Thanks for your service, iPhone 4

March 7, 2015
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

iPhone 4

A couple more months, and it would have been four years. 

My philosophy of making the most of a piece of technology is admittedly influenced by my meagre budget, which is a constant lately; but even if I had more money, I probably wouldn’t upgrade the devices I use as soon as a new model is introduced. Avoiding unnecessary waste is something my family has taught me since I was little. 

And I really made the most of my 16 GB iPhone 4. It has served me quite well over the years. It was introduced in June 2010, but I was still paying the iPhone 3G under the original two-year contract with my carrier, so I had to wait a bit. I eventually got it in April 2011, basically just when it was being discontinued. At the time, a few friends suggested I waited until September/October 2011 for the upcoming iPhone 4S. It was a sensible piece of advice, and I would have probably followed it if I had been using an iPhone 3GS. But my iPhone 3G, by 2011, was feeling old and a bit slow, and I really wanted to go Retina. In retrospect, iOS 4 had impacted the iPhone 3G’s performance more significantly than iOS 7 did later with the iPhone 4. 

Despite getting on the iPhone 4 bandwagon late compared to most people, I was extremely happy with my purchase. When you upgrade jumping a generation, the difference in features and performance is staggering. If you’ve been long-time iPhone users, try remembering how it was iOS 4.2.1 on an iPhone 3G, or the quality of the iPhone 3G’s 2‑megapixel camera (and responsiveness), compared to an iPhone 4 under the same iOS version, with a Retina display, a 5‑megapixel camera, 512 MB of RAM (the iPhone 3G had 128), and a CPU that was twice as fast.

The iPhone 4 is still a beautiful example of design, and it’s the iPhone model that has felt the most robust among the ones I have owned and tried out. I can attest to its robustness after a nasty fall that happened just three months after purchase. I was walking down the street, the iPhone in my jacket’s inner pocket, and listening to some music. I pulled out the iPhone to check something on Google Maps, the iPhone got tangled in the earphones’ cable, and in an attempt to free it, I dropped it. Until then, my policy with iPhones had always been ‘no case’, and with the iPhone 4 in particular, it was a pity to bury that design in a protective case, no matter how stylish. As I was helplessly watching my iPhone 4 fly towards the pavement, I obviously felt stupid for choosing not to protect it, and I was anticipating shattered glass everywhere, and a visit at the Apple Store to have it replaced. To my surprise, the iPhone got only some minor scuffs, mostly on the right side edge; both the front and back glass panels remained intact and basically scratch-free. But most of all, nothing had broken internally. I frantically checked Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, if cellular reception still worked, the state of the speaker and the microphone, the camera and its flash, everything that could stop working after such a fall. But all was well, and I was blown away. 

Okay, there’s probably some luck to add to the mix. Perhaps if the iPhone had fallen differently, the glass would have shattered, or the antennae would have stopped working, and other horrific scenarios. Yet I’m certain that the design of the internal components and the materials used in manufacturing the iPhone played a big role in my iPhone 4’s survival. I believe that any other smartphone of similar vintage would have taken a much worse beating after a fall like that.

These four years with the iPhone 4 have been great: I’ve shot thousands of photos and it has effectively been my main point-and-shoot digital camera. For more than a year (April 2011 to June 2012) it was my sole ebook reader, and during that time I’ve read more books than the two preceding years combined. Then I bought a third-generation iPad, and my ebook reading passed to its bigger screen.

The iPhone 4 will probably be the model where I’ve witnessed so much evolution in terms of software. On it I’ve used iOS 4, iOS 5, iOS 6 and iOS 7 — four different and important versions of the operating system. And speaking of iOS 7, unlike other people, I’ve never really had any problem with it. Sure, it may have caused the iPhone to feel a bit sluggish here and there, but a quite acceptable experience overall (I wrote about iOS 7 and the iPhone 4 in three previous articles: iOS 7 on the iPhone 4, iOS 7, battery life, and the iPhone 4, and iOS 7.1 and the iPhone 4 performance).

Speaking of battery life, this is another department where I must say I’m incredibly satisfied with my iPhone 4. During the four years I’ve used it daily, I never took particular precautions apart from the obvious checks on which parts of the system and/or which applications could impact negatively on battery life, but that’s it. I honestly don’t remember how much the battery lasted on a single charge when my iPhone 4 was new back in 2011. I guess it was approximately two days with light-medium usage. Lately it went down to one day and a half, again with light-medium usage, and from morning to evening on particularly intense days. Still a respectable performance, all things considered.

The only physical sign of my iPhone 4’s age has been the home button, getting progressively unreliable and alternating days of decent responsiveness to days in which I thought I had to push it all the way through the iPhone’s back to elicit a response. If I hadn’t upgraded, I’d have got it fixed. 

Finally, I must add that I’m not completely decommissioning this iPhone. Since I have two numbers (a Spanish SIM and an Italian one), this iPhone 4 will become my secondary phone with the Italian SIM. In the next days I’ll configure it properly to work as such, reviewing the apps installed, eliminating a few of those that take up too much space, or are redundant, or make the phone feel too sluggish (many photo apps, for example), that sort of thing.

In the meanwhile, thanks for your service, iPhone 4. It has been quite a good run indeed.

→ Kill the wireless contract

March 1, 2015
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

In her piece for the Wall Street Journal, Kill the Wireless Contract! Buy Your Own Phone, Joanna Stern writes:

I am an idiot. I signed a two-year contract to get my iPhone 6.

Without much thought, I did what most Americans do every two years: I agreed to be locked in by a multibillion-dollar wireless company. With pricey contracts and confusing add-ons, they make it incredibly hard to leave, let alone take our phones with us. I deserve to walk around with “Property of Verizon” stamped on my forehead.

We sign on the dotted line because we presume it will save us money on that new shiny phone and our monthly service. But here’s the thing they don’t want us to know: Neither is necessarily true anymore.

My experience (I’m in Europe) corroborates this. When I upgraded from an iPhone 3G to an iPhone 4 in 2011, I left a two-year contract with one carrier, Movistar, to start another two-year contract with a different carrier, Orange. At the time it seemed a better deal, and I paid €140 for my 16 GB iPhone 4 when unlocked it would have cost me €599. But to be able to pay such a low price for the handset, I had to sign a 18-month contract where I would pay €42 per month to have in return a bunch of free texts, 500 MB of mobile data traffic and (if I remember well) some discount on national calls, or something like that. 

Of course, those €42 did not include VAT, so I basically ended up paying €50 per month, an amount which started to skyrocket every time I phoned my parents and friends in Italy (I live in Spain), because international calls and texts were not among the included expenses in that contract profile. To give you an idea of the craziness, a half-hour call to my mother would cost me roughly €20. A single text was something like 60 cents before VAT, so a couple of such calls and a bunch of texts would make for €100 (or more) monthly phone bills. Eighteen months like this… do the math. I naturally tried to limit international usage, but still, over the contract period, I more than paid for the cost of the handset. The last cherry on the cake was having to pay €10 to have the iPhone unlocked by the carrier once the 18-month contract period was over. 

Finally, in February 2013, I decided to leave this absurd two-year lock-in model, and since then I’ve been a happy customer of a local carrier (a MVNO, or mobile virtual network operator) called Pepephone (the site’s in Spanish). The name may sound funny to an English speaker — I think it’s based on the company’s mascot, Pepe, who sorts of represents the man of the street, the ‘regular Joe’ — but hey, I’ve been enjoying a great customer service, low rates, and very good coverage. At the moment I pay a €6.90 monthly flat rate for 1.2 GB mobile data traffic (VAT included), and in the two years I’ve been a customer the highest phone bill was less than €20. (Yes, making international calls and sending texts to phones outside Spain is still comparatively expensive, but not like it was with the previous carriers.) Oh, and this company has the great habit of not raising prices whenever it upgrades the service or its offerings. For instance, all Pepephone customers are currently in the process of being upgraded to LTE, and when it happens, we’ll still be paying the same as now. 

If you do switch to one of the smaller guys and you don’t like it — guess what! You can just get up and leave. That’s the real freedom. They’ll never dangle a contract under your nose. You can set up an auto-renewing monthly plan and cancel any time.

Exactly. My contract with Pepephone implicitly auto-renews, but I’m free to go whenever I want if I don’t like the service or if I find a better alternative (so far I haven’t); there are no strings attached. 

But apart from praising this company in particular, the point here is that — as Joanna Stern explains in the article — life is better outside the lock-in mechanism of two-year carrier contracts. I’ve been ‘free’ since 2013 and I’m certainly not turning back. Sure, having to pay upfront the full price of an unlocked phone is hard, especially when the budget is tight or when there’s no budget at all. In my case, this has meant holding on to my iPhone 4 for a much longer period, and not upgrading to the latest and shiniest devices, but the amount of money saved in the process is indeed significant, and that’s what matters.

→ Saying Goodbye to Apple, Google and Microsoft

February 28, 2015
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

I started reading Why I’m Saying Goodbye to Apple, Google and Microsoft by Dan Gillmor on Medium because it was the suggested reading at the bottom of another, great article you should check out: The Last of the Typewriter Men. I started reading Gillmor’s article not because I just click on whatever recommended reading I encounter, but because I was genuinely curious about Gillmor’s point of view, what brought him to that decision, and which tools he ended up choosing as an alternative. 

Gillmor writes:

More important, I’ve moved to these alternative platforms because I’ve changed my mind about the politics of technology. I now believe it’s essential to embed my instincts and values, to a greater and greater extent, in the technology I use.

Those values start with a basic notion: We are losing control over the tools that once promised equal opportunity in speech and innovation—and this has to stop.

Control is moving back to the center, where powerful companies and governments are creating choke points. They are using those choke points to destroy our privacy, limit our freedom of expression, and lock down culture and commerce. Too often, we give them our permission—trading liberty for convenience—but a lot of this is being done without our knowledge, much less permission.

And I’m totally with him on this.

Later on, about why he changed his mind about supporting Apple:

In Steve Jobs’s eras as CEO, Apple reflected his character and qualities. That was thrilling in most ways, because he demanded something close to perfection. But then the underdog revolutionized mobile computing and became the winner — one day we all realized it was one of the planet’s most powerful, profitable and valuable companies. Apple became the kind of company I prefer not to support: control-freakish to a fault with customers, software developers and the press; and, I came to believe, even dangerous to the future of open networks and user-controlled technology.

He later uses again the word ‘control-freakery’ about Apple as a reason why, when it came to choose a phone, he preferred an Android device (with Cyanogenmod) over an iPhone. And then, talking about Google, among other things, he writes this (emphasis mine):

But Google’s power and influence worry me, too, even though I still trust it more than many other tech companies.

I just don’t understand this position. (And while it seems I’m taking these words out of context, it’s actually the context that makes Gillmor’s stance even more puzzling to me, because he does recognise Google’s flaws and bad behaviour: “the company has made surveillance utterly integral to the use of its software”). 

One of Apple’s traits may be this ‘control-freakery’ Gillmor mentions, but the fact is that Apple did not become ‘control-freakish’ after the huge success of the iPhone — the ‘control-freakery’ started with Jobs, for whom Gillmor shows appreciation. And yes, perhaps Apple’s excessive control has created the ‘walled garden’ effect when it comes to applications and App Stores, but the bright side of it is that it has led to a generally superior quality in third-party app offerings and in the virtual lack of malware. Apple may have made the occasional faux pas when it comes to app rejections, but I believe that what’s behind this obsessive control for the user experience is largely Apple’s care for its customers; the intention has always been to provide the best tools and the best experience. It hasn’t always worked, granted, but I’ve never ascribed Apple’s behaviour in this regard to malice, nor have I suspected a different agenda or ulterior motives.

I don’t know how Gillmor can still trust Google more than many other tech companies — Apple included, I guess — when Google can practically track everything we do online, and Apple has demonstrated it truly cares about customer privacy (Apple can’t decrypt messages you exchange with iMessage, nor FaceTime sessions, for instance) and that it’s clearly not interested in data mining. This for me is enough to trust Apple more than Google and other big tech companies.

Lucas Bale has interviewed me about Low Fidelity and my writing

February 27, 2015
by Riccardo Mori
Et Cetera

Welcome to Arslan banner

 

Shortly after I was interviewed by Alex Roddie back in October 2014 about my serialised sci-fi novel Low Fidelity, I was contacted by another writer, Lucas Bale, who asked if he could conduct an extended interview with me via email about my novel and my writing in general. I was happy to oblige, but it took me an inordinate amount of time to respond. Finally, last month I completed my answers to Lucas’s questions and you can read the full interview on his website. I’m extremely grateful to Lucas for his interest and support. The feeling is mutual. 

Low Fidelity is an innovative, curiosity-engaging and untraditional format for a science fiction serial. It is currently available only on Vantage Point, Riccardo Mori’s compact digital magazine in Apple’s Newsstand. He publishes two issues per month. A monthly subscription costs $2.99. You can subscribe here (The first demo issue is free.)

Some useful links:

Please take some time to explore Lucas Bale’s site, get to know him and check out his books if you love science fiction. If you’re not familiar with his work, perhaps the upcoming anthology No Way Home, set to be released on March 2, is a good starting point (see also this page). Here you can read short speculative fiction stories by Bale and other authors, all with the common theme of being lost, stranded, blocked in places from where there’s no escape, no way to return home. I’ve been graciously handed a pre-release copy and I’m enjoying it so far.

Lucas Bale’s books in his Beyond the Wall series (“an epic, hard science-fiction space opera about the future of humanity and the discovery of the truth of its past”): 

Designing the Moment Case

February 18, 2015
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

Moment Case

The team behind the great Moment Lenses is back on Kickstarter for the funding of their latest product, the Moment Case. At the time of writing, the project is well beyond the original $100,000 goal and has pledged almost $520,000 with still eight days to go. I’m not surprised: the Moment Case looks fantastic, and I think its quality and good design are immediately apparent. The Kickstarter page for the project explains the various features of the Moment Case, and the design/engineering process in detail, but if you want to have an even deeper look at the long design research and process from the very first stages to the finished prototypes, don’t miss Designing The Moment Case: The Good, the Bad, and the Work Most People Don’t Show on Core77, written by Erik Hedberg from the Moment team. This accessory deserves to be backed if only for the meticulous approach and hard work this small team has carried out over months.

A few favourite quotes:

With this project we stumbled on a few insights we never would have prioritized without doing this work:

  • Speed is all that matters with mobile. Despite people’s ability level, taking a great picture quickly was more important than anything else.
  • People get tired of digging into their pocket to find their phone. We found this action loses the nostalgia of taking pictures.
  • Without adventure, most people don’t have the creative ability to take great pictures. Every time the scenery and subject were new, people took better pictures.

 

We’ve never designed a phone case before. When we started looking into doing one, we realized that people take tons of pictures with their phones, but they don’t think of them as cameras — they think of them as phones. We love the vintage quality and novelty of traditional cameras, and wanted to pay homage to that. We wanted to recreate that pride people take in wearing a beautiful Leica around their neck. So we set out to make a case that turns your phone into a camera.

 

The design process is a beautiful thing because it’s never the same for every project. It’s actually quite similar to riding down a mountain or surfing a wave. You start out knowing what you want to do, but once you get riding you might hit a bump, you might suddenly change direction, or you might even make the best turn of your life and become enlightened for a small second. You also eat shit sometimes. When that happens you have to learn from it, get back up and try again.