It was a 5+ year love affair; I’ll never forget my first iPhone, which I got at the start of the recession. You comforted and amazed me during my darkest days. But today I’m leaving you. It’s not you, it’s me; I’ve changed and you haven’t.
When I received my first iPhone 3G as a Christmas present, I was instantly in love. It was a massive paradigm shift from other mobile devices I had used up to that point. And it was fast, which feels like a blast from the past before networks got clogged with mobile traffic. It was a time where people made more telephone calls than text messages. I submit that times have changed but successive releases of iPhone models have not inspired me with quantum feature and functionality leaps. To be honest, my current iPhone 5 isn’t that much different than my first iPhone 3G.
Pictured: A 12th Man Selfie!
So how have I changed? First of all, I have a better sense of self and what’s important to me. Number one on that discovery list is photography. As a blogger, I travel with a camera. In the past, it was my full-on Nikon entourage that often qualified as a second carry-on bag on my frequent flights. As a middle-aged male, too often carrying my Nikon camera on my front side extended my “ledge” even further (a large SLR camera does not have a slimming effect). Enter my new Nokia 1020 Windows Phone running Windows 8.x. It has a 41-megapixel camera that I’m only starting to learn, but in future blogs I’ll share more speeds and feeds that I discover. I’ve been shown but not successfully completed a photography mode that shows a sequence of pics stitched together, like a downhill skier going by over a ledge.
Then there was the internal insight or “look-in-the-mirror,” where I asked myself: what do I really use a mobile phone for? I counted a 15+ bona fide uses, which pales to the 100,000 of Apple apps that will do anything for me. I encourage you to engage in this same exercise, and you’ll like concur that you don’t do that much with a mobile device. My short usage list is:
- Telephone (make and receive calls)
- Photos
- Texting
- Internet access
- News (CNN, MarketWatch, etc.)
- Ski report(s)
- Ferry and Traffic schedule
- Dining Guide
- Alarm and Stopwatch
- Myfitnesspal.com dietary applications
- GPS
- CRM
- Flight planning/Hotel planning
- Music
For the sake of argument, I’m sure there are a handful of additional tasks that I perform on a mobile device that I am not listing here. But here comes the bombshell: the Nokia Windows 8 phone does exactly what I want!!! It’s not like the iPhone has some killer app that I need and can’t find elsewhere.
This is my personal opinion, and I am of course open to discussion from you all!
Breaking News! As I was writing this blog, CNN’s Headline News (HLN) reported an interesting story. Apparently an individual found a 1991 full-page newspaper advertisement featuring computers. The report found that all of the technology displayed in the advertisement, which exceeded $10,000 in costs, is now available on your smartphone mobile device. The point is that the pace of innovation is amazing and that HLN segment really provided context.
As a bonus, my new Windows Phone has platform integration you really get spoiled with. In a private meeting last week with a Microsoft Windows executive – I suggested that they continue to emphasize the UI and user experience is the SAME across all Microsoft devices. This allows incredible learning leverage in an organization by teaching once and using often. Combined with the way my profile follows me across devices and combined with SkyDrive storing my commonly used data, it’s frickin’ scary.
I want to emphasize I’ve only had my new Windows Phone for a week but I’ve already traveled far from home without my familiar iPhone and I survived just fine. I am sure that those of you who pick up a non-iPhone device will too.
