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Yesterday I tried out Siri for a while. (Remember, my old phone was an iPhone 4 so this is the first time I have access to Siri.)
I tried to get her to play me some music by Warren Zevon. Let’s just say it didn’t exactly work as planned.
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I just turned off Touch ID. It turned out to be more annoying than helpful.
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Yesterday my new iPhone 5S arrived at my doorstep.1 That means that I’ve now owned and used an iPhone 5S little over a full day. I thought it might be fun to write down some first impressions of it. This is not meant to be a comprehensive review. Nor is it meant to answer the question whether you, dear reader, should buy an iPhone 5S. I’ll happily leave those kinds of decisions to you.
iPhones have been my primary phones since the fall of 2008 when I bought an iPhone 3G.2 I used that phone happily for two years until I made the catastrophic mistake of ”upgrading” its OS to iOS 4. That mistake resulted in a super slooooooooooooow phone and pushed me to buying an iPhone 4 instead.3 That iPhone 4 has then been my one and only phone up until yesterday.
Because of the terrible ending of the 3G I’ve been hesitant to upgrade the OS too much on the 4. I waited almost a year to go from iOS 5 to iOS 6 and I decided not to upgrade to iOS 7 at all. Still, the phone has gotten slower and slower, probably because of a mixture of wear and tear on the components and apps that are increasingly resource hungry. Since it’s been a gradual slowdown of the phone I don’t think I realized just how slow it had become, until now.
The iPhone 5S 4 is fast. Really fast. This seems to be a mixture of much faster hardware and the ability for apps in iOS 7 to do data fetching in the background.
I am a bathroom twitter reader. I mean, aren’t we all? Up until yesterday a bathroom twitter session was as following:
Now, the procedure has been shortened:
Same goes for other apps, for example Instagram.6
Even things that I didn’t think was unnaturally slow on the iPhone 4 (things like launching new podcast episodes in Downcast) has been sped up significantly on the 5S.
The value proposition of Touch ID seems fantastic and when it works it really is great. However in my use so far it fails more often then succeeds. (Something like a rate of 60% failure, 40% success.) I’ll likely come back to this in a future blog post.
I think iOS 7 looks great. (Apart from Apples icons, that is.) Since it is not a new OS on the same old phone I don’t feel that almost vertigo-like feeling and frustration that some seems to feel when upgrading their old phones. The whole package, phone plus OS, just feels fresh and interesting.
As mentioned above the ability for apps to fetch data in the background also makes the whole phone feel faster.
That’s just some quick thoughts. I’ll probably write more once I get more familiar with the phone.
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Jag och Linn är just nu på semester i Grekland. Här är en bild från stranden i Rethymnon, Kreta, där vi tillbringar dagarna.
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De senaste dagarna har två beklämmande fall av ”män som hatar idrottande kvinnor” visats upp på Twitter. Det började med ett gäng män inte tyckte att Marion Bartoli var värd sin Wimbledon-mästartitel för att hon var för ful, fet, en ”fucking dyke” etc.1
Därefter var det svenska mäns tur att visa att vi är världens mest jämställda land. Twittrarna tyckte att det svenska fotbollslandslaget var lesbiska horor, ser ut som män, inte är riktiga fotbollsspelare etc. Detta fångades på bild och twittrades ut av Jack Werner, alias @kwasbeb (som alltså inte hör till idioterna som hatar.)
Sånt här gör mig så arg och ledsen och jag vill uppmana alla er som läser det här att om ni ser någon som ni följer som uttrycker liknande idiotier i något socialt nätverk (eller för all del i verkligheten) att säga ifrån. Svara personen och tala om hur idiotiskt det är att skriva sådant.
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and tagged it with Majora's Mask Zelda I love video games, old video games. Specifically I love the games and games series I played when I was a kid. More to the point, I love Nintendo branded video games, especially from the Zelda Franchise.
A couple of days ago I finished playing Zelda – Ocarina of Time. It’s a game that I’ve owned for a long time, probably since it was first released in 1998. I’ve played it countless hours but I’ve never played it to the end before. I did however make it all the way to the final dungeon, Ganon’s Castle, back in the nineties. This, combined with the fact that Ocarina of Time has, until very recently, been the newest Zelda game I’ve owned, has meant that I haven’t really encountered anything new in the world of Zelda in the last ten to fifteen years. Sure, I’ve found new artifacts and hidden secrets in the games that I’ve played since then1, but nothing has been truly new. Until now.
Earlier this year I bought a used copy of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and on July third I started playing it.2 So far I love it! In many ways it really is a sequel to Ocarina of Time, more so than any Zelda game that I’ve played before. The game engine seems to be the same and a lot of characters appear or seems to appear in both games.3 Also the control schemes and a lot of the usable items are the same. In other ways it is a big departure from the previous games. (I’ll try not to spoil it for those of you who haven’t yet player it.)
The games in the Zelda franchise has a lot of things in common when it comes to game mechanics. (The game that stands out as the most different among the once I’ve played before is Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.)4 New items and plot devices are introduced in each new game but the overall mechanics of the game are the same. In Ocarina of Time it was the Ocarina itself, the songs you played on it and the concept of Time that was the big new things introduced. The passing of time changed things in the game world and you as a player needed to do the correct things in the correct point in time. Without spoiling too much of Majora’s Mask, let’s just say that these two concepts gets magnified a lot in this game which makes for a different experience compared to the other games in the series. It also means I need to approach playing it in a new way. Especially the first six to eight hours of playing, before I knew what I was doing, felt very awkward but in a good way.
Now, after something like fifteen hours of game play, I’m far into the first real dungeon and I just love playing this game. I don’t know if it’s just the fact that it is the first time in a long time that I play a game that I don’t already know most things about, but it feels like this is the Zelda game so far that has the hardest puzzles to solve. The combat elements are similar to Ocarina of Time, which to me means they require my concentration but I will not fail at the game because of my lack of combat skills. (Well, Links combat skills surely affect the outcome but the fact that I’m not a very good gamer when it comes to combat will not.)5
If you like Zelda or Zelda-esque games and you haven’t yet played Majora’s Mask I highly recommend you do. Buy a used Nintendo 64 and a used copy of the game or get it as a download in your Wii or Wii U’s virtual console store6.
The once I’ve played a lot in recent years is A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. ↩
This Article was mentioned on blog.henrikcarlsson.se
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and tagged it with Ocarina of Time Zelda I just finished Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and realized something. It feels like it’s not that long ago since I got the game. However, it was actually back in 1998. That’s 15 years ago!! Back up another 15 year and you are in a time where no Zelda games exists.
That’s crazy!
[…] A couple of days ago I finished playing Zelda – Ocarina of Time. It’s a game that I’ve owned for a long time, probably since it was first released in 1998. I’ve played it countless hours but I’ve never played it to the end before. I did however make it all the way to the final dungeon, Ganon’s Castle, back in the nineties. This, combined with the fact that Ocarina of Time has, until very recently, been the newest Zelda game I’ve owned, has meant that I haven’t really encountered anything new in the world of Zelda in the last ten to fifteen years. Sure, I’ve found new artifacts and hidden secrets in the games that I’ve played since then1, but nothing has been truly new. Until now. […]
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Som politiker och offentlig person är det inte ansvarstagande att skriva hotfullt till journalister. Det är helt oacceptabelt att du anklagar en person i min redaktion för att vara svenskfientlig och landsförrädare.1
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and tagged it with Bilder 
iPhone 5s
(iPhone 4 for comparison)
©
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First day impressions of the iPhone 5S :: Henrik Carlsson's Blog
21 november, 2013 23:48[…] my new iPhone 5S arrived at my doorstep.1 That means that I’ve now owned and used an iPhone 5S little over a full day. […]