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An editorial on productivity on the iPhone 6S and a general overview after 2 months of ownership
Storage and battery-life define my productivity experience more than anything on the iPhone 6s. While it is often not considered as a factor in productivity by many of those who write in the digital space, music is key for me, and having the space to store all of mine is a Louisville Slugger of a capability. How productive I am is often driven by the music I listen to, which is more defined by what music I have available on a given mobile device. The freedom to plumb my entire music collection on the go gives me the ability to pick and choose whatever I think will propel me forward, or to simply occupy the parts of my brain that might otherwise get distracted by letting it focus on an album I am not familiar with. There are, surprisingly and unfortunately, a very small number of smartphones being produced today and readily available in North America that have a 128GB SKU in the lineup. And expandable microSD cards are not a suitable substitute, because of how different phones and event different apps can interact with them. On the battery-life front, I typically go to bed with somewhere between 35 and 50% of battery life left on my iPhone 6S. That is for a 20 hour day, often with heavy IM’ing or extensive music play, and connected to a Microsoft Band 2 and Jawbone UP 2. Needless to say, I never worry about the iPhone going unavailable on me because I could not manage its battery drain during the day.
I talked a bit last year when I reviewed the Huawei SnapTo about how a smaller phone sometimes resulted in me getting more things done, because there were scenarios that I would have just waited to do something on a larger phone until I had two hands free rather than try and pull it off one-handed. This notion runs counter to what even I normally propound, which is that more screen real-estate typically means greater productivity. The iPhone 6s definitely supports the thesis of the former. Additionally, my user experience is at a high level because of the rock-solid reliability of the apps. Pulling up a note-taking app on the iPhone 6s presents little worry that my note (or notes) is going to get eaten. There is some funkiness in apps and the overall UX because of the fact that the iPhone does not have a “Back” button, as this often results in developers doing wacky, non-intuitive things to let you get back to a previous screen. Or, worse, they don’t let you go back and you have to pop to the beginning of the workflow and traverse the thing all over again.
Rounding out my primary app kit on iOS are my comms solutions. Communicating with others is, obviously, also a key part of productivity. FaceTime provides one of the best ways to get in touch with my mother and get the kids on-screen. Getting her and I both on an iOS device is one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. Of course, I talk to the rest of the GWW staff using GroupMe. While I do not like the client on iOS nearly as much as the Android variant, it’s still pretty solid. Twitter is in the mix, and, again, the lack of a Back button kills me here, especially when I get into a conversation actually using Twitter’s Reply function (I know, rare) and need to get back to see the conversation represented as a thread rather than disconnected tweets and Mentions. Finally, the wifey and I have gone to using WhatsApp rather than SMS. You don’t get as many display options as you do on the Android version (no option for Pop-Up notifications), but, again, what else are you going to do? I’m not interested in using some third party solution that hooks the WhatsApp API, so native app it is.