Rants and raves about stuff happening in and around my life in Singapore

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

iPhone 5 ..... or not?

I've been waiting patiently for the iPhone to become the phone that has always been expected of it. While its true there have been numerous innovations as a result of the iPhone the problem is most of those came with the very first generation and there has been little improvement ever since.

We’ve seen better battery life, better design form factor, but most of the improvements since the first generation are to fix design flaws that many people have taken to jailbreaking their phones to correct to begin with.

Apple is just too slow to respond to what people want and .....



..... it seems that its absorbing some of the better apps that you can install on a jailbroken phone into its firmware to compensate.

Lets take the latest phone the iPhone 4S. It’s got a faster processor and Siri and that’s pretty much about the sum total of the innovation there. It has a notification screen which is nice, but there are better apps out there if your phone is jailbroken as lets face it the notification screen is pretty basic and really not much use.

Even Siri is pretty useless if the truth be told and after everyone who owns an iPhone 4S has gotten tired of asking “Who’s your daddy” I’m pretty sure Siri doesn’t get used much thereafter.

Meanwhile in the background the android phone market being open source has come along in leaps and bounds and I reckon it won’t be long before it surpasses the iPhone in terms of functionality and capability. In fact many people would argue (somewhat successfully too) that this is already the case.

So I’ve decided that I am going to wait until the release of the iPhone 5 before deciding if I will continue to support it. If that isn’t everything I expect in a phone and more then I’ll be dropping out of the iPhone yearly upgrade cycle (which in itself is becoming slightly annoying), jumping onboard the android mother ship and not looking back.

So heads up Apple, it’s really time to pull the finger out and innovate because if you continue at this same lack-luster pace then my prediction is that Android phones will surpass iPhone sales in 2012.

And while we are on the subject of a lack of innovation Steve Jobs once joked that soon everyone would be wearing the iPod nano as a watch. Well there’s a new player in town called “I’m Watch” which is set to take control of that particular market as well. It is everything that the iPod nano (as a watch) could have been but isn’t and is definitely one to watch. Oh and guess what, it’s android based too.

I’m seriously beginning to wonder if Apple has lost the plot.