iPhone 5

This is not a techie blog. Actually for almost two years it hasn't been a blog at all. But, I digress. I have been a loyal android user since android came out. My most recent android phone was a Motorola Droid X2. This was very unfortunate. Especially for Motorola. My wife Julie and I had gone into the Verizon store two years ago to upgrade her phone. The Droid X2 was one of the phones I was thinking she should consider. When we went in it actually turned out that they had a sale where if you buy one, yes, that's right, you get one free. We should have immediately realized this was a red flag to stay away. When we bought the phones they had android version 2.2 or Froyo on them. Not long afterwards they were upgraded to Gingerbread or android version 2.3. The last upgrade this phone ever received was 2.3.4. After that...nothing. It never got Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean. This phone just wallowed in it's slowness. At the end of it's life (just before my contract period was over--yesterday) it was just ridiculous how poor this phone worked. The worst part was that the battery was just useless. I could charge it for 8 hours and have it say it was shutting down because the battery was critically low in a matter of minutes. You could literally watch the battery status icon "drain." This may have been the source of a lot of my issues, but there were other things that just drove me crazy. I use Instagram and when you go into the app, it has to load the photos from the web. When I opened the app it would just time out and say it couldn't load anything. The way to fix this is to turn the phone off and then back on. This took over three minutes. We did visit the Verizon store and ask about this issue and they gave me a shortcut that sometimes worked. You put the phone into airplane mode and then turn airplane mode off. This would sometimes fix this issue. The only way to fix the battery issue would have been to replace it. Yes, I could have replaced the battery. But I figured with not too much time left on my contract and knowing I wouldn't be keeping this phone I didn't see spending the money on a battery. So the decision now came down to what phone to upgrade to when my contract period was over (yesterday.) I had a countdown going and was driving my family nuts. I narrowed the choices down to either an iPhone 5 or the Motorola RAZR Maxx HD. I have stuck with Motorola almost exclusively through the years. As I already said earlier, I have had an android phone pretty much since android came out. One of my research strategies when I need to make a decision like this is to talk with people that have the phone, or whatever it is, and ask them if they like it. This has served me well for many things. I struck gold on Easter when our family came over and two family members had the two phones I was considering. I have to say that one of the things that really turned me off of the RAZR was how large it was. I really wasn't sure how well it would fit in my pocket. So I agonized for quite a while, but obviously from the subject of this post, you have probably extrapolated that I chose the iPhone 5. Now, I only got the phone just yesterday, but I have to say I really like it so far. There are some key differences, obviously, between this phone and my old one. My old phone was only 3G. The iPhone 5 is 4G LTE. Then there is the operating systems. Although, at a basic level, they are both basically UNIX/Linux based. While it's screen is larger than previous iPhones, it's actually smaller than my old phone. But I think it's mostly just the width. The height is about the same. The iPhone 5 is much lighter and seems much smaller though in general. I used it for a while without a case and I would say that while I would probably not need to have mine in a case, I feel better having it in one. The iPhone's outside surfaces are pretty smooth and it can easily slip out of your hand. Especially when your hands are super dry because of the cold winter weather we've had for so long here. Your hands just really have no moisture in them from mid-winter on. So it would be easy to drop the phone. For a case I chose the new Lifeproof case. I liked that it had a warranty against falls and it is waterproof to 6.6 ft (3 m.) I figure that way I can take it to the water park in the summer or my sister-in-law's pool and use my iPhone in the water to take pictures of the kids this summer without having to buy another waterproof enclosure for my phone. We'll see how that turns out. While I haven't installed all the applications I used to use on my droid, for the ones I have installed, some of them are quite different. This really surprised me. We use the Cozi organizer. If you don't know about this, it is great. You can put everyone's schedule on one calendar among many other features. Anyway, it is exactly the same on the iPhone except for input methods and stuff like that. But those kinds of things are because I'm using iOS instead of Android. Instagram wasn't much different, although it's MUCH faster. I'm guessing that is due mostly to the 4G LTE. What is different about Instagram is that on the news page it doesn't show the names of people that have started following you. On android it did show this. Just like if was someone liking your photo. That appears to be missing on the iPhone. But maybe it's just that I don't have any new followers. I'll have to get to some other differences tomorrow, as I've run out of time to write this. I will comment more tomorrow.