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iPhone 5 or iPhone 4S?


Doug Osborn

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Thanks for all the input.  My seven year old Samsung flip phone just had it's last leg kicked out from underneath it this week.  My daughter's dumb phone is giving up the ghost.  Mother's Day is on Sunday.  Headed to the Apple Store first thing in the morning for three new iPhones.  Time to bite the bullet and to pay the piper.

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All phones are heading to voice over LTE, so voice quality will go through another change soon. The quality of that depends on how much compression they feel ok using. Right now they all run a voice and data network, but they are slated to be combined to a single data stream when LTE is fully built out.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I just got an offer I couldn't refuse, and traded in my old iPhone 4 (and got a $150 credit), so a new iPhone 5 only cost me fifty bucks. Other rates stayed the same. Love the phone -- very light, big screen, good battery life (so far), and I really noticed the speed improvement, both on the LTE and on running apps. I thought I'd be kinda "eh" about it, but I'm actually very jazzed with it. If I didn't know better, I'd say the sound quality also was improved a little bit.

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I've had lots of experience with cell phones because of work. I MUCH prefer my personal android phone, but that's my personal taste. I had an iPhone 4S as my work phone, and I was not impressed with it at all. Then I had it upgraded to the 5 (because we were thinking of making a case for it similar to the one we made for the 4), and I have to say I was quite disappointed. Faster processor? Ok...I guess. I can't tell a difference. 4G LTE? I'll pull out my Android phone next to my iPhone 5 and for some reason the iPhone 5 won't be LTE, by my android will. Bigger display? Not really. It's just a little longer, but not wider. The phone is thinner, so it feels really cheap. They switched to that 8 pin lightning connector which, if you are going from an old dumb phone is a non issue, but it made me grumpy, plus I find it to be flimsy. I've never liked the iOS, and I particularly don't care for the music player. My next personal phone will probably be the HTC One or the Samsung Galaxy 4. Way more advantages with that..but again, it's all about personal preference, so you may find the iPhone better for you. If you are having to choose between the 5 and the 4S, then I'd go with the 4S. In terms of performance, I've yet to notice a difference. 

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I skip multiple generations between phones.

 

+1 on that.....  a 4-600 phone, amortized over 24 months, is pretty significant, IMO.

 

Though I'm very much a Mac-ophile, I went with a $200 DroidX2 deal and am pretty happy with it - for over 2.5 years.  It does everything I need it to do, and I don't bog it down with too many apps, letting my iPad do more of that "work".   Verizon keeps bugging me to upgrade to something newer (of course with the 2-yr "hook") but I just don't have the need yet.  

 

That iPhone 6 does look pretty interesting - but having / finding a big white "projector screen" available at any given moment might be frustrating.   It does look like a good business idea though - it's certainly going to increase data consumption for any owner / viewer of the next latest greatest.........

 

MF

 

MF

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I had an iPhone 4S as my work phone, and I was not impressed with it at all. Then I had it upgraded to the 5 (because we were thinking of making a case for it similar to the one we made for the 4), and I have to say I was quite disappointed. Faster processor? Ok...I guess.

 

I recently changed from the iPhone 4 to the 5, and I thought there was a big difference in speed. Part of it was the LTE, part of it was the processor, but I sure feel the difference. 

 

Ever since the original v1 iPhone, I've used a rubber-bumper case, not so much because I drop them all the time (I've owned 4 different phones and only dropped them a total of maybe 3 times, none catastrophically) but rather because they tend to slide out of my pockets. With a rubber-coated bumper, that provides some friction so it won't slide out when I least expect it.

 

I agree that the Lightning connector sucks, and I use other iPods for my music player. I think the iOS universe works provided you're willing to buy into Apple's "walled garden" approach, but I concede that it's not an experience everyone likes. And there are a lot better smartphone alternatives now than there were 4-5 years ago. Most of the apps I use are directly related to the sound business, like SPL meters, the Lectro remotes, timecode readers, and so on, and I think there's more to choose from for iOS than the other operating systems.

 

Note that there are now 129 million smartphone users in the U.S., and 1 billion of them in the world. This is a concept that took over very, very quickly. 

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