Living with the Apple Watch

Well, after the previous blog post my phone dilemma was solved to the point where the snappiness of the 6s won me over despite the Nexus 5X being more versatile. I was thinking about what to do with my now-unused 6+, and I tried to sell it online for a while. However, secondhand market for the larger iPhones doesn't seem to be as active as the one for the smaller iPhones, and as a result of that I couldn't attract any buyers despite a reasonable price demand. Then I noticed a trade-in program with a Finnish retailer Gigantti. Of course the rate they offered wasn't quite the same than what I could get with selling the phone directly to a new owner, but still it was quite decent especially when considering that I'd get to keep all the accessories such as extra Lightning cables (you can't have enough of these lying around) and chargers, so it turned out to be an OK deal. However, part of the deal was that I'd spend the amount they'd pay for my 6+ on other products from the store, so I thought I'd finally get myself the Apple Watch. Sure, there are lots of (maybe clickbait?) articles popping up around the first anniversary of the Apple Watch, but despite all the gloom and doom in the articles, I'm rather happy with mine and so far it seems to beat the LG G Watch Android Wear device I used to wear, and it does so in almost every category. Currently the G Watch wins only in the "display the time constantly" department, as that's something which is not currently possible with the Apple Watch. However, I've noticed that the gesture for waking up the screen is rather reliable, more so than the G Watch equivalent that I used before just setting it up to display the time constantly.

I'm not going to do a category-by-category comparison for the simple fact that my Apple Watch gives my G Watch such a severe beating in too many ways that a more serious comparison wouldn't be even funny anymore. Let's just say that I'm happy with the more reliable activity tracking (no more bogus cycling credits for driving my car in a slow traffic), some quite useful glances and the possibility to respond to messages (using canned responses, though) and answer phone calls directly from my watch.

Sure, apps are slow to launch on the watch, but I use them so rarely that it doesn't really matter. I didn't use apps that much on my G Watch either. I mainly want to know what time is it (well duh, it's a watch), get my notifications and hopefully also deal with some of them straight away, and track my activity and hopefully motivate me to exercise a little bit more. The Apple Watch does these just fine and wins two out of three categories compared to Android Wear. In addition, even if the apps are quite slow to launch, having a slowly launching Authy on my wrist is still faster and more convenient than getting up and fetching my phone from another room when I need my two-factor authentication. However, getting up and walking to another room would fill my standing ring, so it's a win either way.

I also appreciate how easy it is to change the bands. However, I don't quite like the price of many Apple's bands, so maybe I'll give some 3rd party bands a try.

Now if only Apple Pay were available in Finland...

Phone Dilemma Revisited

Whoa, it's been a while since the last update. Quite a lot has happened since the last post. The iPhone 6+ is now sitting powered down and waiting for me to decide what to do with it. The reason why it's powered down is that I first got myself a Nexus 5X from a deal (32GB for 349€, not bad with the prices over here), and just recently got an iPhone 6s from work. Just the 16GB model, though.

What comes to the 16GB storage, that abomination does not belong in an expensive flagship phone in 2016. It just kills the user experience, something which Apple at least used to hold in high regard. I had to forget about restoring my old backup as the device would've been full straight away. Granted, I did have quite a lot of unused apps, so instead of slimming down my backup I decided to start out fresh. I installed just the bare necessities, but still I was running into problems with the storage even though I took Schiller's advice and used the cloud. However, with my first 16GB iPhone since the iPhone 3G (where 16GB was all you could get and it was quite sufficient for the time with much smaller photo resolution and smaller apps) I quickly found out that the "optimise iPhone storage" option for the iCloud Photo Library doesn't quite work as expected. Instead of offloading my local photos to the cloud, it insisted on pulling some ancient pictures from my iCloud Photo Library to the device even though I hadn't even viewed any of those photos in years. That in turn made things a little bit harder when I was trying to empty my local camera roll into the Mac OS X Photos app. All those ancient pics it synced to the phone were identified as new even though the OS X Photos uses the very same iCloud Photo Library. I had been running Google Photos alongside iCloud Photo Library for a while now, and this episode actually pushed me to disable iCloud Photo Library and trust my photo backup to Google Photos instead. So far I'm really happy with the choice. Now I actually have some headroom on the all-too-cramped device and unwanted old photos no longer show up to mess up the photo import. If the minimum storage would've been the more appropriate 32GB I might still be actively using iCloud Photo Library, but now that Apple's stinginess with storage revealed the shortcomings of the "optimization" algorithm, I think I'll scale down my iCloud storage subscription since I no longer need or trust iCloud Photo Library (I had some issues earlier on already, but this "optimization" mess was the last straw). Great business move Apple. If you skimp on the storage in order to sell your cloud service, maybe first make sure that the cloud service actually works? If the cheapest model (read: the only one you'll get from the company) had 32GB of storage, photo library taking up close to 5GB on day one could've gone unnoticed as there would've been plenty of headroom on the device, but when you're fast approaching 1GB free and the Photos app goes "Oh look, another pic from 2005! Gotta cache that on the device!", you start to take measures against such stupidity. That meant disabling iCloud Photo Library and soon I'll be scaling back my iCloud storage subscription too.

OK, that's for the iCloud rant. Now to the actual dilemma. I have a hard time deciding which device will host my primary SIM now. Currently it's sitting in my Nexus 5X, but I've been considering about moving it to the iPhone 6s. It's rather funny (if I were Apple, I might call that alarming instead) that a phone that costs only half as much as the 6s and still provides more storage is so strong in this competition. Let's make a quick comparison of the pros and cons of each.

Nexus 5X
Pros:

• Mobile payments. Pivo provides these and they even link against my debit card, which is nice.
• Camera. It actually seems to capture better details than the 6s camera, something which surprised me quite a bit.
• Voice control. I can actually control both music and podcasts playback hands free in my car, thanks to Google Now supporting both Google Play Music and Pocket Casts
• USB-C fast charging. While the battery isn't too good, being able to top it up quickly is nice.

Cons:

• No work email or calendar. However, company policy is here to blame instead of Android itself. Still an annoyance that I can't do much about
• Bluetooth issues with some apps. Google Play Music seems to handle an incoming call, but e.g. Pocket Casts resumes playback as soon as the ringtone finishes playing even though I've answered the call. That leads me to having to interact with the phone itself to pause the podcast so that I can actually hear what the person in the other end is saying. I've submitted a bug report about this, so let's see what they'll do.
• USB-C availability. I have some chargers, but finding a friend with a spare USB-C charging cable is still quite rare
• Apps. Some apps just aren't as good as their iOS counterparts. However, there are apps that are currently impossible to implement on iOS, so this is more of a draw.
• No apparent waterproofing and really poor waterproof case availability.

iPhone 6s

Pros:

• Wicked fast. Is this thing snappy or what?
• Work email and calendar. Helps quite a bit quite often.
• Good apps. Even though all innovative stuff isn't available thanks to hardware and/or review policy limitations
• Lots of good apps for a musician. Yes, I play guitar in a band and every now and then even hit the right note.
• Surprisingly good built-in water resistance even though Apple hasn't acknowledged this, but iFixit teardown and several tests have revealed this. Also plenty of case options (including waterproof ones) available.

Cons:

• Siri just doesn't work with the apps I use. Sure, it's now available in Finnish, which is nice, but as the music controls are limited to Apple Music (I use Google Play Music for cloud stuff and this 16GB PoS doesn't have space for syncing local stuff to Apple Music) and Apple Podcasts (which I'm not going to bother with when Overcast and Pocket Casts are available).
• No mobile payments yet. We're well into 2016 now, so how about expanding Apple Pay a little bit more, Apple?
• Somewhat poor battery life & no fast charging. Sure, Lightning cables are nowadays everywhere, but how about making the phone a little bit thicker to accommodate a more usable battery?
• Camera isn't as good as I've been used to on an iPhone. Surprisingly many failed shots on this one. I'm starting to suspect the hardware in my phone might be defective.

As you can see, both phones have their pros and cons. I now just have to figure out which pros are more important than the associated cons. Apple could help its device quite a bit here by rolling out Apple Pay in more countries and opening up Siri access to 3rd party apps. I'm quite confident that Marco would implement Siri support to Overcast if it were just possible. Well, maybe I'll need to play around with both phones a little bit more. 

Oh, one more thing. If that phone call continuity weren't restricted to the same wifi, I'd just put my primary SIM to the 6s and the work one into the 6+ and never miss a call without ever having to mess around with toggling call diverts. Pretty please, Apple?

Back on iOS - Again

Well, as it turns out I'm once again running an iPhone as my daily driver. I managed to find a person who wished to trade in his 64GB iPhone 6 Plus that was warranty replaced with a new device on new year's eve for my 64GB Nexus 6P. Even though I would've preferred the 6s Plus with 2GB of RAM, the 6 Plus was still a good deal as it removes the battery issues I had with my iPhone 6 and also solves the annoyances my Nexus 6P got with Android 6.0.1, i.e. Bluetooth and occasional connectivity issues. The 6P wasn't a bad experience (far from it), but in the end iOS seems to fit my needs better. With the iPhone I get better and more predictable battery life, my work email and calendar (granted, this is a company policy issue instead of a technical limitation), and most importantly stable Bluetooth. Those irregular one second gaps of silence every now and then that 6.0.1 introduced were slowly driving me crazy. With podcasts it was an annoyance, but when it comes to music it's approaching the dealbreaker territory quite fast.

Maybe I was just using the wrong apps on Android, but upon my return to iOS it was nice to see how many of the apps I used had 1Password and/or TouchID integration. The Nexus Imprint on my 6P was a bit of a letdown as it wasn't of much use besides unlocking the phone even though it did that blazingly fast. 

However, I did lose mobile payments for now with the transition as Apple Pay is not yet available in Finland and thanks to iPhone NFC being locked down to Apple Pay only, the NFC hardware is currently totally useless. Even more than having Apple Pay here, I'd like Apple to open up the NFC interface so that Pivo (the app I used for mobile payments on Android) could introduce mobile payments also on their iOS app. I prefer having those smaller payments linked to my debit card (like I had with Pivo) instead of piling up stuff on my credit card.

I still have my Nexus 5 for staying in touch with the Android side of things, but with my 6 Plus as my daily driver I'll be eagerly waiting for iOS 9.3 and Siri in Finnish + Night Shift. If the iPhone 7 does indeed have the rumored waterproofing, I think I'll upgrade to the Plus version of that once it comes out.

Oh, one more thing. I kinda like the fact that I got my 6 Plus secondhand as I didn't get to pick the color. I now have the gold version which is quickly growing on me (Apple going with a toned-down more champagne gold is the key here, I couldn't stand some flashy bling gold), but if I had initially bought it myself, I might've gone with the Space Gray as my color preferences regarding iPhones have been pretty much in line with those of Henry Ford.