Monica

In my last post I talked about the sudden death of my Android phone (again) and my pursuit of an iPhone, which was stymied not by Apple but by T-Mobile. That was Thursday. On Friday morning I returned to the Apple store soon after opening time, this time with a backpack full of auxiliary hardware (tablet for an authenticator app, old mostly-broken phone that could still take a physical SIM card, iPad for Apple login on another device, and by the way my existing phone charger to confirm I didn't need to buy a new one).

It took almost two hours, but we got past the T-Mobile hurdles so I could walk out of the store with a working phone. I'd already decided there was no way I was buying it from T-Mobile (and I suspect it would be locked if I did), and neither I nor the employee who was helping me felt good about "buy it here, take it there, hope they do the right thing". I have many colorful things to say about T-Mobile...later.

For the locals: Mikey in the Shadyside Apple store is fabulous. This was customer service way above and beyond what I've experienced at other tech providers. Mikey was knowledgeable, empathetic, and cheerful even when T-Mobile was screwing with us. I really hope the feedback I gave on the customer-service survey contributes to Mikey getting some recognition. And this is in stark contrast to previous phone vendors, who, if you can get a human at all, will just tell you to ship the phone back to them at your expense, or buy a newer model, or otherwise do what is convenient for the vendor but not the customer.

I bought the iPhone 16E; it's the most affordable current model, but it's still a lot more than I've paid for a phone before. On the other hand, Dani has had his current iPhone for a lot longer than I had my previous Pixels (both of them). Maybe a mid-range phone costs $100/year and the replacement schedules are different between Android and iOS.

So, the actual iPhone. I've used an iPad, so I was a little familiar with the environment, but using a phone is different in some important ways. There are definitely things I'm not used to; some might be better, some worse, and many merely different and I just need to get acclimated. Initial stream-of-consciousness impressions:

Setup was pretty straightforward, carrier issues aside. No surprises from the first phone call and first text message. I couldn't import anything from my dead Android phone, but the iPhone knew about apps I had installed on the iPad, so that helped. I can access anything in Google's cloud storage by installing their apps (e.g. for photos). I haven't figured out if I can recover text messages.

The default keyboard does not include period and comma on the main screen. What the hell? Is this why so many text messages blow off punctuation?

I am used to a global "back" button, not just for browsers but for everything -- pop out of map navigation (while staying in the map app), go back to your photo gallery from looking at an individual photo, etc, with the top-level "back" being "exit the app". Apple does none of that -- they rely on the individual apps to provide navigation, so if an app doesn't have the "back" concept, you can't do anything. And apps, of course, can and do change the UI -- maybe there's a "back" button and maybe it's in the top left corner, or maybe you're expected to navigate by controls across the bottom for different views, or maybe it's something else. Android apps had those variations too, but there was always the phone-level "back" button. I miss it.

There's also no "home" button (take me back to the desktop). You leave an app by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. I sometimes have to try a couple times; I haven't yet found the magic "sweet spot".

There is a gesture, also involving swipe up from the bottom, to see all the apps that are running and allow you to really close individual apps. This was the third sticky button on Android. I haven't quite figured this out on the iPhone yet; sometimes I stumble into it, and often the screen shakes at me to tell me it didn't understand what I was trying to do. Learning curve... Also on the learning curve: apparently on the iPhone you swipe left to dismiss notifications, not right? Neither is better; it's just an adjustment.

Settings are weird. A lot of apps don't have any control for accessing settings, even when apps clearly have settings. I had to ask Mikey about that. It turns out that the system-level settings -- where you control things like display, sound, passcodes, etc -- also has a section for app settings. To add a non-default calendar to the calendar app, instead of using the non-existent in-app settings, I go to Settings -> Apps -> Calendar and poke around in there. On the other hand, some apps do have in-app settings, so you have to hunt around for them.

Apple is very much still in the world of "we think this design is intuitive and therefore you don't need any assistance". I had to do web searches to find documentation on what some of the glyphs mean. There's a "control center" (similar to Android) where you have quick access to things like toggling Wifi, Bluetooth, and dark mode, and changing brightness and text size and volume, and a bunch of other stuff. The iPhone offers more options than Android and the layout is highly customizable. They have some cute ideas, like apparently there's some tool for "identify the music that's currently playing", which I think means in your environment and not Spotify, but I haven't explored it yet. Almost all of this involves graphics not text, though, and not all of their choices are as obvious to me as they were to their designers. There are three "disconnected box around a thing" glyphs; one's a QR-code scanner, one's a "tell me what this thing is" (uses camera and probably AI), and I'm not yet sure what the third one is.

This is me, so we have to talk about visual accessibility. This was the very first thing I tested in the store on Thursday, 'cause if that didn't work, nothing else mattered and I'd have to head back to Androidville. Mixed review here: adequate with some compromises, but there is more work to be done here. Specifically, fonts: there are two font-related toggles, normal/bigger and normal/bold. These affect displays in apps that pay attention to them, which they don't have to. Also, apparently the OS is not an app in this sense; nothing I did changed the text labels for the apps on the home screens. The text is "one size fits all". Yeah, you can reportedly magnify your entire screen, but that's not what I want (too much collateral damage). I mitigated this by changing the desktop from their colorful interferes-with-text wallpaper to solid gray. Unlike my Android devices, the iPhone doesn't have a built-in library of wallpapers; there's the default, or you can use a photo, or you can set a solid color. So, solid color it is; I'd've preferred something with a little more character (but also legibility), a balance I struck on Android, but oh well -- it's just wallpaper, not something important.

There was something small and light gray that Mikey had to point out to me in the store (would have missed it entirely), but I can't now remember what it was. I suspect there will be more of that sort of thing.

Ok, apps. I was migrating from Android, so I couldn't just bring all my apps with me. There are iOS versions of most of the apps I used (not always identical), so I just had to look them up individually in the App Store and install them. Initially I did this from memory, which was frustrating, but then it occurred to me to ask my Android tablet if it could tell me about apps that weren't on that tablet but that I'd used. The answer to that turned out to be "yes". Some things I haven't found equivalents for yet; this will be a background process for a while, I expect. Critical stuff is mostly in place (I need to have a conversation with my bank about their app); nice-to-haves are trickling in.

I'm trying out some of the native Apple apps, particularly ones that could replace Google apps. Some differences are strange: in the Apple calendar app, how in the world do you get it to show you a month view like Google Calendar? I can get it to show me a couple days at a time (in list form, like a week view but not all week), but I want the month view. I haven't tried out the Apple apps for photos and maps yet, but plan to soon. The note-taking app seems fine so far. I can't imagine using Pages, Sheets, or Keynote on a phone, but they came pre-installed.

I couldn't figure out how to use Apple's email app with multiple accounts, but that's ok; I used Thunderbird on my Android phone, so I'll just install...what do you mean there's no Thunderbird app for iOS? (Beta coming soon, they say.) Ok, I found another client that'll do. Still hoping for Thunderbird later; I liked it on my previous phone and also use it on my desktop Mac.

My Android phone had a fingerprint reader for unlocking. It was flaky, so I often ended up having to enter my passcode. This iPhone has Face ID, and so far it's worked flawlessly for me. I asked Mikey how to temporarily disable it for situations where I'm worried about it being used against me (hostile agent has physical possession of your phone -- we can all imagine scenarios, I'm sure), and he pointed out that it always requires the passcode after restart. Good to know.

Speaking of restarting... I had to search the web. Mikey did tell me how to turn the phone off, but apparently I'd misremembered. On my old phone, a long press on the power button brought up a menu; on my newer Android tablet, you have to do it in software as far as I can tell; on the iPhone both are possible but the physical option involves both the power button and a volume button and then an on-screen slider. I guess people don't restart (or turn off) phones very often?

It's only been a few days (and one of those was Shabbat, a no-phone day), but so far the experience of actually using the phone has been smooth. It feels comfortable and even pleasant at times. My Pixel's 5G connection was sometimes flaky and would drop out at the most inconvenient of times (like while trying to navigate); I haven't taken my new phone on any big outings yet, but so far I'm not seeing these problems when out and about. There are some initial weirdnesses, but I think I'm going to like this a lot better than my Pixel.

More thoughts later as I settle in.

I have a problem with my (older) Android phone and am not sure how to debug it.

Four times in the last six months, I have used the navigation in Google Maps while in a car (audio, not looking at the screen). Every time the trip has ended the same way: the app informs me that I have reached my destination, I reach for the phone to exit, and the phone crashes. On restarting, it tells me I have 1% battery and crashes again. (Phone was not low at the start of the trip.) Now here's the interesting part: when I plug it in to charge, it reports something in the range of 30-40%. So, something is confusing the phone about its battery state, because no way does my phone charge that quickly (especially on a car charger).

Here's tonight's case: I was at something over 60% when I turned on nav for a 15-minute trip. Crashed on arrival, plugged in (in the car) and turned on, it said 32%, I unplugged, and it crashed again (back to 1%). I left it off while I completed my errand, but plugged it in to charge on the drive home. At home, it was 40% and, this time, did not crash when I unplugged it from the charger.

To determine whether the problem is specific to Google Maps, I installed another navigation app (Waze). When the installation finished I opened the app...and the phone crashed. When I connected it to the charger, it said it was at 31%. I let it charge for a bit (I turned it on while it was connected to the charger), and disconnected it around 50% with no issues.

Here's all that in pictorial form:

Also, the power manager reports no fast-drain apps. iDrive, a backup app, was a fast-drain app and is the singular entry in the history, but I've nerfed it and it hasn't popped up recently. Could its mere presence be a problem?

Now, I'm pretty sure the battery isn't actually being drained to practically nothing, because it wouldn't bounce back that quickly. And apparently it's not just Google Maps or GPS, because Waze didn't even finish opening before that crash. But something, either Android or something in hardware or firmware, sure thinks there's a problem that calls for shutting down.

How do I find it?

I have not had crashes with other apps -- though I also don't stream videos or play games on my phone, so I'm not taxing it. I have noticed the pattern of "steps" you can see in the picture here -- battery will drop noticably, then stay level for a while, then do it again. I don't know what's causing that or if it's related.

The phone is old -- ZTE Axon 7, bought in 2017, running Android 7.1.1 and apparently not eligibile for newer -- but it otherwise works, has the (rare) aspect ratio I crave, and already has all my stuff on it. I'd like to keep using it for a while (and let the 5G world sort itself out in the meantime).

[Update to the update, 2020-12-14 13:15 EST: Lost service again this morning. After much discussion with a T-Mobile rep, I've learned that they are doing work on my tower to upgrade it for 5G, this work will continue for a few weeks, and while they don't think there are general outages despite my reports, "brief interruptions" are possible during this work. Uh...]

[Update 2020-12-13 15:45 EST: Problem went away on its own; see comment below for more info.]

I generally don't keep my phone's WiFi on; even though I could use my home network, I don't tend to run into throttling on the cell network, this frees up some home bandwidth for other things (like my work computer, since March), and I'd rather not have other WiFi networks passively tracking me when I'm out and about (not a consideration since March, but someday again I hope).

On Thursday my phone started dropping the cell connection -- flaky, not outright reporting errors, but almost entirely not working. (In timing that somehow just fits in 2020, it dropped two minutes before an important phone call.) I've switched to WiFi, which seems to demand more battery, but eh, it's a workaround.

This, however, leaves me with the underlying problem: what the heck is going on? I've already power-cycled, reseated the SIM card, reset the network connections (but not messed around in APN), toggled into and out of airplane mode... none of that helped. I even got a new SIM card from T-Mobile (on Friday) and swapped that in; still nothing. Another device on the same network (and plan) gets low bars but gets bars. This feels like a recent degradation, but in the course of debugging this I learned that Dani uses the home WiFi all the time, so I don't have good data from a second device.

I talked with an actual human at T-Mobile (in order to get the new SIM card), who told me that he's not surprised that a phone released in 2016 (I bought in in 2017) is having problems on "modern networks" (by which we mean the 4G LTE that's been there for the life of this phone). His take is that technology moves on and my phone's antenna probably isn't powerful enough any more. I don't know how to test that hypothesis; if the antenna were completely gone it wouldn't work with WiFi either, but it does.

Is there some other debugging I can do, or any simple repair I can make? Or am I in "buy a new phone" territory?

A new phone wouldn't necessarily be the worst thing; mine is stuck at Android 7.1.1 (because of US trade blocks against China that happened mere weeks after I bought the phone). But the phone otherwise works fine, so if it's fixable then replacing it would be a waste. And, more significantly: WTF is with phone sizes and aspect ratios these days? My phone has a 16:9 aspect ratio and is 6" long. This is a good size for me. Anything bigger won't comfortably fit in my pocket; much smaller and I'll have trouble seeing. And that's where the width comes in: modern phones are too freaking skinny for text! They've all been designed around the idea that you'll watch widescreen movies on your phone, I guess, which I consider ridiculous -- I'll watch movies on my TV or at least my full-size monitor, or if really pressed, my 10" tablet. Not my phone. But to make them support that, they've made the portrait orientation tall and skinny, and that does not work for me.

Remember when cell phones were new and not yet smart? (Some of you might not.) There were two basic styles: flip-phones and candy bars. I never understood why anybody liked the candy bars; they were large and prone to butt-dialing. A flip-phone fit in my pocket fine and its keys couldn't accidentally be pressed while closed. While locking has presumably cut down on butt-dialing, I still don't want the candy-bar form factor.

(My phone is a ZTE Axon 7. I would like as close to its aspect ratio and size as I can get, if I have to get a new one.)

--

A tip led me to Network Cell Info Lite, which has gauges with needles that hover between the orange and red zones (not completely static). I'll collect some more data points when getting take-out tomorrow.

My cell phone (Samsung Galaxy S4) had been showing signs of its age, and then more recently it started spontaneously (and unpredictably) rebooting, sometimes several times in a row. This happens with both of my batteries, so it's probably something in the hardware. (Yeah, checked for seating, dust, etc.) It's also running Android 4.4.4 and Samsung has no plans for further updates (aside from security patches, when they get around to it); meanwhile, the current Android release is 7.something. So I started shopping and reading reviews.

I would have been willing to get the latest Samsung, on the theory that after the fiery-batteries-of-death fiasco they're probably being careful with the next one. But... ugh, aspect ratio! I do not want a long, skinny phone! I'm mot going to watch super-wide-screen movies on my phone, and the thing is too skinny to read web pages, email, or anything else once I apply a bit of zoom. Meanwhile, the extra length (height) isn't helpful and further challenges pockets. Ick. Remember back before smartphones, when the two form factors were flip-phones and candybars? I hated candybars, too.

Sadly, "longer and skinnier" seems to be becoming more common; the Google phones are the same way. So, criterion #1: reasonable aspect ratio (and size).

Criterion #2 turned out to be even harder. When did removable batteries stop being a thing? I've replaced the battery somewhere along the line on my last two phones (to get extra life out of them). Actually, with the S4 I got a spare battery fairly early on, which allowed me to carry an extra, charged battery in my pocket on phone-intensive days, like when taking lots of photos on vacations. There are still phones out there with replaceable batteries, but they're a dying breed. I only found one that got ok reviews, and it had some other weirdnesses.

I went to the local T-Mobile store to see if they had anything interesting that I'd missed in my searches (and, you know, to fondle the phones). Long and skinny rules the shelves there too.

In the end I bought a ZTE (who?) Axon 7 (whazzat?). It has a good screen size and aspect ratio and lacks a removable battery. I'm a little concerned about the latter (how many times can I charge this phone before the battery dies, taking the phone with it?), but I assume if it modern batteries were terrible that way, I'd've heard. I've never bought a phone without seeing one first, but I took a chance.

I took it to T-Mobile today to have service transferred, came home and took a 1.8G OS update to 7.0 (the phone shipped with 6.something), and at this point I think I've got most of the basic settings right. So far I'm happy.

It's too early to evaluate the software, but the folks at ZTE clearly put some thought into other usability and user-experience considerations. I don't usually care about the "opening the box" experience (just gimme my stuff), but their packaging stood out as well-designed. The box includes the wall charger of course; it also includes an adapter to use with your micro-USB cables because this phone (like many newer ones) takes USB-C in. They could have just said "hey, we gave you a charger; you're on your own for the rest", but they didn't. The box also includes a case -- not a high-end one or anything, but I've never seen a phone that included one before instead of making you buy it separately. It also includes a screen protector -- ditto, always a separate purchase in the past. In short, the box not only contained everything I needed to use the phone, but it even included an adapter I could stick on my car charger or power pack. (There's also a set of earbuds, which I don't care about.)

There is one mystery object in the box, a piece of rubber(?) of a size to cover the (rear) camera and fingerprint reader (why would you?), but with no obvious place to snap it in, and with what looks like a pin buried in it at one end. The guy at T-Mobile was mystified, too.

Price-wise, this is a mid-range phone, not inexpensive but also not in the Samsung Galaxy S8 range. I hope the battery lasts a few years, to give me a cost per year that's comparable with the last one.