Jan 4th, 2019

Author: donich_admin

Abandoned the iPhone

Afraid that after only eighteen months experimentation with the iPhone and Apple’s eco-system I have given up on it for good. Nice phone in a number of ways, but for me it has two very bad features, one of which is just a killer.

a) The battery life is awful. Just as bad (if not worse) than the Windows Phone it replaced, and particularly spectacularly terrible when using the Google Maps feature with the SatNav on. To me this is one key feature a phone must have, and on the iPhone 7 plus you are lucky to get four hours of operation out of it before the battery is flat. I realize that it is because of the GPS, but it is not much use when you are on holiday trying to navigate round a foreign city.

b) The killer one. No headphone jack. I have a pair of expensive Bose noise cancellation headphones which I use extensively whilst travelling and working round the house. The iPhone only has a lightning port so you have to use an adaptor to attach the headphones to the phone; it is unreliable, buggy and also a pain in the backside as it is easy to lose and even easier to break. Also you can’t charge the phone while listening to music without yet another adaptor. Apple are hella stupid for implementing this, and looking at the trends they seem to want to go for no ports on the phone at all and give the end user a combination of facial recognition and Bluetooth. I’ve been there with both these features extensively and neither of them work satisfactorily.

So I bit the bullet and bought a Moto Android One. It has a head jack and seems so far to have a decent battery life. This is my last port of call on smartphones – if this one doesn’t work properly I will just give up and buy a feature phone that makes phone calls.

So my loss is J’s gain as he is getting an iPhone 7+, an iWatch 2 and a docking station.