin’s.Boyle and android never had that issue (it always gave me both options).
I prefer selecting text on iPhone and find copy and paste easier, but on the whole I miss the android typing experience. The wider screen helped too.
It’s good to have my headset fully functional again, but if the doubletwist app was available for iOS I would give it a go. I liked that airsync could sync with any computer at any time (works good with iTunes home sharing on my laptop and PC). It’s a shame iOS will only sync with one computer (or am I doing it wrong?)
Miss the bigger screen for readings books and comics but will survive.
App switching is definitely simpler on iPhone. Task manager works ok on android, but using task manager instead of the home screens is daft. The home screens are beautiful and with widgets easily better than iOS—but resetting apps by launching from shortcuts is wrong. The task manager launches apps better, but is nowhere near as nice as home screens. Take your pick there—I’m interested to see how both improve in this space. iOS 6 doesn’t seem to have widgets so I think android might be better—if they improve switching between apps using shortcuts (maybe there is a way to improve this that I did not discover).
Nice to use iMessage again—since my wife uses an iPhone too.
Not sure if my next phone will be an iPhone 5 or android. Interested in both! Shame the google nexus phone is not available in Australia.
I would like an android device, but not sure what. The nexus 7 tablet sounded good, but a poor fit for me I think. Wifi only limits it to home use and I don’t need another device at home. Also disappointing that services like google music are not available outside the US, and yet we are expected to pay $50 more. Georestrictions and regional price gouging are lame.
For now this will wind up my posts on iPhone and android. Happy shopping!
Ben Boyle lives here! 