iOS: 4 weeks In

I have done quite a lot of travel in the last two weeks. Actually it was a full RTW circle: Poland - Hong Kong - California - Indiana - Washington - Poland. Was using the iPhone a lot for all sorts of things. The battery life has proven to be sufficient. Which is a big relief. I purchased a small universal power bank (the Anker 622, which is both magnetic and cable and can charge other devices over USB-C too). And I have not used it, which actually is a good thing :).

What has really proven to be the strength of the iOS platform is its market leading position which forces vendors to prioritize applications and services to support the Apple devices. You simply cannot afford not to. To get around Hing Kong you need an Octopus card. The issue with the Octopus is you need cash (yes, cash!) to purchase it (unless you have an account in one of the local banks). Now there is a virtual Octopus for Tourists (an iOS app which integrates with the Apple Wallet). The app actually allows you to top the virtual Octopus card with a credit card, so you can avoid an ATM entirely. All good as long as you have an iPhone, as surprisingly there is no Octopus for Tourists equivalent for Android. I mean there is but only from the Huawei store, which many people want to avoid.

I have been using the iPhone Wallet more than ever before - city cards, boarding passes, credit cards. It has two clever ideas - one is it needs to be activated (double press of a side key), so no one will silently read your card details over NFC. And the other - the NFC antenna is on the top of the phone and not on the back (like in many Android phones), so the physical handling of the device during payments is much more natural (no need to lay it flat on a reader). Little things matter.

Other minor things I discovered have been:

• It automatically deletes messages with authentication codes once the code has been pasted in the app or a web page. Little things matter.
• The concept of stacked widgets is handy. For example I wanted to follow the weather in all the citifies on my itinerary. So stacked the weather widget with a card for each city and then without consuming too much screen real estate I could scroll through all the cities by touching the stacked weather widget. Similar with a world clock widget with time zones. They are particularly tough to track globally during this time when some countries (Europe) have already transitioned to winter time and some (America) have not yet.
• Live activities (I think this is an iOS17 feature) are nice - they display the most current app data on the lock screen. E.G., the arrival time of your hailed Uber driver. Or a time to teh start of boarding for your flight. No need to unlock the phone.

There is a lot to be said about the photography department. But that requires a separate post (or a series of).

And have I mentioned the keyboard in iOS 17 is awesome?