A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.
21 September 2013
I’ve been an iPhone user since the first release, and have upgraded my hardware faithfully at every opportunity. I did take a little detour to Windows Phone land for a short while.
But I flipped this week to an LG G2 android device. I’ve been running the developer previews of iOS7 for months so there was no real new excitement from Apple for me this week on the software front. And the new iPhone hardware is fine but nothing stunning about it. And most importantly, neither the hardware nor the software addresses my number one smartphone problem: battery life. I have struggled with my iPhone 5, needing to keep charging setups at home, in all cars, at work, and cables and car chargers with me at all times. I use the internet a lot and I would get at most a half day of use on a charge. And then iOS7 just make it horrible with the background tasks – Facebook and Maps in particular would just kill my battery, and this never got a lot better during the iOS7 betas. I had to constantly monitor what tasks were running and manually kill them. Smarter battery management is sorely lacking on these devices – there is no reason that Facebook should be nattering away in the background burning battery when the phone is in my pocket. Maybe the app developer thinks their app is so awesome that it should do this, but the OS should be smarter about managing the tradeoff between network usage and battery life.
So I am switching. I am looking for the full smartphone experience with better battery life. Several Android phones promise this, and I decided to try the LG based on other’s recommendations. I’m only in day 2 so I can’t be sure if it has solved the problem, but it does seem at first impression to survive longer on a charge. And it certainly has every app I need. The level of polish is so much better than the Android devices I toyed with 2 years ago. Way too many buttons and options but I am learning my way around all that. The input keyboard is way better than iOS thanks to Swype and also better autocorrect preview.