Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
M had a showdown with the floor of the pool vs her iPhone. Her iPhone lost. It happened on day 2 of our vacation so no phone until we can get it looked at.
I am not sure if it is worth the screen replacement cost to fix an iPhone 6 (or 6s, not even sure) that is at least 3 years old and 3-4 generations old by now.
When Apple announced that the public betas for iOS was available I thought about trying it out. I then remembered Beta one of iOS and how I had to quickly remove it from my phone even though it wasn’t a phone I relied on day-to-day. This year I waited. Last year around now I felt it was safe enough to try the beta on a phone and generally was okay playing with it through the official launch of the operating system.
Since as of this writing it is late August (22-August and not sure when this post will be scheduled to post) and the launch date for the final version of iOS 10 is close enough I finally installed the latest public beta of iOS 10 on my iPhone 6S Sunday. So far I haven’t noticed much difference. It feels like all his bedding features I was looking for a not yet enabled class apps are written to support them. I am talking about features like unified call log and chat messages in messages from my VOIP applications. Or Siri application integration.
One function that does work is facial identification in photos.I was able to tag some photos with the correct names of people however when I miss tagged one photo I was not able to remove the linkage. There’s definitely some work that needs to be done however so far it looked pretty cool.
Other than the notification pop-ups looking different I haven’t really experienced much change so far. Our plus side most of the apps I’ve tried to use including my dictation app seemed to work without problem. I was concerned about the beta breaking stuff. That is why I waited until late August to try a beta. I am also only testing on one phone that if I ran into a problem I don’t have to rely on.
UPDATE
I wrote the initial part of this post over the weekend and scheduled it to publish on Friday, 26 August. Between the time I wrote it and Wednesday night I had a change of heart. There did not seem to be anything fundamentally wrong with iOS 10. I’m eager to see some of the new functions working when applications are updated to support them however feature wise the beta was just not that compelling to keep using it. The trade-off to using it was flaky network connections where I would have to put the phone in airplane mode and then turn it off every time I came out of the subway. To my dictation app, Dragon Anywhere not syncing correctly even know it mostly worked. I don’t rely on this phone that’s running the beta however it was more nuisance than it was worth.
In the end there wasn’t anything majorly compelling to use the beta or to get rid of it. I took the short term hit of time to do a full restore last night and will eagerly upgrade when the final version comes out.
Ah September. Fall is almost upon us. That means iPhone upgrade season. I admit that typically I have upgraded phones annually. That ended when when the iPhone 5S came out. There was just not enough compelling reasons for me to upgrade so I skipped it. Last year the 6 was significant enough of an upgrade and I needed new phone so the decision to upgrade was simple. The harder part was deciding between the 6 or 6 Plus. The 6 won out. This year I have to ponder the same issue.
The 6S may not be enough of an upgrade however the force touch does seem nice. It boils down to I likely do not need to upgrade however I am going to anyway. I save away money every month with the assumption that I am going to upgrade and I can sell the 6 with enough resale value that I am don’t get sticker shock from the upgrade.
When the iPhone 6+ came out I was intrigued with the bigger size however I opted for the plane old iPhone 6. After about two months I decided to try the 6+ on my work line. I had it for all but a day and returned it. At the time and used to a lot of things one-handed. I tried the galaxy note in the past as well and it was too big. I stuck with my 6. Flash forward to this year and when the 6S came out I opted for it over the plus for the same reasons. I ended up selling my Nexus 6 that I was using for my work line. That was also a big phone but significantly cheaper then the plus. I was using it more as a media device than anything else. As much as I like the device having one device is android among all the others that were iOS didn’t make any sense. For a time I returned to my old iPhone 5 as my work line however the size of that screen was becoming very annoying compared to larger 6. Since I was getting by with the next six as a media device and hearing several people work enjoying the larger phones I decided to take the risk and get another plus for my work line/media device.
After about a day I wanted to give it a try as my main phone. Swapping between phones my Sim card was harder than I thought it would be. It was not as simple as swapping SIM cards. I had to re-associate my iTunes account and phone number to each phone.
Once I started using the plus as my main line I was surprised to find that I liked it. There were still limitations with regards to what I can do one handed. What I realized however was that now that my kids were slightly older I was not as concerned about pushing strollers or carrying a baby in one arm needing to answer the phone. It still uncomfortable to use in some situations because of its size however the advantage of the larger screen in other aspects of day-to-day use have so far been outweighing the downsides. It’s interesting how much a year or two makes your requirements change just enough.
My week using the iPhone 6S plus has my main phone is evolved into indefinitely using it as my primary. I’m curious to see how long I keep it up or if I decide to switch back. I’m hoping to like it and I just sell the 6S. Of course I do that I have to figure out what to use for my work line. The challenge I have is the work upgrade options are pretty paltry so I would have to either get something that’s not so great or pay out-of-pocket for something else.