My Move to iPhone

[ionbasa]

NOTE: This will be an multipart thread with updates weekly.

 

 

Intro

So, let me begin by prefacing why I'm moving to an Apple phone. I have got nothing against Android. I've had most of my smart phones actually run Android. My latest phone was an Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini, but it pretty much sucked balls. Infrequent software updates and Samsung Knox prevent me rooting without throwing up an yellow triangle on boot (not that I personally care, but it limits my ability to resell or trade in if I wish to do so.) I've also had a variety of other phones as well, my favorite thus far being the HTC HD2 which shipped with Windows Mobile 6.5 with HTC Sense. That phone had awesome community support by the folks over at XDA Developers, I even had Ubuntu running on it at one time, but my HD2 saw up to Android 4.0 on it before its age was too much to be useful anymore. I've also had two iPod Touches before (2nd gen and 4th gen) so iOS isn't completely new to me. 

 

Why?

Why would I want to switch over in the first place?

There's a variety of issues I've had with Android phones in the past year or so, mainly being lack of less than 5" screen devices that I feel comfortable using. The second being that most of the smaller Android phones tend to be the cheaper variety with not so great specs. Which is where my current phone comes in: Galaxy s5 Mini. I've had nothing but issues with the phone. The camera is a joke and the limited ram (1.5Gb) causes Andorid itself to hang. With no apps running and with the stock launcher (Touchwiz) removed and replaced with the Google Now launcher, my RAM usage hovers at 1Gb. leaving only 512Mb of usable RAM space for apps! I can't even browse the web without running out of memory, apps also force close or hang because of limited RAM space.

 

Also, my phone is kinda broken, it randomly restarts by itself. Its also out of warranty.

 

Which iPhone?

For this review, I'll be using the iPhone 5s. Mainly because I got it for free after I upgraded one of our lines to the new iPhone 6s. I realize this isn't as exciting, but I'll still be comparing and giving my impressions on iOS. The iPhone will be running the latest version of iOS, which at the time of writing this is 9.2.1

 

Won't You Miss ROOT/ SU /Power User Features?

Jailbreak/Cydia - Analogous of Root on iOS devices. I will be doing this later on, and I will give my impressions as well.

 

Day 1:

 

I started by downloading the Move to iOS app on the Google play store:

 

The switch and syncing of my data to the iPhone seems to have gone on without a hitch. I still have all the data on my Android phone. I'll be making ROM backup of Android phone along with keeping manual backups of all photos and documents I've accumulated. All of my Android apps are either natiely available on iOS or there are alternatives which do the same function.

 

One thing I won't miss is the SD card slot. Android 4.4 / Samsung implemented an stupid SD card rule where apps can not natively access or save data on the SD card. SInce the iPhone has 16Gb of internal storage, I won't have to worry about having separate folders and how I manage my data across external/internal nand. If I ever do run out of storage I can always dump and sync pictures I don't need to my computer or do an network backup, just use iCloud, or sync with iTunes. No biggie.

 

What I miss:

• No home screen or widgets is kinda depressing. I usually kept my Google Calendar, flashlight toggle, and weather on my home screen. I usually only run 1 homescreen on Android anyway, so its not too bad of an change, will just need some time to adjust and get used to it.
• Google Now - I guess Siri is the alternative, but I haven't set is (her?) up yet.
• File/Folder Browser - I guess for simplicity sake, it's more easy on iPhone to find pictures and documents, but there's not a whole lot of flexibility for now.
• Keyboard meh. I miss the stock Android keyboard. Will probably be replacing with Swiftkey, or another alternative.

What I like:

• Buttery smooth UI - Holy shit, I kid not, this is an godsend to what I was dealing with on the Galaxy S5 Mini.
• Touch ID - I used to only use an pin code on my S5 Mini, this is an much better and secure option.
• Better screen - My Galaxy S5 Mini had blue shift in sunlight
• Camera - I'll post comparison pictures later on.

 

Day 1 Conclusion

Overall, the iPhone 5s was an way better experience than the S5 Mini. There are a few things that are annoying or missing coming from the Android ecosystem, but I'll address most of those in a later post. I'm quite happy with the UI and responsiveness of iOS in general. Please feel free to ask questions, critique, or give suggestions. Feedback is always appreciated. If you'd like me to try something out, I definitely will.

 

[Horan]

I think its a bit of weird review now, because you compare devices that are a bit on a different level. 5s is a one/one and a half year old high end device en a s5 mini is more like a budget/midrange model from last year. Which wouldn't be that if you noted this. And explained the difference. A lot of disadvantages you sum up are also caused by the specific implantation of android by samsung. (I've got for example android 4.4 and have almost no problems with sd-card storage). At last I would like to say that your review was quite a pleasure to read and provides also a lot of usefull information and eagerly waiting on updates.

[Mew]

6 hours ago, Horan said:

I think its a bit of weird review now, because you compare devices that are a bit on a different level. 5s is a one/one and a half year old high end device en a s5 mini is more like a budget/midrange model from last year. Which wouldn't be that if you noted this. And explained the difference. A lot of disadvantages you sum up are also caused by the specific implantation of android by samsung. (I've got for example android 4.4 and have almost no problems with sd-card storage). At last I would like to say that your review was quite a pleasure to read and provides also a lot of usefull information and eagerly waiting on updates.

The 5s is over 2 years old; it'll be over 2.5 years old by the time my upgrade comes in may. 

[ionbasa]

13 hours ago, Horan said:

I think its a bit of weird review now, because you compare devices that are a bit on a different level. 5s is a one/one and a half year old high end device en a s5 mini is more like a budget/midrange model from last year. Which wouldn't be that if you noted this. And explained the difference. A lot of disadvantages you sum up are also caused by the specific implantation of android by samsung. (I've got for example android 4.4 and have almost no problems with sd-card storage). At last I would like to say that your review was quite a pleasure to read and provides also a lot of usefull information and eagerly waiting on updates.

This isn't the full review yet. I plan to do updates every 7 or so days (1 week). One of the SD card storage issues I was having with the Galaxy S5 Mini was Google Photos and other apps not being able to directly save/modify or delete data on the card.

This has been documented: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/android-platform/14VUiIgwUjY/UsxMYwu02z0J

and here: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2014/oct/09/how-can-i-get-android-kitkat-to-work-with-my-sd-cards

and here: http://lifehacker.com/android-kitkat-blocks-some-access-to-micro-sd-cards-1524997895

External I/O access to SD cards were modified to in Android KitKat  to use an emulation/sandboxed layer which broke many apps, and managed to frustrate me coming from Jelly Bean.

 

As to regards of the Galaxy mini line being an budget phone: No it isn't. It first retailed $450 when I bought it. To put it into perspective the iPhone 5s retailed for $699 on Apple's website. That's only an $249 difference. If anything, the S5 Mini was supposed to be an 'premium mid range' package for those of us who don't like large smartphones. Considering most mid-range phones retail ~$300, and low end phones surround the ~$200 range (HTC Desire) / Moto G

 

My issues aren't just with implementations by samsung. I had already replaced the launcher and done software tweaks such as modifying transition speeds and setting default background processes. There were on the other hand Samsung based issues: such as the front and rear camera choices. The ram issue seems to be an generic Android problem, many manufacturers don't tweak their kernels to enable KSM and memory compression.  The iPhone 5s has 1Gb of RAM while the S5 Mini has 1.5GB, yet I haven't encountered any issues on iOS. I know memory management between the two work differently (including how multitasking works). On iOS oppn apps not in the foreground get 'frozen' and the process gets paused (or is dumped to storage) until re-opened. On Android, background processes can continue to gobble up RAM.

 

8 hours ago, kurahk7 said:

The 5s is over 2 years old; it'll be over 2.5 years old by the time my upgrade comes in may. 

If you upgrade to an 6s, don't think twice about it. NVMe SSD is insane fast. The reason I have the 5s is because one line upgraded to the 6s and I got their 5s. Its funny that the older iPhone 5s is better than the newer Galaxy s5 Mini I was using.

[VerticalDiscussions]

Well its actually quite normal for you to have felt that way. Samsung mini line was a complete failure, selling low end phones for near high end prices with theyr equivalent "S" emblem, which is why we never saw an S6 mini or S7, and they did good on that. Altough its actually kinda unfair to compare Samsung TouchWiz to IOS, since we all know Samsung hardware is great, but software is totally underwhelming, even now because it has way too many useless features, too much ram comsuption and overhaul slugishness and pretty much no updates anytime soon. I cant see the S7 getting Android N until its late 2016 if not early 2017, which is a complete bs for such an expensive phone. Maybe, if the Iphone SE proves to be a worthy Iphone 6S "Mini", ill try to get it and run it along with a small powerbank, but otherwise i dont see it happening, so it would be an LG G5 or an Iphone SE, which should release at around the same time, but as far as software goes, nothing can beat Apple in terms of balance, usefulness and speed.

[ionbasa]

23 minutes ago, VerticalDiscussions said:

Well its actually quite normal for you to have felt that way. Samsung mini line was a complete failure, selling low end phones for near high end prices with theyr equivalent "S" emblem, which is why we never saw an S6 mini or S7, and they did good on that. Altough its actually kinda unfair to compare Samsung TouchWiz to IOS, since we all know Samsung hardware is great, but software is totally underwhelming, even now because it has way too many useless features, too much ram comsuption and overhaul slugishness and pretty much no updates anytime soon. I cant see the S7 getting Android N until its late 2016 if not early 2017, which is a complete bs for such an expensive phone. Maybe, if the Iphone SE proves to be a worthy Iphone 6S "Mini", ill try to get it and run it along with a small powerbank, but otherwise i dont see it happening, so it would be an LG G5 or an Iphone SE, which should release at around the same time, but as far as software goes, nothing can beat Apple in terms of balance, usefulness and speed.

I wasn't using Touchwiz! I had that part written in the OP. I was actually using the Google Now launcher. 

[VerticalDiscussions]

5 hours ago, ionbasa said:

-snip-

And it was slow o-o? Well god, i had myself an original Samsung Galaxy Mini, didnt even have an Oled display and it sucked balls hard. Couldnt even play Clash of Clans on it, with a 600 mhz single core, probably an ARM robot oriented cpu... They were a complete failure of a lineup thats for sure. The only cool thing about em was that you could remove theyr battery, but Samsung killed such awesome feature anyways.