I Am Neg

Switching from iPhone? Have you gone mad?

It’s 2:24am on a Tuesday morning and most people are tucked up in their beds.  Most people except me, I am a night owl and I have just finished watching 2 films and few episodes from my box set of Only Fools and Horses.  I should go up to bed but i can’t.  I have had a late night idea.  Late night ideas are dangerous and brash. Well to me at least and generally they involve me spending lots of money.   Past late night ideas of mine have convinced me it was a good idea to buy a 30 year classic Mini that is starting to rust and eat its own pants.  I plan extravagant holidays, buy a new summer wardrobe or think of why it’s a good idea to sell my Macbook Pro and replace it with an A4 notepad.  So now I’m sat here and I’m thinking to myself, iPhone.  The wonderful iPhone 4S, the extension to my arm.  In my line of work, I am surrounded by Apple products.  An office full of iMac’s, MacBooks, iPhones and iPads.  My life is in sync with the slick fruity brand that is Apple.  Oh and the apps, how can we forget the apps?  I have amassed hundreds of apps at a cost I don’t even dare to consider.  Then I had my dangerous thought, ‘Could I actually ever leave my iPhone behind and switch to a different phone?’

To answer this question I had to know that a transfer to another device would work.  Whatever device it was, I had to have all of my apps available to me on the new platform.  How reliant we have become that a purchasing decision is based on whether we can play angry birds star wars, use Facebook or Shazam the latest track you heard in a bar.  I looked through my iPhone at all of the apps I currently had on my phone.  I had done this a few times in the past, just as a spring clean exercise and could only bare to get rid of about a fifth of the apps on my iPhone.  When was i ever going to use a tax calculator?  Really?  Yet I still kept it for when i might need it.  It was clear i was an App hoarder.  So this time i was ruthless.  I ripped out all the apps I didn’t use.  Colour Splash, gone.  Tax Calculator, gone.  Countless camera and filter apps.  Then I wrote down the top 10 apps I used religiously. 

1. Facebook 2. Spotify 3. Pinterest 4. DropBox 5. Sky Sports 6. Twitter 7. Tumblr

Then I started to struggle, in fact I had halted.  I never reached 10 apps.  I was a little upset at this tally, I always thought I was switching between multiple apps and leading some hip and trendy cosmopolitan lifestyle within the ‘appiverse’. 

The following sunday I was in Phones 4 U.  Not to make a purchase for myself but for my Wife’s Grandmother.  She wanted a phone with a Camera and easy to use  Oh and touchscreen technology.  Let’s not forget that the little old dear is 87 and she isn’t very savvy with technology so it had to be simple to use.  I homed in the HTC Radar.  At £110 it came in under their budget and seemed simple to use.  Whilst waiting to be served, my impulsiveness took over and in the 4 minutes that I stood waiting for an assistant, I had decided that I was going to buy a windows phone 8.0.  The big screen TV surrounded by Windows Phone 8 display graphics was drawing me in.  The OS (Operating System) aesthetics was enough to seduce me into making a decision there and then.  Not only had i decided to ditch the iPhone, I was going to move to a Windows Phone.  

Say, hello to the HTC 8X.  The challenge was on.  Within 2 weeks i would put one of the phones on eBay.  Which will it be?

1 Week later…

We have a winner.  The HTC 8X.  I didn’t need two weeks to decide.  I found that even though the Windows app store is pathetic compared to the might of Apple’s own and even android.  I did find that all the major players in the appiverse had already submitted apps to the windows store.  Facebook, Spotify, Sky Sports, Twitter etc.   The only price to pay on the app front when it comes to switching devices is that the Pinterest app is not available on Windows Phone yet.  This app received heavy use on my iPhone and I am very disappointed to see it hasn’t arrived yet.  There are third party client apps that allow you to use Pinterest but they are simply dire.  It’s a good job i have my iPad to fall back on when I’m not at my iMac.  

I’m not going to give a review of the HTC 8X, you can find them all over the internet, and would do a much better job than i can.  The operating system of the windows is aesthetically very different to whats out on the market at the moment.  The ‘tile’ format offers something that I had began to crave and that is personalisation.  The different tiles that are the apps, can offer live information and updates right there on your Start screen.  The whole experience is a lot more engaging than that of the iPhone.  I also noticed that from my time using the iPhone, a PDF would never display colours accurately.  No such problem with the HTC, the colours are as they should be.  The integrated maps app, actually works. Need I say more?  A nice additional native feature to this Windows Phone 8 OS is “Local Scout”.   An in-depth app that gives you info the area you are searching.  Suggestions on where to dine, places to visit or shops to spend your hard earned cash.  Sure the iPhone has apps like ‘Around Me’ which offer the same thing but its not all tied in so snuggly to the core OS.

As a parent, the fear that a 3 year old can instil into you, when he gets hold you your iPhone is not a good thing.  My little boy has deleted apps, changed settings and made in app purchases that i didn’t even know about.  With Windows Phone 8, there is “Kids Corner”.  When i showed my wife she was suitably impressed. A dedicated section for your little treasures to play to their hearts content.  Kids Corner essentially puts the child into a playpen, where they cannot change any settings and access only what you let them.  So you can head off to the kitchen to start dinner and not have to worry about them downloading 10,000 credits on Farmville.

In all honesty, during the last week I haven’t once wished I had my iPhone.  This has truly surprised me because i thought it would be a huge battle to cut my cord to the iPhone.  So why do iPhone users have such fierce loyalty to this device?  You can do the same things on the HTC and windows phone OS that you can on the iPhone 4S and even the iPhone 5.  Some cases the HTC outperforms the iPhone 5.  Screen resolution is greater, and on the odd occasion that I did pick up the iPhone, I found it uncomfortable and condensed in terms of screen size.  The HTC is noticeable bigger.  This never bothered me prior to the HTC and what you don’t have you don’t miss.  Now i’ve had it though, I would certainly miss the larger screen of the HTC.  So if it took me, an apple gadget owner for the last 6 years, one week to decide the iPhone ‘aint all that’, then I can only assume that the reason people in the office thought i was bonkers to even consider switching, is due to the fact that apple is the must have.  The brand of cool, the object of desire.  So here I am, breaking free of the Apple tree, just because I had the balls to question the power a brand can have over oneself.