Me and My Phone

Almost exactly 4 years ago, I posted this in my previous blog in which I showed a pic of me with the Samsung Note 4 which was at that time, the state-of-the-art phone. Click here for the post.  On the photo, I wrote some words with the stylus pen from the phone and I thought it was a balanced 'naturist' review of the phone.

More than a year after that, I bought the Samsung Note 7 which proved to be a phone that gave nightmares to the folks at Samsung. Note 7 was the darkest chapter in the history of Samsung. The lithium battery for very few handsets would burn on its own.  The affected phones were very few but Samsung recalled all such phones. We were given a new Note 7 but that too was recalled. Samsung then gave us the S7 Edge which is a pretty good phone and which I used until late yesterday when I bought myself the Samsung Note 9.

The Note 9 has been hailed by phone reviewers as the best phone in 2018. Everyone expects that the Note 10 which industry watchers rate as nothing less than revolutionary will be available by late August this year. I had been waiting for it but yesterday, I felt I could wait no longer and so I got myself the Note 9. It's all right to get the best phone currently when the best phone of the future won't be available until August.

You may think I have always been a Samsung fan but that's not true at all. I started life with the iPhone, like most unguarded people who are duped and fooled but remain none the wiser. I knew the iPhone had many limitations but because I did not try using other phones, I thought the limitations were what you should expect in any phone.

For a long time, the iPhone had no self-timer in its camera. I had to install a third-party app in order to use the self-timer but that compromised on the kind of photographs I could take - the resolution was greatly reduced. I suffered for a long time without the use of a proper self-timer feature. Even when I got the iPhone 4 which was the latest at that time, the camera in the iPhone had no self-timer.

I can't remember the exact timing but probably months after I started using the iPhone 4, my wife got herself a Samsung Note 4.  I played around with her phone and for the first time in my life, the scales fell from my eyes and I knew I had been deceived all these years by the pernicious iPhone propaganda. The self-timer which iPhone obviously considers such a complex rocket-science problem is in fact a feature that is available in Samsung and all other unheard-of brands of phones for years and years.  I decided to ditch the rotten apple and got myself the Samsung Note 4.

I realised something that I never knew for years - the iPhone is a third-rate phone that is way overrated because of its marketing and packaging. I soon discovered that for many years, all phones had features that iPhone users could only dream of as something taken out of a science fiction story. That's how backward the iPhone is. I discovered that the iPhone was miles behind all other phones - Sony had a waterproof camera, followed by Samsung and other brands before the iPhone (many years later) made its first waterproof iPhone and even then you couldn't go as deep or as long in the water as other phones could. And when iPhone finally knew how to make a waterproof phone, it had such a huge publicity about this feature which was disgraceful since other phones had been waterproofed years and years before. There are many other features that I can talk about that are absent in the iPhone but present in all the other phones in the market.

I can write a book in three volumes about the woes of the iPhone and anyone who has converted from being an iPhone slave to a user of Android is sure to feel the urge to sing 'Amazing Grace' - 'I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.'  If you think I am overreacting, you really don't understand how a man feels when he's been cheated as I have been in all those years when I used the iPhone. If you have been using smoke signals all this while to communicate with friends and you discover that the rest of the world has been communicating with the modern phone, for sure you will feel cheated and you will have strong feelings about this. That's exactly how I felt.

I will just mention one last point. I don't know about you but what I own is mine and I expect to be able to use my possessions in any way I please. Not so for iPhone users. When I take a photograph with my phone, I expect to be able to store it anywhere I want. You can do that with an Android phone. You just connect a wire to your phone and your pc and you can download the photos just as if the phone is a normal camera or another hard disk drive.  Apple is by nature insanely proprietorial - it wants to stop you from placing your photos in any place other than an Apple app or device. So you are forced to download your photos in iTunes or iPhotos.  As you accumulate more and more photos, you will find that getting thousands of photos out of iTunes is not a simple task. The same applies to your contacts. Apple makes sure that your address book cannot be moved to any other platform apart from an Apple app.

To me, this is absolutely unacceptable. My contacts are mine as are my photos and videos. If a company seeks to curtail that right of mine, I will just have nothing to do with the company. Of course the initial breakaway is not easy. I discovered that some of my contacts remained trapped in Apple and so were some of my photos. For contacts that could not be exported, I typed them all out again on Google Contacts. It was hard work but I was determined to cut off Apple from my life. I valued my liberty too much to want to remain an apple slave. I got rid of the MacBook and that's another story. I discovered that the MacBook (including their high-end range)  uses a processor that is  so outdated and old that all other computer companies do not use such a processor  except for their budget sets!  Can you imagine that? The most expensive MacBook you can find in the market uses a processor that is slower than all other cheap computers in the world. I will stop here.

Since I did a photo 4 years ago with the Samsung Note 4, I thought I should do the same with the current Note 9. This photo shows me with my Samsung. Naturally, this photo was not taken with the Samsung which was is my hand. I used a camera to take this pic and I downloaded the pic into my Samsung phone and used the new stylus pen to write on the pic.

And then I thought that surely a review of a phone must include a photo taken with that phone. So here is a pic I took with the Samsung Note 9. I placed the phone on a table to take this pic. You can see that the quality of the stylus pen (in the photo above) and the resolution of the photo (in the pic below) are undoubtedly top-notch.

If you need to get a new phone, go for the Samsung Note 9, especially if, like me, you enjoy using the stylus pen. The stylus pen has more functions that merely writing on the screen of your phone; you can also use it to take selfies. And if you know the CEO of Samsung, show him this blog post. Samsung may use these photos for their advertising for free. But I won't refuse them if they offer me their Note 10 which will be available in August.

NOTE: I realised the earlier link to my previous blog post didn't work and have just changed it. [28 June 2019]