A late iOS bloomer's musings on the 5s

It's been a little over a month since I bought my first Apple iPhone. An iPhone 5s 16GB was the best I could afford at the time. I got the colour that I wanted - Space Grey - on Amazon for about Rs 23,000. As I write this, its price has fallen to Rs 18,300 -- "Amazon-Fulfilled" and all.

Doesn't matter because after all the VK-STYLTAG, DM-DOMINO, DM-UNILET and a bunch of other spam messages that I couldn't stand, but was forced to endure every day on my Android smartphone, just the near-spam-silence alone makes me feel the money was well spent.

On the stuff-just-works user experience that iOS fans go nuts about, I should say it's the stuff-just-works-better experience that's got me, a late iOS bloomer, hooked on to iOS. For example, Endomondo, which on occasion has stopped on my earlier Android phones, has run flawlessly on the 5s. Take the Bloomberg Radio+ app, which I love to listen to most days -- on Android, even on a Rs 28,000 Android smartphone, with 2GB RAM, the app goes off to buffer once in a while.

And I have a broadband connection that in actual-use conditions provides 2MBPS speed. On the frugal iPhone 5s, which has only 1GB RAM, the app has not stopped mid-streaming even once.

To be sure, there could be a host of factors that the apps above worked less delightfully on my Android phone, but by and large, what I did was, install every app that I couldn't do without on the Apple smartphone as well when I made the switch. Therefore it's a reasonably good comparison at the end-user level. Not at the test-bench-bound gadget reviewer's level.

In the first week after I bought the iPhone there were more instances than I care to remember of my beautiful wife observing I spent more of my free time -- after already spending the entire work day constantly checking it -- with the new handset than I did with her.

"Hey, I'm a tech reporter... I owe it to my readers" didn't really cut it with her.

Things got better after I demonstrated I could hook up the iPhone to my Sony SRS X2 bluetooth speaker set and fill the living room with John Legend's ‘All of me’ streaming from Apple Music of course. Stevie Wonder's ‘Part time lovers’ is on my collection, as are Kate Voegele's rendition of ‘Hallelujah’ and Shreya Ghoshal's ‘Deewani Mastani’ from Bajirao Mastani. Sadly, AR Rahman's ‘Kannalane’ from Bombay isn't to be found on Apple Music. For that, YouTube is the easiest option.

I don't store a whole lot of videos on my iPhone, so my 16GB handset still has about 5GB left for actual use.

Email is one area where I still prefer the BlackBerry above all else, and still intermittently use my Z10, but that's for another blog post. Will Apple improve their mail experience? I hope they do.

Finally, the biggest reason I totally fell for the 5s is the (jargon alert) form factor -- with due respect to all you phablet lovers, my personal ideal is the 4-inch screen. And I just love the feel of the individual, and round, volume buttons and the physical switch to silence the ringer. I suspect there are many others out there who feel the same way, which has made the 5s such an iconic handset, which is still much sought after in India, a rising market for Apple. Sure, a bigger screen and 3D Touch are cool, but in my humble view, the 5s is incomparable.

No wonder there are strong rumours that in a week from now, on March 21, Apple will release another phone, which will look probably like the 5s, but come equipped with the more powerful A9 chip, a 12MP rear camera and support for Apple Pay. Will this new "iPhone SE" as it's being called, eventually pave the way for the 5s to be stopped in India, as the 4s and 5c? I hope not.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.