back to the dark (sleek, black and thin) side

I bought an iPhone 5. It came this week. It is fast and thin and works great, especially now that it’s sporting LTE.

I had a Motorola Droid RAZR. I got it last November through a screaming deal on Amazon Wireless. It had 4G LTE. It was fast and thin and worked ok. But I believed. I bought into the idea that now that Google owned Motorola the updates would be coming all the time. I believed. And I waited.

I’d overcome my bad history of the original Nexus (nice device but limited memory), my sense of abandonment by Dell and their 5″ Streak and my love hate relationships Android 2.x and 3.0. Despite all that I wrote online about preferring Android to iOS. I liked the customizable home screens, the growing number of apps, and the joy of using any old micro-USB cable to charge the phone.

Finally Verizon and Motorola got around to updating the RAZR to Android 4.0, just a few weeks before the faster, better Android 4.1 came out. I thought I could deal with the phone freezing while trying to dial out. Google Voice crashes? No big deal. Dealing with a Gmail app that doesn’t provide an integrated inbox? All the better to keep my personal and work mails separate.

The thing that really opened my eyes to the POS that the Verizon/Moto/Google combo had created was buying the Nexus 7. It had the latest OS. It was faster. It worked, things just snapped. The whole product was a joy to use. I hadn’t planned on upgrading to the new iPhone. My contract wasn’t up and I’ve long since stopped being an Apple fanboy. But I did it anyway.

I needed an iPhone for some app development I’m doing (nothing fancy, just playing around for now) and after swiping to answer yet another call with the RAZR only to have it look like nothing had happened while the caller is screaming “Hello?” from the other end it was time to embrace the Dark Side. I came. I ordered. I have beheld it’s shiny blackness.

I’m still an Android fan, for some things. I love the Nexus 7 and I’m writing this post on an ASUS Transformer Infinity (another device still waiting for an upgrade). However Apple really had created what may be the best phone ever. It works, despite the limitations of iOS, and it works well.

I can’t say the same for my history of Android phones.