Over Android

Today, while dri­ving today, I nearly threw my phone out the win­dow. I thought about rolling it down and chuck­ing it out as I rolled along at 50 miles an hour, watch­ing in joy as the phone shat­tered and broke on the pave­ment and snow. I had had enough.

You have to under­stand, I’ve sup­ported the Android OS since the Droid 1 got into my hands. It was a fan­tas­tic phone and I was very happy… for the first year or so. And then the phone began to fall behind, tech­nol­ogy moved for­ward and the Droid 1’s proces­sor and mem­ory quickly fell fur­ther and fur­ther behind. I was able to com­bat this with cus­tom ROMs and thanks to the preva­lence of the Droid 1 I was able to enjoy a thriv­ing hacker com­mu­nity to squeeze every ounce of power out of it.

Come a few months ago and my Droid 1 was nearly dead. It limped along with a bro­ken power but­ton, poor bat­tery life, and increas­ing forced reboots. I held out and fought, drag­ging the phone kick­ing and scream­ing to my two year phone upgrade with Ver­i­zon, but when the time came the promised phone — the kwisatch hader­ach for Android was not to be seen, the Sam­sung Galaxy Nexus kept get­ting pushed fur­ther back. And I was forced to suc­cumb to a sub­par phone, the LG Rev­o­lu­tion. My patience had run out, and I did not rel­ish the thought of dri­ving across the coun­try with a half oper­at­ing phone. And my loss of patience led me to make a rash decision.

The LG Rev­o­lu­tion has been noth­ing but painful as far as phones go. For our drive we relied on Katie’s iPhone’s GPS to get us nav­i­gated safely. Why hers and not mine? Because using the GPS was caus­ing my phone to reboot. For phone calls we had iffy qual­ity. Some­times when I get a call the phone never shows me a use­ful screen and just vibrate rings end­lessly. The only way to stop it is to pull the bat­tery. I mean seri­ously, What… the fuck.

Now, my anger isn’t against the Android OS. I think it does fine and will con­tinue to improve. But if a per­fect Android phone exists out there, then I might have to go through three or more phones before I find one which works. Whereas if I go straight to the iPhone I know I’m guar­an­teed a sat­is­fac­tory per­for­mance. Maybe not stel­lar. I know there will be frus­tra­tions there, but… well… I’m ready for a change.

So in the next few weeks I’ll be going for it. Time to try out iOS.