Month: September 2012

Phone, camera, music and network

There’s a lot of chatter on tech blogs comparing iPhone, S3, lumia and more. Talk about cameras and 4G and operating systems.

For me, using an S3 is a stark reminder that before my first iPhone, I carried an iPod and a phone. Doubletwist kept pausing music today and the headset controls weren’t snappy like I want them to be. Should my phone first and foremost be an iPod? Something to ponder…

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When you buy a flagship phone, that’s what you should get

Let’s fire up the Samsung vs Apple debate—not about patents. I want to discuss the customer experience of buying a flagship phone.

When you buy an iPhone, you can pretty much expect you have the top product apple has on offer for about the next 12 months. You can upgrade every year or 2 to keep pace, or know you’ll have a pretty awesome phone regardless.

I expected similar from Samsung, though in hindsight this is a strange expectation. Samsung release many, many more products, and those products are going to compete with each other. The Galaxy Note 2 is an interesting comparison, for example, but these are different phones for customers who want different things.

What I didn’t expect, was for Samsung to release a better S3! But coming out this month is an S3 with 4G network support, available in black and grey. New colours are cosmetic—but why doesn’t my S3 have 4G support? To cap it off, they get the Jelly Bean update. Where’s my update!

Why is this a problem? It’s not a big deal really, but when you buy a top of the line S3, you expect to have a top of the line S3. You don’t expect to have a ‘second best’ S3 within weeks. :/

I encountered this news while looking for accessories—something that’s also easier to do over in the apple camp!

Big phone week

Two big pieces of phone news this week. Naturally everyone knows the iPhone 5 was announced but most people probably don’t know my replacement Galaxy S3 finally arrived. It vibrates!! So good.

Expect some more comparisons in coming weeks. I am looking forward to trying the camera out properly this time. I am also looking forward to the android “jelly bean” update, though I will say iOS update news is much clearer. When apple update iOS, you get the update. When google update android, you wait for Samsung to do something… Samsung’s information about upcoming OS releases is rubbish. They really need to improve there.

Meanwhile, to make comparisons more interesting I bought an iPad 2. I passed on ‘the new iPad’ because (a) it costs more, (b) it chews battery faster, (c) weighs more and (d) has a silly name. I grew up on ‘New Street’, and let me tell you that name gets old fast.

iPad 2 is doing a great job for reading comics, books and news via flipboard. All of which are nice on the S3, but the iPad screen is bigger.

This way I get to keep my iOS content: apps, tv shows and movies. I also discovered—when a friend loaned me one during a jam session—it’s great for quickly looking up bass tabs on the Internet.

So this is the plan: iPad, Galaxy S3 and iPhone 5 envy. But hopefully not much of the latter! 😉