[Rant] I really don't need a mobile charger

Few weeks ago, I bought a Lightning cable for my iPhone 5S. At first I was in a dilemma whether to buy just the cable or buy a mobile charger. I could use the cable to charge the phone at work. The chances of me needing a mobile charger was slim. The iPhone 5S's battery is very good (compared to my iPhone 4S) and with a full charge I could survive a day easily. The issue would be me forgetting to charge the phone the night before. Very seldom we go out on a long trip (like once in a year). 

Today something unexpected happened. I had plugged in my phone to charge in the morning because we were planning to out. But for some weird reason, it didn't get charged even though the phone was detected by Windows and I could even browse the camera roll from explorer. But the phone never got charged. 

I only found out about this "situation" about 15 minutes before the time we were planning to leave home. There wasn't much time to even charge it with the wall charger but I had to do that. The phone was only carrying 5% charge!!! But as always my wife took her sweet time to get dressed and I managed to charge the battery to 32%. But that's not enough for me. We will be mainly shopping so that means the phone will have a big role to play!!!

Before shopping, we were planning to go to a Sri Lankan restaurant in Naka-Meguro. Then it came to me that if I took the tablet with me,

I could charge the phone from the tablet while we were having lunch. It's bad manners to use the phone at the dining table anyways.

So I took the tablet (luckily it had like 90% charge left) and the Lightning cable (the original one, because the one I bought is at the office) with me and did exactly what I was planning to do. I only managed to charge it up to like 35% from like 18%. I managed to drain the battery from 32% ti 18% while on the way to the restaurant. I browsed a bit, used Google Maps from Musashi Kosugi station and wrote part of this post on the phone. 

Yes I know 35% battery is not much. And I probably won't be able to survive with just that most of the times. But it was better than nothing. However, since I took the backpack with me, I was able to charge the phone while I was using the phone. The tablet inside the backpack and the cable coming out of the backpack to charge the phone. The cable was long enough. And it was not getting in the way either. I could even charge the phone while the phone was in my pocket. It's just great. It is same as using a mobile charger actually. Just a bit bigger. I stopped charging when I got to 40% charge and I was able to do just fine with that much remaining battery life.

If I had an iPad I wouldn't be able to do this. That is not to say that I'm totally happy with my tablet though. Atom CPU and the eMMC storage solution suck big time!

By the way, I fixed the charging issue by uninstalling iTunes and uninstalling the Apple Mobile Device driver from Device Manager and then reinstalling iTunes.

[Article] iPhone 5S is awesome.

Well, at least compared to my old iPhone it is million times better. I'm sure people with the iPhone 5 won't notice the difference.  Or the hardcore Android guys or Windows Phone guys. I love Windows Phone, but I cannot get one in Japan, so I have no choice.

The biggest improvements I see are in the areas of UI fluidity, app launch speeds, network speed and battery life. Screen is largeer but it is not that noticeable. 

The A7 processor in the iPhone 5S is almost 4 times faster than the iPhone 4S's A5 processor. I'm sure the improved GPU is helping with the fluidity of the UI animations  I thought the animations of iOS 7 were so slow but I don't feel that with the iPhone 5S. I don't play games on the phone so I really cannot comment on the gaming performance. However, I'm sure I will get used to the speed and start feeling that this is no big deal after all. That happened with the iPhone 4S as well.

The biggest difference I see is with network speeds. LTE is way better than 3G - especially 3G on SoftBank because it SUCKED. With LTE, now I can stream YouTube, webpages open super fast and download apps quickly. For example, the Coursera courses page took ages to open on my 4S, but it opens within a couple of seconds on the 5S. On the day that I bought the 5S, I downloaded almost 700MB of apps on the way home from work, on the train. I wonder if that 7.5GB limit won't be sufficient for a month. It's possible that the amazing LTE speeds that I see are because most people are still on 3G and that the network is not congested. Or it could be a feature of LTE. I have not looked into LTE, not even a bit. (I should!) The quality/speed might change in the near future though because of all the people upgrading from their iPhone 4S to iPhone 5S.

Then the battery life - it's way better than I expected. If I leave home with a 100% charge, I can return with a 25-30% charge remaining. On the 4S, maybe because of the terrible 3G speeds, I couldn't get by a day with a full charge. Because of that, I had to charge the phone at work almost every day. It could be because its battery was worn out. But it could also be because LTE is so fast that it can go into idle state quickly. Besides, the iPhone 5S has a much bigger battery that the iPhone 4S. However, if I drain the battery, I won't have a charging cable with me. I wonder if the cheap Chinese rip-offs can at least charge the phone. I don't want to access the content of the phone from the PC.

Other than that, the finger print reader works really quickly. I thought you would get a lot of false positives with it but that is not the case. But I'm still not used to the whole idea of it, and I only remember I can use the finger almost half way through to entering the passcode lock. 

I haven't had time to use the camera yet. Hey, I am not a photo guy. I don't think it will be as good as the PureView camera in the Nokia Lumia 1020, but since they say it is better than the previous generation, which was even better than the 4S's, I'd take that as a "vastly improved camera". Hehe.