Hating and the internet go hand in hand. Heck, I’m ready to start a petition to rename the Internet to Haternet.
Blogs, message boards and comment threads have long been the platform of choice for a small minority (which can sometimes seem like a majority) to voice their hotheadedness and displeasure on everything from the ugliness of Craigslist to the London Olympics branding to the last Justice album, Audio, Video, Disco.
“The new iPhone suxXx becuz it
doesn’t have NFC or wireless charging.”
A lot of industry people were “let down” by the iPhone 5. The phone didn’t quite hit the home run pundits were wishing for: there wasn’t NFC, the design wasn’t new, the screen was suddenly 16 x 9, and on and on and on. These days, especially with Apple, every product refresh has to be revolutionary rather than evolutionary or it’s not good enough. For some, the last iPhone was even the worst iPhone ever.
I couldn’t disagree more with the “let down” reviews of the iPhone 5. Since its launch in 2007, the iPhone product line has accelerated beyond my wildest expectations. I now have an impossibly amazing music player, organizer, camera, video recorder and task doer in my pocket that’s constantly connected to almost every bit of content I produce or consume.
I may be late to the party coming from a lowly 3GS, but even after playing with iPhone 4′s and 4S’ I’ll debate anyone that the iPhone 5 is a winner right from the first experience I had with the phone. The latest iPhone offers an uncompromising user experience driven by iOS and the incredible app ecosystem, upgraded processor, new screen, camera capabilities (especially when it comes to low light) and wireless network speeds. I’m still not sure how these features equate to a “let down.” The iPhone 5 camera destroys the camera on the 4S. There’s more than twice the processing power and don’t even get me started on the amazing screen.
Even better than the ultra impressive hardware that the iPhone 5 packs is that it took me all of 10 minutes to set up. Not hours like I, naively, expected. Yes, I was blown away by the iPhone 5 before I had even tried out how much faster some of my favorite apps open and run, taken a picture or tried accessing the web from my LTE connection.
Once I completed the initial set up and logged into iCloud, I watched (magically) all my apps appear, organized exactly how they were on my old phone, along with photos from my camera and photo stream, email accounts, text/iMessages, and more or less every bit of information I had stored on my old phone.
After the initial downloads were complete, I added a new lock and home screen background, logged into my carrier’s admin account to change my SIM and, a few sips of coffee later, I was up and running with pretty much all of of my data downloaded from iCloud. Even though I’m involved with technology and the web every day, I still can’t believe how far things have come since I bought my 3GS.
We are now at the beginning of device data independence. iCloud also gets a lot of (unncessary) hate, but as the service and platform matures, it’s definitely moving in the right direction as a hidden, always accessible desktop. With iCloud I now have an integrated experience between my devices that seemed like an impossible dream back when I was loving my Blackberry 7290 and rocking my 3rd gen iPod.
