Well, iphones are not waterproof. Roommate dropped his into a puddle during the rain, and, fried phone. He now has a new, but older model iphone. It's much lighter, and thinner then the new one. All I did was enter the code for the WIFI, and, the virtual keyboard was
really hard to do with big fingers.
You're talking about a $600 phone from a tier 1 OEM vs. a deliberately inexpensive lowest common denominator 1st generation device.
The phone was dropped in street, in the pouring rain, at the SFO passenger loading area, as he dropped off a client. This was very early in the morning, it was dark, and the phone is black. He came back four hours later. The phone had been run over a number of times, the screen was severely cracked. The phone actually started up, he got a few messages off of it, and then it died.
It's now being worked on by two experts in the bay area, trying to recover the phone.
The good news is all his contacts and stuff are loaded to the 'icloud', so, as with google, he didn't loose any contacts when he lost the phone.
The phone he replaced it with is also a 4s, so it was just my groggy perception that the phone was tiny, which it is, compared to my HTC 4g Slide, Khaki.
Still, I'll take the extra weight and size, and being on my second day on this battery charge, and, I still have 68% of the charge left.
He said almost the same thing Merc's clients did:
"It's just SO easy to use."
It isn't fast. It looks like another Apple charge a lot, give you terrible, low standard hardware that barely runs the software.
I prefer SwiftKey X on my phone. It's available for the Kindle Fire.
Now typing this with SwiftKey on the transformer. The idea that it personalises predictions based on usage is nice. Pulling that data from your accounts is clever, but I am not giving it access to my Gmail account.
It isn't anywhere near as quick as swype yet, but but I'm willing to test it for a week and see what happens. If my posts start to resemble lunar's you'll know what happened.
The nice thing is, at least Android people get a choice.
True, but it's unfortunate you need it in the first place.
appl
Whatever.
I don't care if it survived being run over by a tank, I'm not getting into another appl closed system.
There's obviously enough divergence of opinion in what makes a good on screen keyboard that ithing people could probably stand to see some choice in the matter as well.
How does the default virtual keyboard compare to the iOS5 virtual keyboard?
Nearly identical in my (limited) experience. Some androids are faster than others. I have always wished for swype on iPad, and apparently it is possible.
They're both acceptable. Swiftkey probably is too. I'm used to Swype on my phone and that's what I prefer work with.
The biggest annoyance I have between on screen keyboards is the mild lack of standardization about which non-QWERTY keys go on the primary screen. The default keyboard the Xoom uses, for example, has the underscore ( _ ) on the main QWERTY screen but the much more useful hyphen ( - ) tucked away with the numbers and symbols.
I probably wouldn't pay much attention to any of that except that I actually have a stack of these things sitting here.
Even in the world of x86 hardware, keyboards aren't 100% standardized. It might be asking a lot to try to get everyone to come together and agree what on screen keyboards look be like.
On the destroyed phone: with iCloud backup he shouldn't have lost anything at all.
The biggest problem I have with istuff is the reliance on itunes to do everything. I can grudgingly accept locking data to an application and Apple's sealed-box approach to its OS, but itunes itself royally sucks.
At least the iphone isn't locked into crummy phone networks any more.
The ipad I was messing with wouldn't let me do a single damned thing with it until I plugged it in to a computer with itunes on it. It just came up with a graphic showing a picture of the data cable and an arrow pointing to the word "itunes."
If that's changed recently, it's for the best, but I couldn't figure out a way to put .cbr files on my ipad without itunes involvement regardless.