First 12 hours with the iPhone 6

So, I was gifted an iPhone 6 recently. It arrived last night and because of a fairly ridiculous AT&T policy, it was about to be shipped back to China before I rescued it. I’ve spent a little over 12 hours with it now and here are some points about it –

1. iOS 8.0 has chinks. (See how I underplayed it there?) There’s no reason to expect that Apple, the company that created the OS, has been through 8 iterations of it and literally is one of the richest companies in the world can’t hire a few testers. You know, those people who test your stuff and tell you what’s wrong with it.
2. The iPhone 6 is too big. The iPhone 6+ is bigger still. These are interesting positives (specially for me as a writer and reader), but huge negatives too. When I take out the phone from my pocket and start using it, it tilts forward. If I’m not careful, it tilts just enough to fall. In fact, in this short 12 hour period, it’s had one serious fall and many little falls. Which leads me to my third point.
3. Please buy Apple Care. Up until now, I’ve had very little use of Apple Care, since I tend to care for my devices just enough to extract maximum use from them before they crash and burn (not literally). But this time, I’m sure that no matter how much I care for this phone, it’ll fall, slip, drop, dive (yes, dive) and slide away from me and towards the hard, cold earth. Which means that 6-8 months from now, I’ll need it replaced. Time to fill Apple’s coffers now so we can raid them later. Also, when you do get that inevitable replacement, make sure to run every possible hardware test on it, because Apple will give you a phone which will have a bad wifi, or crappy LTE antenna, or weird memory defects. You’ll have only 7 days to return the thing and ask for one which actually works, so use those 7 days well. Over and over again if necessary.
4. This phone is too thin. That kinda got covered above, but the point is, Apple, that you could have done a slightly better job with the battery. Mine works well for now, but it could have been better. Your future phone is the iPhone 6S, not the iPhone 6++, no matter what phony tech analysts and market gurus say to the Wall Street Journal. So yeah, here’s a spine; now please put a real battery in the phone. I will prefer, nay, demand, a fatter phone in the future.
5. The lock button being on the side is weird. Screenshotting is going to be a challenge now. I get why you did it Apple, I’m just saying I’m one more person not used to change. Or maybe I am, we’ll find out.
6. Reachability, Apple’s innovative approach to ridiculous screen sizes, is a Godsend. Whoever thought of that in the Apple UI/UX team deserves a Medal or something. This is literally the thing I’ve used more than anything else on the phone till now. Samsung, this is your cue. Copy this. People need this. But one thing – the person who implemented the actual features needs to sit down with their manager for  . The thing works in at most half of the OS. There are so many menus and screens where I’m double-tapping the home button but nothing is happening.
7. About the Touch ID, the less I say, the better. I’ve had an iPhone 4S all this while, so I’m slightly behind the curve. Also, the new keyboard is good, but it could have been better.
8. Apple, here’s a tip – next time, please release iOS 9 as late as possible. Take all the time in the world. There’s a misconception in the enterprise world that if you don’t release software on a fixed time table, your customers will hate you and abandon you. You know when they’ll hate you? When you bring crappy code to the table. Somehow, Apple seems to have adopted this yearly time table thing. It was cute for the first few tries, but it’s time to retire this habit. Wall Street will bash on you for a bit, but who are those puny mortals to question the behemoth that you are?
9. I saw that my iPhone was downloading 5 concurrent apps last night. That’s 2 more than my iPhone 4S does. Awesome!
10. There are a lot of apps that I have had to drop because of shifting to a new phone, apps like Sunstroke and Neater. I’ll miss them. I might still be able to get them loaded through iTunes, but they’ll probably not work well. I’m sad because of that. On the other hand, I opened up iBooks and loaded Lionel Shriver’s “We need to talk about Kevin”. The bigger screen is definitely a plus there! Loved the reading interface.

Oh well, there’s my 10 points about my new iPhone. Tell me what you think about yours.