There’s no disputing it anymore: iTunes is a sack of shit. I was able to activate the new Verizon iPhone 5 on the fly yesterday, download about fifty apps, get everything going the way I wanted, and boom pow, as soon as I set up sync with the home computer, it tried to put every app – three hundred of them, all told – onto the phone. And then it wiped EVERYTHING I’d downloaded already when I tried to make it stop. It ended up as a whole bunch of checkbox ticking on a Mac mini over three years old. Annoying as shit.
But yes, the phone is up and running. Not a moment too soon, either, as the weird-ass battery issues with the iPhone 4S are continuing to plague me. It’s dropping at a rate of 1% every time I look at it, seems like, and I’m going to be very curious to look at the usage at the end of the day when it’s done nothing but sit there. But enough about the old phone (which will get wiped and repurposed and hopefully behave better for it), let’s talk about the new hotness.
The seven week wait wasn’t out of the ordinary. It took a month before I got my company-issued original iPhone, and I didn’t run right to the 3G until my original shorted out (lint in the dock connector). I skipped the 3GS altogether, got the 4 on launch day, and only got the 4S owing to parts constraint when my 4 failed while still under AppleCare. So it’s not unusual that I took a couple months to take possession. The delay, of course, was occasioned by the carrier change – after my great success with a Verizon LTE iPad, there was no reason not to make the move as I allow work to pay for my phone going forward. =)
I went with the black one, of course. You should know me by now…I also had the standard Zagg InvisibleShield applied to the front. I’m in kind of an unusual spot in that for the last two years, I’ve relied almost entirely on the standard Apple bumper – almost every other case out there felt too big or too bulky or just didn’t seem right – but before that, I had reverted to carrying my iPhone 3G with no case (barring a brief period of experimentation when I first got it, in hopes of stopping the aforementioned lint). So I don’t know if I’ll ultimately cave and find a case for this one.
LTE is legit. I sat at the train station in Mountain View, California, and pulled 24Mbps downstream – or roughly double the speed of my uVerse connection at home. Unless they actually meter the data at work and ding me for it, there’s precious little reason to ever keep Wi-Fi on this thing away from the office. Coverage has been pretty good thus far, although it’ll be tomorrow before I can see if I still have an issue with the famous dead zone on the Palo Alto border on Caltrain. I also need to see whether tethering is enabled, because that would be handy to have. Not critical, as the iPad has its own LTE for travel and I don’t anticipate taking the laptop much of anywhere any longer.
I’m also sorting out where I need extra cables. I bought one 30-pin-to-Lightning adapter which is going everywhere with me at present. The cable that came with it is on the bedside charger, for obvious reasons, but the fact that the adapter costs $10 more than just buying a cable is making me evaluate how badly and where I actually need connectors these days. Still, with the wife and the iPad both on 30-pin, a certain measure of flexibility is required for the present…but the places where my iPad and iPhone overlap to charge are almost nonexistent, which is convenient. All the more reason to adhere strictly to wireless sync at home.
The bigger screen is nice but not radically so; its main effect has been to make the old phone’s display look kind of squatty. Also haven’t been impacted by apps not changed to fit the screen, but give it time – I’m sure something will annoy me. I’m happy to have the headset connector on the bottom, but I haven’t used it in any meaningful sense yet, so we’ll see how long it takes to get used to it. Which means it’s time to bring up the podcasts and see how the battery lasts…