Back in 2009 I decided to see if I could get away with no phone. No land-line phone or a mobile. Think about that for a second. Was it a pain in the butt? Not as much as I had expected, but yeah it was. The one thing that quickly revealed itself to be the biggest annoyance in the year and a half I ran this little experiment was the need to go old fashioned when meeting up with people. As in stating a time and exact place and hoping the person you’re meeting was on time and knew where you were talking about. These days being exact isn’t a huge deal. ”Hey man, I just grabbed a seat by at the bar, you on your way?” You might text a buddy and he responds a jiff later, “Yeah, be right there.” You’re a text or phone call away (assuming you’re within a coverage zone) from knowing where your pal, significant other, or family member is.
Why am I starting out mentioning something completely unrelated to games? Because the only real difference between an iPod Touch and an iPhone is its WiFi only functionality. Games on the iPhone and Ipod Touch look and play the same. Aside from (I’m taking a guess here) something like a dozen games that require phone service (and honestly there might not even be a single one) the two devices are nearly the same. The iPod Touch is a little smaller, weighs a little less, but you can find out all the technical specs with a quick search.
Who should avoid an iPhone and go for the iPod Touch? A lot of poor people. If you don’t have the means to pay a nearly $100 a month phone bill then an iPhone isn’t for you. Even if you can afford such a monthly cost you might be better off with a cheapo cell for calls and texts and an iPod touch for everything else–games, maps, the Internet, music, email, and so forth. Sure, this means you would need to remember an extra item when leaving home, but you could end up saving a whole lot of money going this route.
Sadly the comparison between iPhone and iPod Touch begins and ends right about at the point where we do or do not talk about a phone being a phone. An iPod Touch is just an iPhone without the phone part.
Next week I’ll be talking about the iPad and that, unlike the iPod Touch, is a whole different animal than the iPhone. I’ve owned all three and I’m here to tell you that if you can afford to own an iPhone you’ll not regret it.
You missed the part where the iPod\iPhone is a shiny overpriced underpowered piece of cheap foxconn hardware enjoyed only by teenagers and people who view computers the same way as your average peasant in the middle ages might have viewed magic, and that anyone with any sense (especially anyone who purports to be good with money) should avoid them like the plague. I once heard the analogy ‘owning an apple product it like taking a wheelbarrow full of dicks up the ass every waking moment of your life’, and while I find that analogy quite vulgar and distasteful it is perhaps the best descriptor of owning a tech product that is bad for developers, bad for consumers and encourages monopolistic behaviour on part of Apple. I would rather piss kidney stones the size of watermelons than own an Apple product. Or be seen with one in public. Or have to touch one.
I agree with a lot of your sentiments, but at the same time I can’t see myself going from my iPhone to something else. iOS is, handsdown, the best mobile platform for what I want. Is Android better? Well, being that it’s really the only other game in town it doesn’t even need to be, but I don’t think it is. A lot of what I can find on the iOS app store I couldn’t find on the Android Marketplace or Google Play or whatever they’re calling it now.
Is Apple good? Eh, no. Is Google better? I don’t know, I like them better, but my iPhone 4S has everything I could want in a mobile and a lot more. So until there’s a different option that can deliver all that AND MORE I’m kind of stuck with them.
Really? I was being a tad facetious.
The thing that really kills me about Apple, though, and a large part of why I don’t buy their products, is the way they handle competition. They do not see competition as a legitimate opportunity to show that they have a better service (possibly because they don’t). There have been multiple iOS developers over the years who have created applications and built a business around them, only to find that Apple suddenly removed their application from the app store. Why? Because Apple developed their own alternative, and they want their software to be the only software you can use. So as long as they have control over what software you can run on your iDevice, you basiclaly aren’t allowed to compete with them. They also completely fucked the margins of a large number of developers when they suddenly demanded a cut of the money made from in-app purchases. Many services that had narrow margins had to either jack up the price or cease to exist, and all of that is very bad for consumers.
As an OS, I don’t really like Android. The fragmentation issues are as bad as they’re made out to be, and Google seem to release a new version of 6 months so it’s impossible to stay ahead of the curve. Despite being based on the Linux kernel it has nothing to do with desktop Linux, which is disappointing. And I never know when a program I want is going to be incompatible with my phone’s hardware (or incompatible for some other unspecified reason) – but it happens far too frequently.
But the thing I DO like about Android is that I feel like I own my phone, not Google. I don’t have to use Google Play if I don’t want to, I can use Amazon’s marketplace or any of the other myriad alternative ‘app stores’ as ya call them. I can get APKs directly from the developer and install them manually myself. I can tweak and fiddle with the interface and even install entirely new launchers that replace the stock one.
That said, Android is still pretty mediocre overall. My next phone will probably be Boot to Gecko because I’m a huge Mozilla fanboy. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/b2g/
That is the dumbest thing I’ve read in a long time.
I’m starting to lose faith in this place.
Really..? Recommending ishit? A phone that you can’t even plug into your computer and browse it’s inner file structure without some third party application installed and jailbroken? A phone riddled with pseudo gaming that are really only good to alleviate trips to the bathroom? With needlessly expensive accessories and the intrusive bloatware that is itunes that is forced down your throat? With no swappable battery or memory card? And most of all, extremely overpriced for what you get?
Selling a phone alone on “user experience” is great… if you are a clueless grandma scraping by in the digital age. I’d rather be allowed to make my own user experience and whatever else I feel like with my phone.
PS.: If you primarily buy a phone to game, you would be better off with a xperia play or something like a droid 3 with a game gripper and game keyboard installed (latter will be a much better choice once hashcode finishes his custom ICS rom).