Phone Flipping

After faffing about making the decision, I finally ditched my iPhone 5 for a Samsung Galaxy S4.

I know… try to contain your outrage, I shall endeavor to explain.

I switched to using the iPhone 4 back in 2011, having become massively pissed off with my BlackBerry and found it to be by far and away a better device. The iPhone 5 came along, and I remember some people being rather underwhelmed by it (I think I commented at the time that there’s only so many times you can completely revolutionize a black rectangle), and that the next phase would be the connected services that went along with the device.

With the launch of Vodafone’s 4G service, I started thinking about handsets I could switch up to (since the 5, rather annoyingly didn’t support their bit of the spectrum). I saw reports that the 5S was around the corner, and I realized that I wasn’t even slightly interested in it. I didn’t get the feeling that Apple were doing anything particularly interesting in the service space, and I wanted more than a slightly faster black rectangle with a better camera.

Hence my switch over to the S4. Google is doing some pretty neat stuff at the moment (Google Now, Image Storage/Processing and Google Glass), and I can’t really experiment with those services fully on the iPhone (which is a shame, because despite the technical issues I was having, it was a nice bit of hardware).

I’ve not really had the phone long enough to develop a reasonable opinion of it. The 4G service is pretty damned cool – getting 55 Mbps to the phone is amazing. I may do a fuller write-up once I’ve lived with it for a while.

B