The glorified iPhone 5 announcement passed a couple of days ago, and I wanted to leave my thoughts related to that event. iPhone 5 is a good phone, but it’s not what I’ve expected. As many of other people, I wanted a little bit more. This way I am getting what every other Galaxy S3 owner has for months already.
Except for the design.
That design does impact my buying decision
My best friend actually told me that he thinks both phones look the same, but in my books… That slick unibody aluminum design does look rather spectacular. Glass has been proven to be quite fragile in the close encounter between it and concrete. And I don’t like buying extra protection for the sake of protecting the phone. It’s expendable product anyway. If you can’t replace it easily with a new one, maybe you should get a cheaper one?
Is there anything that I can do with new iPhone, that I can’t already do with my current one?
Apart from the Siri (still got iPhone 4), I wouldn’t get too much improvements in terms of functionality. I don’t see anything that I could do with new iPhone that I couldn’t already do with my current one. Except for being that cool guy who has the shiny new phone.
And that vanity fair will only fly in Serbia. When I reach the states, it’s going to be welcome to the land of everyone has the same phone. So I am going to be, “yet another retard” with an iPhone.
Will I buy it?
Yep, of course I will. But unlike before I won’t be in the rush to get it. First of all, I will wait to get a sim free phone. I am a huge hater of contracts, hence I will wait to get enough hard cash to get it. Than the second thing I am waiting for will be stable jailbreak of iOS6 for it.
I am a huge fan of customization, because that allows me to run my fully customizable system. And only in that system I have my frictionless productivity. It will take a couple of months to crack the new hardware. So prior to that, my iPhone 4 will do the trick as perfectly as it does so far.
Why will I upgrade?
- First of all my current phone has 16 gigs of storage. This doesn’t satiate my needs anymore. I know I will pay 100–200$ more for something that costs them 10–20$. I will create a lot of videos when I move to USA, and that extra space will be just right.
- I need more RAM. 500-ish megs of ram does run out rather quickly under my usage. Especially with full blown jailbreak and a bunch of tweaks that break my apps from a time to time. It gets my device sluggish and slow sometimes. If I don’t think about the apps that are running in the background. Hence I need to shut them down from a time to time. Getting rid of the friction…
- The sexy unibody aluminiummmmmmmm
Is it justifiable to dish out that kind of money for those tiny improvements?
Well, it’s a buyers decision in the end. When we are buying products, we’re not only buying the characteristics, we are buying the way we feel. And Apple has got the sweet spot with our emotions. It’s the core center of their money making machine.
And in the end, when something is free, the price is your privacy. And I believe, and I have that feeling (even though I might be completely wrong), that I am safer with Apple’s servers than I am with Google’s.
Cause I don’t believe in free. When something is free, you are not the customer, you are the product.
Will it increase your productivity?
Answer to this question is: One answer doesn’t fit all. If you have iPhone 4 or higher, you won’t get an upgrade in terms of functionality. If you are coming from a different platform, or you are a newcomer to smartphones, this is a good buying decision, if you aim for the high end device.
So overall answer is yes, but it’s not a significant improvement.
Conclusion
The deal today is that even “lower end” devices are equally good choices. Smartphone market reached the point of maturity, the same way it happened to the computers when we reached “the Pentium era”. The differences between the computer generations were shrinking, and there wasn’t too much of an improvement in terms of functionality between one and the other.
Since I consider the phones are “expandable” products that I replace on a yearly basis, I don’t think that buying a brand new phone is financially savvy decision.
Even the phone I’ve got now was bought from someone who upgraded to iPhone 4s. That way I don’t have to think about incidental damage that will inevitably happen during it’s lifetime. And when it happens, you won’t be that disappointed.
I am way more excited about earbuds! 🙂
