Dave’s Cell Phone update: Slowly Finding my “Happy Place” and “Happy [phone holster] Case”..

So, I finally did it – made a decision to upgrade my iPhone, as chronicled in my prior Blog posting.

The winning decision was a white iPhone 4S 64GB (I would have preferred a 32GB, but they were getting impossible to find – as mentioned in my prior blog post).  As alluded to in that post, finding any of the iPhone 4S’s that were greater than 16GB has proven to be extremely difficult.

The summary is, I’ve been loving the iPhone 4S so far, now about 3 days later.  I’m in the process of trying to pick a good case for it.  My personal favorites are the Sena LeatherSkin and WalletSlim cases.  I have had 2 of these faithfully serving my iPhone 3GS’s for 2-3 years, and am currently just trying to decide which color and style I want for the new one:

http://www.senacases.com/apple/iphone-4s-cases/leatherskin/

For the curious, the specific iPhone I selected was an older 4S (it had like iOS 5.0x installed on it – and its battery had been completely discharged) – so, this made the upgrade process take even longer than normal.  [FYI – it takes about 30-40 minutes for an iPhone to charge from absolute zero to actually getting to a point where it will turn on.  I was glad that I had brought my Google Nexus Tablet to keep busy while I was waiting at Best Buy for that charging to occur. 😉

Apart from that, once I got the phone back home, I was essentially “forced” to upgrade the phone to iOS6, which I hadn’t wanted to do (again, for reasons mentioned in my prior Blog post), because my prior iPhone backup was in a “newer” format than the current iPhone’s software (5.0x) could recognize.  This is again a practice of Apple’s that chafes me – e.g. forcing people to upgrade to the newest iOS and/or not making it easier for older firmware or software revisions to be obtained.  Best practice, and just good common sense, dictates that it’s wise for technology vendors to make older versions of firmware, Operating System software, etc. available for their consumers – “just in case” – particularly when there’s no strong economic or business case to yank them away prematurely.  What value is there in making it difficult to upgrade (or obtain) the latest NON-iOS6 software update from iTunes?  It’s not like the latest iOS 5 software wasn’t stable or reliable.  If it was, say, the iOS’s version of “WindowsME”* – then I’d understand – but that wasn’t the case here.

That aside, I’ve been loving the faster speed, the awesome display and camera, and the fact that the phone has the traditional iPhone connector, as well as the audio jack up on the top of the unit, where it’s “supposed” to be.  😉

— DB

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