Dear Siri,
We have had a great time together, but I'm afraid I have been seeing somone else and I'm going to be going away with them. "Hello Galaxy".
That would be one way of starting my "Dear John" letter to my iPhone. Another would be to blame it on the seven year itch. For I have been loyal iPhone user since 2007 when I got a 'jailbroken' iPhone 1 in a store in Dubai and saw the future.
Since then I have flirted a little with other devices, but slowly and surely my life has become quite Apple centric. We have four iPhones in our home, one iPad, two Apple TVs, an iMac, three MacBook Pros and a MacBook Air. I had certainly played my part in the success of Apple.
To be fair to the iPhone, I didn't go looking for another device as a replacement. I have only had my iPhone 5s for about 6 months, so there was plenty of novelty and wonder still to go. But I did need to buy an up to date Android device so that I could test a new App which integrates SMS with Salesforce.com. And that was the start of the affair with Samsung.
I decided that rather than just buy an average up to date Android phone, I would try out a new way of working; to have a phablet (phone/tablet) plus a smartwatch. So the obvious choice was the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 plus the Samsung Galaxy Gear.
So after a bit of an eBay search I ordered my new hardware. The plan was not to use this gear instead of my iPhone, but just to experiment with it and probably await whatever Apple launches in this category. After a week or so, my Samsung equipment arrived.
After a bit of messing about with a SIM adaptor, I got my iPhone 5 nano-SIM into the Note 3 micro SIM slot. Having already charged the battery, I then switched it on and started the sign-up journey.
Everything seemed to go OK, the Note 3 ran and looked great and the screen size was a real wow factor. After a quick tour of the Note 3, I booted up the Gear smartwatch. Again, all seemed to go well and the two devices paired seemlessly.
So far so good. I had no intention of trying to 'port' my iPhone working environment to the Android devices, so I was happy just to play around with the features. However during the first few hours and maybe first couple of days of using the Note 3, something changed my mind. It is difficult to put my finger on it, but I'm going to try. I would say that three things changed my mind, they were:
1. Android has come a long way since I first used it four years ago. It is more intuitive, more responsive and gives you the feeling that you aren't missing anything if you are using it.
2. I became facinated with the stylus, or S-Pen and the handwriting recognition of the Note 3. I hadn't given this a second thought before my purchase. But I realised that for a fair while I have been frustrated with using a keypad to compose SMS messages and emails. I felt that with some time the S-Pen could become the best input device yet.
3. I also became facinated with the smartwatch. The most used feature on a phone is the clock, so perhaps there is a future for the watch which stretches beyond indicating the time and the wearer's wealth.
These three things made me feel that perhaps by staying loyal to Apple, I was missing out on some new adventures in life. Maybe I should try to give Samsung the chance of winning me over completely. But to do this I would have to go through a messy separation from Apple and lose the the 'home' I had constructed using Apple's product set. This would not be easy, and it might be quite emotional.
Fortunately, for just about every iOS App there is an Android Equivalent. Usually the identical product. I also have mostly free Apps, so there was not great price burden to the installation exercise. So after about an hour I had installed just about all I needed for both work and leisure. My home screen on my Note 3 was starting to look familiar.
Samsung have given a little thought to winning over iPhone users, and provide an App called 'SmartSwitch' which downloads all the Contacts, Appointments, Messages and Photos from iCloud to the Note 3. This exercise was not perfect, partly because I seemed to be a little behind with my iCloud backups. But it did save me a considerable amount of manual entry.
Services like Gmail, Flickr, Dropbox and Evernote hold all your data in the cloud, so once the App was installed, or configured, you could see everything. Microsoft Office is a suite of Apps, mirroring the desktop equivalents, which really seems to be better than Pages, Numbers and Keynote on the iPhone.
So once I had all the Apps, there was one glaring problem which was what to do about Music. I tried installing Kies on my laptop and to move content from iTunes to my phone. But it wasn't ideal. Next I tried the Mac version of Samsung SmartSwitch. This has been designed with purpose of moving users from Apple to Android in mind. Unfortunately it did not work with my iPhone backups. Maybe this was due to them being encrypted, or maybe because they were on an external hard-drive, but it did not work. So it was back to Kies.
At the end of this experience the most obvious gap in the Android eco-system is the absence of an iTunes alternative. To be fair I haven't tried the Android music stores such as Amazon, but as I have purchased so much music over iTunes, and ripped so many of my CDs to my laptop via iTunes that I didn't want to do any more purchasing. I just wanted to move the content I already owned. I hope that at some point Apple decide that it isn't good to build iTunes to only support Apple mobile devices. Maybe it is time to bring down that wall?
So after some pain, I got my multi-media files onto my Samsung Note 3. That is with the exception of Movies and TV Shows which are not going to work without some tinkering about. So it wasn't a perfect state of affairs, I lost some content that I like. But lets face it divorce is messy and painful and you aren't going to get everything.
My separation from Apple was complete as far as a mobile phone was concerned. I'm not sure what I will feel about my new relationship with Samsung, nor whether it will last as long as my last relationship. I may even go back to Apple if stories about a larger form factor iPhone 6 and the iWatch turn out to be true. But I hope that I can spend a fair amount of time with Samsung and learn to enjoy what is has got rather than what might be missing.
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