 The CM Storm SF17 uses a massive 18 centimeter fan to cool your gaming notebook and it adds a four-port USB hub. Click now to learn more. So why am I holding an iPhone 5S or why have I been using one lately you might ask? Great question. Since my trusty iPhone 4, Apple has released three incremental updates to the smartphone that served me really well for three years. So I figured as a supposedly unbiased technology lover who has been using Android in one flavor or another for about a year now, I owe it to myself and to my viewers to take another run at iOS with the iPhone 5S and see if they've done enough to win me back. Welcome to my late but hopefully interesting iPhone 5S review. As always, the iPhone experience starts with the box. Apple's attention to detail continues to amaze me. All I had to do was put the iPhone box on the coffee table and my toddler was immediately drawn to it. The power of great packaging, eh? Once we get past that stuff though, physically the 5S is nothing groundbreaking. The difference in weight compared to the 4 was shocking for me now that they've done away with the glass back. But aside from the lightning connector and the bottom mounted headphone jack, the ION buttons pretty much haven't moved at all. And unfortunately, neither have the speakers. For a company that claims to care about audio, Apple's track record lately with poopy speakers on the bottoms and backs of their devices hasn't impressed me compared to other implementations that are available. The home button hasn't moved either, but the tactile click does feel a little bit different to me, although it could just be because my old one is worn out to the point where it only registers clicks like half of the time now. The size is still perfect for one-handed operation for me, which was a refreshing change now that I can like type with one hand. But I did still find myself frustrated by the upper left corner placement of back buttons in many apps. And I think that's something that will have to change if and when Apple does release a larger iPhone. To be clear guys, I'm aware of the swipe back gesture. The problem is that it doesn't work in plenty of third party apps, so it's still an issue for me. Speaking of iOS 7 features, most of them weren't really anything new because I still use my 4 as an MP3 player, and Apple has done really well by me here to have given me updates for so long on a device that, compared to similar class Android devices at the time like the Samsung Galaxy S, is equally old but still much more functional. But there were a few things that I hadn't used much. Apple's Maps app has evolved to the point where not only is it not totally terrible, but I've actually stopped using Google Maps in the couple of weeks that I've been using the iPhone 5S. Google Maps has actually not been that great lately. It started flaking out on me a lot. It can't find the local dump, it never finds the nearest location of a chain restaurant for me anymore, and its voice recognition for GPS navigation is just plain not as good. We're on that later. Apple Maps on the other hand was worlds better for me in these regards from my use, and I also like their tastefully applied 3D effect, but I do have a couple of complaints about it. I did find that GPS data lagged a little bit behind where I actually was on the road, and I definitely miss the ability to pan around when I'm in turn-by-turn navigation mode to look for alternate routes, and then quickly press a button to go back to turn-by-turn. The good news though is that like so many Google products, Google Maps is also available on iOS now with turn-by-turn, so you can have the best of both worlds if you really feel like it. That said, it's not always quite the same experience, and heavy Google product users like me will find little differences at every turn. So some of them are good and some of them are bad. For example, two-step account validation is not as seamless on iOS, and you'll need to set up some app-specific passwords to upload to YouTube from iOS. You still need to share to YouTube through the photo gallery versus just uploading through the YouTube app like you would on Android. On the other hand, the YouTube app supports sorting the comments by most recent instead of just by most popular on iOS, but I can't find that functionality on Android. Maybe it's there, but I definitely couldn't find it. So there's a bunch of little differences I noticed, and there are a lot more than that. Moving on to the camera. A lot of fuss got made about the iPhone 5S camera and how amazing in DSLR quality it was, and you know what? The app is fast and super easy to use. It's pretty awesome. I mean, the beauty of it is definitely its simplicity. I did miss sometimes the bajillion options that you get in various Android camera apps, but what I didn't miss was the fact that on Android they hide cool features like slow-mo or 4K recording within these like deep, difficult-to-navigate menu systems that take a while to get to. Apple makes it simple. You press the button, you swipe for the different modes, and then you press the button again to capture. It's just faster and gives you a better chance to grab that moment while it's happening. That said, speaking of grabbing moments, I did miss HTC's Zowie shooting mode now that I've gotten used to it. It takes a bunch of pictures and video at the same time, so it's great for uncooperative subjects like cats and toddlers. With all of that said, you know, the camera's okay. When you're looking for perfect testing scenarios to show it off, I think you can make it look fantastic, but at the end of the day for me as a casual user, it might be slightly better or slightly worse than competitors S or H, but it's not DSLR quality and it's alright. Now, I alluded to this before on the map segment, but compared to the, you know, it's alright, it's still a phone camera camera, Siri is not. Siri is f***ing awesome. From the speed to the voice recognition accuracy to the fact that it just plain does more stuff, like allowing some system settings to be adjusted. Apple is so far ahead of Google right now in terms of real-world usability that I really did find myself considering a permanent switch back just for Siri. Like basic stuff, like being able to say, take me home at the end of the day and it plotting a course for home. Very satisfying. Love it. Another thing I ended up loving was the touch-based unlock. If you recognize that for what it is and for what it's not, it's not a bulletproof security measure. It is a convenient way to sign in quickly and make purchases without entering a password, then it's a great feature and another one that really had me kind of teetering on the edge there. It works really well and I went from feeling like it was gimmicky to using it every single time I unlock my phone within like two days. But it's not all completely rosy in Touchland and the touch screen actually gave me constant headaches. The 5S is known to have poorer touch screen accuracy compared to other flagship smartphones, but I didn't expect it to affect me quite this much. I often misclick letters at the bottom corners and icons along the top and not because I'm not familiar with the Apple keyboard, but because it's just not picking things up. Speaking of the Apple keyboard, I do still like it and I have missed the multi-word correction that it does in special cases like Mother's Day where it goes back and fixes capital letters for you. But I also wish as a longer term Android user now that I could change it up for something else if I wanted. I mean maybe something with much easier click and hold access to symbols like SwiftKey for example, which I guess leads pretty well into the list of the rest of the things that I really missed about Android while I was doing this. Battery life is not as good as a flagship Android device, but I guess I wasn't expecting it to be. I am still typically getting around 20 to 35% battery at the end of a workday, but that's about 15% less than the One M8. And on a heavy day, I did find myself running out of battery sometimes. I find it infuriating that I can't put a text cursor in the middle of a block of text or even in the middle of a word without holding and dragging it. That was something I really missed about Android. Home screen customization maybe is less of a big deal for me than it is for heavy widget users, but not being able to at least turn my bottom row into folders or force apps into a particular position on the desktop rather than waiting for the whole thing to fill up is a real drag. The bottom right is where I like to put the icons for my most frequently used programs, and it's the last part of the screen that fills up even though it's the easiest one to reach. Bummer. The home button and multitasking are pretty darn good, but not a replacement for a back button. A universal back that works both within an app and for switching back to recently used apps is something I've always felt even before I used Android like iOS is missing. The continued omission of a landscape mode lock is annoying when I'm trying to watch a movie in bed, for example. It's on the iPad. Apple. It's been years. Please just add it. Thank you. And the quick toggles can't be customized, can't be used to access the general settings menu, and can't be used to turn on a Wi-Fi hotspot quickly. It's something I use a lot, so that bothered me as well. NFC is something I never cared about before, but since we did that recent video about it, I've actually found myself using it more often. I really wish Apple had that or something equivalent. And finally, taking iTunes off my computer is the first thing I'm going to do now that I'm done this video. What a horrible blast from the past that was. But as negative as all of that sounded, in the grand scheme of things, it's relatively minor stuff, and I could probably find matching complaints in terms of annoyingness level on Android to match up to pretty much all of them. But if you're still here watching this video, thank you for sticking around, and I guess it's time for the conclusion. Here goes. I'm not sticking with iOS. Not because it's terrible, or because Tim Cook is the devil or something. I just happen to like the bigger screen and better speakers on the One M8 better. And on top of that, my iPhone 5S is unfortunately a 16 gig model, so it doesn't hold much of that sexy slow-mo video footage. And this is what I think. At the end of the day, it's just a smartphone, and doing this trial run reinforced the belief that I already had that with a bit of effort, pretty much anyone could fairly easily get used to one platform or the other. Switching from the One M8 made the iPhone 5S feel like a little light toy, but switching from the 5S back to the One 8 makes the M8 feel a bit like a clunky brick. It's all about perspective, and I think that people lack that sometimes when they get into the whole Apple versus Android fanboy thing. Speaking of perspective, I wasn't really sure how to do this. Normally, when ChiroPower has us talk about their stuff in our videos, we are talking about like a great deal on one of their excellent portable battery banks or something like that. But when they generously provided us with the iPhone 5S that we needed to do this review, they actually wanted a shout out not for a battery bank, but rather a Revoltek Danboard figurine that features artwork on the character's head that is inspired by Chiro's Danboard-themed 10,400 mAh portable battery bank that we have featured in the past. The figurine comes with a little stand, is poseable, and even includes another head. The link for where to buy one is in the video description, and I have to confess here though. Manga figurines are a little bit outside of my area of expertise, so I'd love to hear from you guys in the comments. Is this kind of stuff like totally neato, or are you more likely to geek out over being able to charge your cell phone multiple times off of, you know, a wicked battery pack like this when you're on the go, and it's okay for enough, you know, to have like a cute character for your charger, and you don't really need, see it lights up like that, actually this guy lights up too, there's a little switch on it, and you don't really need like an actual action figure of it. I'd love to hear what you guys think about that. I think that's pretty much it. Thank you guys for watching my iPhone 5S iSwitched back video here. Thanks to Tiro for sponsoring this episode. Guys, like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, and share it if you felt like other people should watch it. We've got a link in the video description to support us, so you can go ahead and, you know, buy a t-shirt, give us a monthly contribution, or change your Amazon bookmarks to ones with our affiliate code so that we get a small kickback whenever you buy things like extra lampshades, for example. I think that pretty much wraps it up. Thanks again for watching, and as always, don't forget to whack that subscribe button if you haven't already to make sure you don't miss any of our awesome videos. At least I think they're awesome.