As part of my job reviewing smartphones
for TechSpot, I find myself using Android devices most of the time,
purely because the vast majority of handsets released in any one year
run Google’s operating system. I’ve dabbled in the iOS ecosystem from
time to time, but it’s been years since I’ve actually picked up an
iPhone and used it as my daily driver.
With the recent launch of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, I thought now would
be the perfect time to pick up one of Apple’s latest smartphones and
use it exclusively for two weeks. What follows are my thoughts on the
phone and the ecosystem as primarily an Android user, how the two
experiences compare, and whether long-time Android users should
contemplate an iOS switch.
This is my gold iPhone 6s, featuring an awesome wooden skin from dbrand |
The iOS homescreen has barely changed since the launch of the first iPhone, and in some ways that’s a good thing. The iPhone 6s displays a 6x4 grid of apps on each screen, with an additional four apps in the dock; no widgets, panels or app drawers clog up this area, resulting in a main screen that includes every app you’ve installed on the device. There were some unnecessary apps pre-loaded on the device that I couldn’t uninstall (the Watch app comes to mind), but I quickly hid these away in a folder. Not ideal but does the job.
Most ‘at-a-glance’ information is hidden away in one of two areas: the lock screen and slide-down notification center. Normally information on the lock screen wouldn’t really be ‘hidden’, but the speed of Touch ID in unlocking the device often prevents you from reading what’s in there. I’d class this as a pretty good issue to run in to: the speed of unlocking is one of the many advantages to using Touch ID, as it secures my device without slowing down its use.
With that said, I did like the ‘Today’ tab, which shows information ranging from the date, weather and upcoming events, to anything you want third party apps to display, all in an easy-to-read format. This somewhat makes up for the lack of widgets, but it would be more useful if it were integrated into the home screens rather than hidden away in a pull-down menu.
The iOS Control Center is a decent replacement for Android’s quick settings panel, although in some ways it’s less flexible. There are controls to switch on Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Do Not Disturb and more, as well as a brightness slider, music controls and shortcuts to useful utilities such as the timer and calculator; but what you don’t get is the ability to customize this menu in any way. On my Galaxy S6, for example, I can set up quick settings toggles for mobile data access, GPS, and power saving modes, but I can’t easily control these things on my iPhone 6s.
The apps that are included with the iPhone 6s by default generally give a better experience than OEM-developed apps bundled with Android devices. Health, Music and Game Center come to mind as apps with superior interfaces and better functionality than their counterparts developed by Samsung, LG and (sometimes) Google. Apple’s control over their ecosystem allows these apps to be integrated tightly with the iPhone’s hardware or the company’s other services, often resulting in more polished experiences.
With that said, I was impressed at how well Google contacts and calendar events get integrated into iOS, considering the OS isn’t developed by Google and integration isn’t nearly as good on Windows Phone. Mail is less well integrated; I tried using Apple’s stock Mail app for a couple of days, but I just had to switch to the superior Gmail app (which still isn’t as good as Gmail on Android).
One thing I have missed considerably after switching from Android to iOS is decent search functionality. On Android, performing a web search is as easy as tapping the search bar on the home screen. On iOS, you can use Spotlight to search in the left-most home screen, but it requires multiple taps to get web search results, and in general this feature is more suited to searching the phone and its apps. The other option is to fire up Safari and search in the address bar, which brings up a Google search as you’d expect, but this is still a multiple tap operation.
Downloading the Google app did improve the search experience somewhat, and the app also brings handy Google Now functionality, but it’s clear that search is much faster on Android and much more deeply integrated into the operating system.
Of the more random observations during my past week with iOS 9, the operating system loves to throw pop-up notifications at you, especially when launching an app for the first time. Occasionally there are multiple pop-ups in a row, which can be obtrusive and annoying, especially when you have to wade through pop-ups for every single app. Android doesn’t use pop-up dialogs nearly as frequently and that’s a good thing.
Oh, and I’d love it if Apple made it more obvious what apps support 3D Touch, and how they support it. I found myself blindly hard-pressing links, items, and apps to discover where it was supported, and so far this seems to be the only way to learn without looking up specifically where Apple has used the feature.
So these are my brief thoughts after using iOS 9 and the iPhone 6s for a week. I’m still locked in to use the iPhone 6s for the next week, so I’ll be posting further impressions, including a lot more on the hardware of the smartphone, in Part 2 of this series.
~ Tim Schiesser
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