First things first: switching from the cheap case I bought in advance (which was apparently spec’d out from pre-production info and doesn’t actually fit the buttons right) to the Apple leather case made all the ergonomic difference in the world. Black leather wrapped tight to the phone lends it a premium feel and a lot more comfort in the hand, and it grips well without sticking in the pocket. Approved and worth the money.
Battery life seems to be settling too. It looks good for about 8 hours of real-world use consisting mostly of Twitter, taking and posting pictures, checking mail and reading RSS. No audio playback; this was all screen on and cellular data with no Wi-Fi to speak of, and in a crowded environment. (yes, back at Disneyland again. You got a better torture test for a phone?) And while using an iPad charger is still the fastest, I could throw it on a lipstick charger at dinner and go from under 30 to 94% battery between cocktails and taking the entree plates.
Performance in areas of 4G-non-LTE coverage has, of course, kicked the shit out of EV-DO. I was routinely pulling around 6 Mbps without LTE, which is well over double the theoretical max of Verizon’s non-LTE data speed, which I never reached on the iPhone 5. And good coverage means good battery. Even with the bigger screen, I still outperform the 5. I’m curious how it will go at work.
One other thing I’ve noticed is that I can run voice dictation and get results at least as accurate as something like SwiftKey or Swype. The one finger swishing around the keyboard may not be efficacious, but if you can just tell the phone what to type and get the same or better results, that’s huge. Especially since you now get typing as you talk rather than waiting for it to be piped back for processing. Careful word choice means I can text the wife almost without typographical error purely via Siri. And that ain’t hay. It is in fact a major computing breakthrough, one I started watching for two decades ago as I tried to persuade a Power Mac 6100 to accept the rudimentary voice commands built into System 7.1.2 (in a gravelly Southern accent, natch).
Things I still need to test: battery life on a normal workday. The viability of reading on this rather than a Kindle or AMOLED phone screen. The impact of streaming WatchESPN during basketball season and how badly it kills the power. And once the Moto X (2013) gets Android Lollipop, there’s going to be an all-day utility bake off.
But for now, it looks like this phone (with a small charger in reserve for known full days) might just be ready to go as the One Full Time Device. And not a moment too soon either.