You don’t need to rush out and upgrade to an iPhone 5. Now clearly over 2 million people probably don’t agree with this blog post, but hey why try and be popular. 😉 According to Chris Taylor’s Mashable Op-Ed piece, if you haven’t already joined the millions vying for an iPhone 5, you don’t have to. Chris gives two main reasons for not joining the herd, iOS6 and the S series.
The new iOS6 will be available in a few days (September 19th) and it apparent is a “quantum leap forward” for Apple’s operating software. It will included better social integration with Facebook and Twitter, a new Maps app providing turn by turn navigation (but no public transportation), and a “smarter” Siri.
Chris brings up an interesting good point about the S seriews of iPhones. “The S cycle, we can start to see after two of them, is where Apple tweaks the iPhone to perfection. Because the number isn’t changing, the company tends to add more features to justify your upgrade. ” So by waiting for the iPhone 5S (which we assume is the next version) people get the upgraded device with the new “S” enhancements.
For my husband and other non-iPhone people Chris thinks Android’s 4.1 OS (Jelly Bean) is far more powerful than Ice Cream Sandwich and he really likes Galaxy SIII, the Nexus and the HTC One X and the Windows Nokia Lumia 920. If you don’t have one of those phones and you are wondering when/if your Android will get Jelly Bean you should check out ComputerWorld’s Jelly Bean upgrade list. It is a huge list of almost every Android device and whether it is in the process of getting or have already gotten the upgrade, expected to get the upgrade, or unlikely to get the upgrade. (This is my big problem with Android devices, you never know if you are going to get the latest OS upgrade. Just because you got an upgrade doesn’t mean you will when Key Lime Pie is available.)
One of the reasons iPhone has started to become more popular with IT departments as RIM circles the drain is that there is little diversity within the iPhone world. An iPhone is an iPhone, they all get an upgrade (unless you have an iPhone 3 or 3G then it is too old), they all have the same manufacturer and they all operate pretty much the same way. The downfall of the Android was its diversity when our IT department tested them. In an organization with 30 thousand employees, several thousand of which have a company phone, you need as little diversity as possible. With BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) businesses. That is why some think the Windows devices with its “baked in cybersecurity goodness” might be poised to strike big among businesses.
What does this mean for medical libraries? It means that we need to keep an eye on these things and think about our resources and how they work. Can we design for every device? No that is why we need to look at web design not apps for our important systems.
I have been using a RIM Blackberry Storm for 3 1/2 years. It looked cool, and was totally taken in by RIM’s advertising in 2008. Bad choice…
At the time, my organization allowed only RIM devices. That changed about a year ago, and now many devices are “approved”, including Android and iPhones. I never liked my Blackberry, and knowing that RIM was circling the drain, as Krafty says, I debated between an Android and an iPhone.
Then I got an iPad2 for Christmas. I had never used an Apple anything, but now I totally “get” what the Applephiles say about ease of use and intuitive. Then my husband got an iPhone4 (he’d been using the digital equivalent of a stone tablet). My daughter has a iPhone 4S. I was hoping my now very old and fritzy Blackberry would hang in there until the heralded Sep 12th release of the iPhone5, and in the way of the fates, that’s the very day my Blackberry finally died.
I put my order in yesterday.
I think integration is the key. I know my iPhone will integrate with my personal iPad, and once everyone in my nuclear family has a iPhone, we will be able to share and take advantage of features we were unable to before.
I doubt there will ever been a standard, and that we will all have to live up to the challenge of coping with different operating systems, platforms and whathaveyou. But isn’t that what librarians have been good at for centuries?