Phone glee 2014

I’ve got a case on my phone.

It’s a Magpul case endorsed by none other than William Gibson – it’s a little bit Mall Ninja but not obviously so. Good grip, good protection, only obstructs about half my charge cables. I don’t mind it, and it doesn’t make the phone too big. Which begs the question: if I’m going to carry something of that size, why not get a phone of that size that doesn’t require a case and is using the added volume for bigger battery and a screen to match? Sturdy polycarbonate, Gorilla Glass…you see where this is going.

Seven years after the introduction of the iPhone, I’ve finally started giving active consideration to what my life would look like without it. To be honest, a lot of this thinking has been enabled by the acquisition of the iPad mini – a guarantee of iOS functionality in a go-everywhere package. But a lot of it has been driven by the frustration of battery on my iPhone 5 in the past six months or so. The problem is, my daily work life is in places where signal is compromised at best, and Verizon phones never deal well with compromised signal. And the battery has already been replaced once, which isn’t encouraging.

The problem is, battery technology isn’t keeping up, so the only solution is to cram in a bigger battery. And since Android’s power management was unspeakably bad until very recently, Android phone makers made a virtue of necessity by using 5-inch screens on phones too big to use with one hand…but which could make it through the day with the correspondingly oversized power supply. Apple did a little of that, but not much, when the 5 arrived. But now…

Now we have the Moto X. In addition to the larger battery, it uses several other tricks. Slightly smaller screen. AMOLED. 720p instead of unnecessarily higher resolution that the human eye can’t distinguish. And most innovative of all, a series of coprocessors that make it possible to staff out certain key functions to their own ultra-low-power CPUs and save the phone from lighting up the main processor (itself dual-core rather than quad). The Moto X is all about user experience, and the first big step is the elimination of the battery anxiety that goes with any heavy use of a modern smartphone.

The other problem has been diagnostics. I’ve had the very devil of a time trying to see what exactly has been taking the piss out of my battery. The only thing I can do is delete one app at a time, or turn off one functional at a time, or not play audio back, and do each of these things for a full day while making meticulous notes on usage times and battery percentages. And that’s purely a function of iOS. At least with Android, the potential exists to monitor the functions of the phone at a more granular level and see what’s hitting the CPU so hard.

So then, let’s be practical: what are the implications of going to an Android phone, based on my frequent usage? Well, number one is podcasts: I have to be able to download my two or three podcasts on the fly and play them back on a weekdaily basis. Then there are the other things on the dock: music playback (possibly challenging given that a good chunk of my music is still FairPlay protected m4p), RSS, and text messaging – and that becomes a challenge simply because so many of my friends and colleagues are iPhone users. Killing iMessage means committing to burning through a lot of text messages relative to what I use at present.

After that, it’s a whole pile of free apps: Instagram, Evernote, things like weather and IMDB and mail. And mail is tricky, given that I do use iCloud for my primary personal email. Not insurmountable, obviously, but a quality IMAP client would be essential to getting by otherwise. And obviously I would need a calendaring solution for work. And I suppose you get maps for free, along with transit info via Google Now, and…

And there’s the rub: while you don’t necessarily have to treat with Apple for anything other than the App Store, it’s almost impossible to deal with Android without working with Google. And while Apple wants your money, Google wants your data – and wants to keep having it. It’s not a question of paying off the phone and being shut of them; in almost every way that matters, going with an Android device means learning to live with Google as your middleman.

So…is it worth taking a flyer on? It would be the biggest adjustment since acquiring the Dell netbook, and for similar reasons, and that flamed out after six months…but then, is is possible to really be a good IT professional without working both sides of the street? And heaven knows I need to be forced if I’m going to leave the warm embrace of AAPL…

Something to think about.

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