Goodbye Droid, Hello Phone That Works
A couple years ago I was in the market for a smartphone. Mostly I wanted something which would let me do email and light internet browsing and stuff, and I also wanted it to serve as my primary MP3 player. While I had an iPod Touch and liked it a lot, I was and still am a fairly loyal Verizon customer, so the iPhone was out.
A friend of mine was getting a Droid and he talked it up like it was the second coming. So, when it came time for my upgrade discount, I picked it up.
Big mistake–the Droid was a huge piece of junk, and I am so disgusted with my experience that I’m probably never going to own another Android device again.
About three months in, the entire left half of the touchscreen–which includes the “back” button and the area where I kept my messaging and phone icons–died. I sent it back to Verizon–one thing I can say is I’ve always had a good experience with their customer service, which is why they’ve kept my business–and received a replacement. This one had a broken sensor–it constantly registered as if your face were pressed against it. I sent that back; a month later, this third phone’s charging port died.
In general, Android is a terrible platform. I found the software to be very buggy–programs, including such esoteric ones as the phone, messaging, and included browser sections would crash really often. Syncing it to my computer was murder–it’d crash my Macbook a lot. In general, the build quality of the Droid was really poor–it felt flimsy, the battery cover kept slipping off, and again, I went through four separate phones.
A little over a week ago, the headphones jack completely died. For months, it’s been very slippery–if you glared at the headphones it’d stop recognizing them–but it finally decided not to recognize input whatsoever. Since an MP3 player was one of my primary reasons for buying the device, this made the Droid even more of a brick. I was due for an upgrade anyway–I made the jump and bought a snazzy new iPhone.
Now, I’ve had it for two days, admittedly, but I’m loving it so far. Obviously I’m familiar with the device based on my experience with the Touch, but the phone-centric features work pretty well. I spent some time on FaceTime and I’m really impressed by it–it didn’t seem to have any lag from what I could see, and even though it’s a gimmick I’ll probably never use it’s nice to have reminders that I’m living in the future.
I also really appreciate the fact that syncing doesn’t require anything more detailed than “plug in” (as opposed to the Droid which required an elaborate combination of buttons to get your computer to recognize it and later spit it out), and I like that I don’t have to babysit the organization of my MP3s–it’s REALLY nice to have a frontend to it–my music is not just randomly dumped into a single folder. It also feels a lot more solid, like it’s not going to fall apart soon.
I’m just hoping I don’t write a “fuck iPhone” article in two years’ time, but anyway.
So anyway, obvs I’m interested in gaming. So far I haven’t done much–I picked up Epic Citadel and was sufficiently impressed enough to consider downloading Infinity Blade. If you’ve got any suggestions of apps or games, let me know–my page is looking sad and empty right now. N.B. that I played Angry Birds on the Droid and I have no clue where the hype is–but then again I played it on a Droid, so maybe that’s it.
Filed Under: Blog
