iPhone 6: The Good, The Bad, and The Mediocre

© 2014 Apple Inc.

I finally got my iPhone 6 in the mail, and after playing around with it for a couple of days, I have many a praise, but also a few criticismesses.

The Good.

1. Touch ID.

Yes, I know, it's been there since the iPhone 5S. However, since I'm upgrading from the iPhone 5, it's new to me.

Words cannot express how well this feature works. It is simply amazing! It reads your fingerprints and only your fingerprints, and it reads them every time without fail, in a mere fraction of a second. You can store multiple fingerprints, which is very helpful if you want to unlock the phone with either hand, or maybe if several people are using the same device.

2. Slo-mo video recording at 240 fps.

It's official: my iPhone sees better than I do. Watch a droplet of milk fall into a cup of coffee, a pro skateboarder perform a complicated trick, or your house lights flicker, all at an impressive 720p resolution. Oh yeah, did you know your house lights flicker 60 times per second? I didn't, until I watched it in slo-mo.

3. Flash photography.

I believe the advanced flash was also introduced in 5S, but it is nonetheless remarkable. No more zombie-colored portraits! In fact, I will go ahead and state for the record that at close range, my iPhone 6 produces the best flash photography I've seen so far.

4. Video stabilization.

It's there, it works, and it makes videos look a lot smoother and more professional than they used to be.

5. Speaker.

For some reason, no one mentions this: the iPhone 6 has a massive speaker, compared to the minuscule, tinny-sounding speaker of the iPhone 5. You can actually hear the bass lines this time around, and it won't make that horrible clipping noise when you turn the volume all the way up.

6. Retina.

Not a new feature by any means, but the screen is as gorgeous as ever, perhaps even more so, now that it's quite a bit larger.

7. Background App Refresh and Google Hangouts.

Not really an iPhone 6 feature either; it has more to do with iOS 8 and Google doing a great job on the app.

After jumping through a few hoops, I was able to direct all my Google Voice messages (SMS) to Hangouts, and from there on it was smooth sailing. The push notifications work, and since the app uses background refresh, your messages are already loaded when you swipe on the notification. There's no wait time for the message to load, and you don't even have to be connected to the internet at that point. What does that mean for me? It means I can still read my SMS in a timely fashion, despite the fact that my Gmail emails now arrive with a 15 minute delay. More on that in a bit.

The Bad.

1. I don't like giant phones.

It's a personal preference. Many people like giant phones: there's a reason why Apple made the iPhone 6 Plus. The iPhone 5 was already too big for my liking. The iPhone 6 is so big that I can no longer hold it with one hand and press the home button. I have to use a new "typing grip" as well: holding the iPhone 6 by the sides with my index fingers, and supporting it on the back with the rest of my fingers, while typing with my thumbs. Typing and holding the phone with the same hand is now completely out of question.

2. Camera sticks out.

Everyone knows about this. It's ugly, and if you don't have your phone in a case, it will never lay flat on a table. That said, I always have mine in a case, so it's not a problem.

3. No support for push for Gmail accounts.

This was probably the biggest upset for me. It's not entirely Apple's fault. Some of it is Google's. You see, Apple never supported push via IMAP. However, there was a way to get around that, by setting up Gmail as an Exchange account instead. However, at the end of January 2013 Google disabled the ability to use Exchange to connect to your Gmail account, on any new devices. This means that my email now arrives with a 15-minute delay, which makes SMS forwarding pretty useless.

I tried out a bunch of email apps to connect to Gmail instead, such as the official Gmail app, Mailbox, and myMail. They all seem to share at least one common problem: there is no support for background app refresh. Which means that when you swipe on that email notification, you have to have an internet connection, or else your email won't load. And even if you have it, there is an annoying delay before you can read the email.

Luckily for me, Google Hangouts implemented support for background app refresh, and it works beautifully. They've also integrated Hangouts into the web Gmail client, which works great as well, both for Hangouts/G-Chat and for SMS. So now I can say "adieu" to SMS-to-email forwarding; it has lost its use, and has been superseded by newer and better technology.

4. iOS 8 app crashes and bugs.

iOS 8 is not the most stable of operating systems. Though I'm not seeing as many rendering artifacts as I did with my iPhone 5, both Mail and Camera apps have crashed on me way too many times. There are some interesting bugs as well. For instance, try putting the Camera app into the video recording mode, hit "play" from the Control Center, and then start recording a video. If you listen closely, you will hear the sound of Apple's programmers getting fired. 

The Mediocre.

Battery life.

Sure, it's better than the battery in my iPhone 5, which after two years of use lasts for about 15 minutes during active use. The iPhone 6's battery went down to about 65% after two hours of dicking around. And I'm not talking about heavy usage and playing video games that will make your phone warm enough to heat your apartment during winter. No, just playing around with settings and shooting a few 30-second slo-mo videos. Not great.

~

Overall, I'm quite pleased with what the iPhone 6 has to offer. The slo-mo feature alone kept me occupied for hours at a time! Now let's get some support for push in Gmail accounts, and "we in beez"!

The new iPad and "competition".

The new iPad was announced yesterday, and although I'm not in the market for one myself, I consider this the one that is really worth getting. The two major improvements are a Retina display and a good camera, likely the same as the one found in iPhone 4S. Those two things were critically missing in the previous iteration. Sure, a faster processor and 4G LTE wireless network support are always welcome, as well as the numerous software improvements.

Meanwhile, the press are split into two factions: Apple admirers and Apple opponents. The latter group is currently reporting their usual crazy statements like this one:

For Apple’s rivals, most notably Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., the incremental improvements in the latest iPad may be just the opportunity they need to establish themselves as legitimate competitors to the world’s most valuable company.

This corporate bullshit talk sounds very familiar to me. Spoken from first person, it's a denial of one's own poor performance. Notice how the article is not even denying that the new iPad will dominate the market; instead, it uses ambiguous lingo to get you to think so. All for a good cause, I guess. The cause, of course, is making money from serving advertisement to people who read the article.

I'll go ahead and make a statement of my own: if Apple hadn't come out with a new iPad this year at all, they would still dominate the market with their old tablets. iPad 2 is orders of magnitude better than anything else on the tablet market today. In fact, Apple created the market, and pretty much owns it. There is no competition. As popular as Kindle Fire has been, it is not competing with the iPad; it is competing with Kindle and other e-readers. The reason for that is that while Kindle Fire is a decent e-reader, it is horrible for pretty much anything else.

Pulling the plug on Google Wave.

Google Wave has been in a terminal coma for over a year now, and Google is finally disconnecting the life support:

Dear Wavers,

More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.For more details, please see our help center.

Yours sincerely,

The Wave Team

Google's new trend of releasing sucky products.

MG Siegler responds to yet another fail from Google, the GMail iOS app.

In case you haven't heard, it was so bad, they actually had to pull it from the App Store. It wasn't even a real native app; it was just a WebView wrapper around their HTML5 web app, and yet they managed to make it worse somehow. Push notifications didn't work, and the icing on the turd cake was a confusing error message that popped up as soon as you launched the app.

I agree with Siegler – the track record of Google's iOS apps has been dismal. It really seems like that whole department is dysfunctional, and they need to just wipe the slate clean and hire some real talent to build iOS apps. Or at least people who can tell success from failure.

Google's Projecide

Google is planning to kill off a bunch of its products, some of which really don't deserve to die. Here's what's currently on the platter:

Code Search
Not many people might have used it, but it was a good idea! Maybe instead of killing it, they should've expanded it to search GitHub and SourceForge?

Google Buzz
Well, they starved it to death, so might as well put it out of its misery. But at least integrate it into the Google+ Stream instead of just smacking it into a separate tab on Profile, which no one will ever see.

Buzz was also a good idea, but it was a knee-jerk response to Twitter, one that never answered the question: “Why would anyone use this instead of Twitter?” To make things worse, they buried it in the GMail app, so it was promptly forgotten.

Jaiku
Whatever, who cares.

iGoogle Social Features
See Jaiku.

University Research Program for Google Search
Sounds cool, but based on their description, it was only available to “a small number of approved academic researchers,” so since it was never available to me, I'm going to go ahead and put it into the Jaiku pile.

Google Labs
This is the real mockingbird of the flock. Why shut down something that lets you field test new features? Many of Google's flagship products graduated from Google Labs, including Google Maps and Google Desktop. This makes no sense at all.

According to the same post from their official blog, Google has “learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+.” I guess the lesson they learned is to release a product and do nothing to improve it, silently watching it wither and die. Because that's exactly what they're doing to Google+.

Fanatical People

From the Businessweek interview, Eric Schmidt on Steve Jobs:

He said, “The thing that I have that no one else has is very loyal customers.” He had these fanatical people who would line up all night for a product that wasn’t any good.

Google celebrates Bar Mitzvah.

Google turned thirteen years of age today. Happy Birthday, Google!

By John Walker

Why I like Google Instant search.

Google Instant search has been out for a while, and it now works from Chrome's address bar. That's great news for me! No need to press “enter” to search, and then click on the address bar again to add search terms. However, not everyone is so ecstatic about it.

There are two types of searches that people generally make. The first is the kind where you're bored and you search for “iPhone 5”, and then click on the first link that comes up. You don't really need Google Instant for that. In fact, the now defunct “I'm feeling lucky” button would work out perfectly.

The second type is when you are trying to find something particular, which might not show up on the first page of results at all, and you'd have to change the search terms and search again.

This type of repeated search is otherwise known as research. This is where the Google Instant comes in very handy. Instead of going back to the search box to add new keywords, you instantly see the results changing as you type, and you can narrow down your search accordingly.

For instance, if you're trying to find a particular article about Google Instant, you start by typing “google instant” into the search box or address bar. Not seeing the desired results in your field of vision, you can add “ news”. Still not what you're looking for? Keep typing, and add “ blog”. Close, but you only want the best, so add “ site:spikesagal.blogpost.com” and presto! Now that's good research!

If Google ever buys the NRA, they should make Journey's Open Arms their anthem.

Blogger gets Lightbox.

As welcome news, much more welcome than the awful iOS app, Google integrated Lightbox into Blogger. Now, when you click on an image (one that doesn't link to an external source), you will see a nice screen overlay with the full-size version of the image neatly centered. No work on the blogger's end is required.

Google farts out a Blogger app for iOS.

New post.

Just released by Google's experimental department of programmers – the ones that had their temporal lobes removed – is a Blogger app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Supposedly, it allows me to write drafts, or even publish Blogger posts directly from my iPhone. Sounds awesome! Let's try to write a new post...

This doesn't really look like a blog post. It looks like a bunch of unformatted text, and some image thumbnails below, that you can't order or move anywhere.

This is what this post looks like in preview...
                   ⇓

Post preview in Chrome.

Editing a post.

Awesome!

Now let's see what happens when I try to edit an actual blog post with the iOS app. I'm not sure which feature is my favorite: the raw HTML code, or the “hide keyboard” button that covers part of the text?

The good news is that the app is not entirely useless. I can use it to snap a couple of photos on the iPhone and attach them to a headline, to be edited later via the Blogger browser app. But as a blog publishing app, it's just embarrassing.

I know there are some smart people employed at Google. Can we please hand this over to them?