Anyone who knew me when I first moved to the UK knows I have very little love for Apple. They annoyed me by considering me a different person when I moved to Britain so I had the choice of losing all my iTunes stuff and switching to UK iTunes or awkwardly maintaining it with a US credit card. I chose to lose it as I wasn’t planning on moving back and I actually shared an account with my sister as none of us had seen where it was going when iTunes first came out. Apple haven’t turned out to be fans of madcap things like sharing.
Either way, a lot of their philosophy has always annoyed me and their biggest fans can be, er, abrasively enthusiastic. As a result, other than the one iPhone my father-in-law kindly gave me when I first moved to the UK, I didn’t plan on owning another one.
I own one now. We looked into it extensively, and the phone I want does not exist as an android. My all time favorite phone was the Samsung Galaxy S 3 Mini – perfect size, ran well, no problems. If anything, Chris still uses that phone to maintain things in the UK and it runs very well for its age and the battery life is still ace. The Samsung Galaxy S 6, on the other hand, has been a crap shoot from the beginning. It is a ridiculously big size, the battery is terrible and it gets white hot. Living in a desert, I could imagine that becoming an issue. We did research online and in physical stores and it looks like the android options are either huge with a good camera or small with a terrible camera. The man at the Verizon shop had actually had an S 6 and now has an S 7. He said it was a bit better, but the battery was still lack luster and it still gets hot. It was also very obviously still a very large phone even apparently being at the smaller end of big in the current market.
Apple are the only company making a small high end smartphone with a good camera, good battery and that doesn’t get white hot from normal use. I had to give in.
Chris kindly googlized my phone, so I don’t need to do much of anything with iTunes or iCloud or any of that. I even installed Google maps over Apple maps. I must admit, it is a very solid phone, but that if Samsung or any other major android producer release a quality mini with a good camera that doesn’t overheat, I will be back in the Verizon store to swap it over.
I would really love Google to make a phone. This process made me realize how fully googlized most of my tech life is. They would be the ideal people to make me a phone as I like their services and they generally do things quite well. I never used any of the Samsumg only apps on my previous two phones. I mainly liked them for how easily integrated they are with Google. That said, Chris has done a great job making sure I almost never even see Safari, Apple’s native browser, or any of the other many Apple services I am ignoring.
Here is the video of the joyous process of buying an iPhone SE: