The iPhone is Still a Poor Phone

Today I started with several meetings. Normally I would take them at home and use my home Internet connection. However I had a short break between my two morning meetings and my afternoon one and I wanted to get some exercise. My favorite winter exercise is skiing and so I drove the 25 minutes to Alta and used my phone for the meetings. I also had my computer if I needed it but I wanted to try something new to see if it would work.

My company uses Microsoft Teams for all of our meetings. Fortunately you can install Teams on your mobile phone for free. Yes, they want you to have an account with them but they also allow you to log in with just a meeting ID and password. I copied the information for my meetings onto a PostIt note and stuck it to the back of an Android phone I got to replace my home land line. When I got to Alta, I didn't bother getting out of my car and just logged into the first meeting.

I never really carry my Android phone anywhere because it is so large. That one quality made it perfect for my meeting this morning. Looking at a tiny screen can be tough for meetings and I wanted the largest one possible without having to pull out my laptop. The meeting went well as did the one after it. Then I could go ski for an hour before having to head home before my next meeting.

My experience this morning reminded me how poor my iPhone is as a phone or in this case how poor it is as an Internet connection. Lately my iPhone has lagged significantly with presentations to the point my view has lagged by several slides. That was not the case this morning. When I carried 2 phones it never was a contest as to which phone performed better. If I actually needed to talk with someone, I preferred anything other than my iPhone. I thought 5G would fix that for Internet connections but discovered that isn't the case.

Now in all fairness to Apple, my current iPhone is a 12-mini and needs to be replaced. I hope that Apple has spent some time improving their phone capabilities. Unfortunately given their past track record, I doubt that is the case but am hopeful.