Well I'm in the (walled) garden now!

[Joelist]

About a week ago my old reliable One Plus died, putting me in the position of needing a replacement but also a replacement that corporate IT would allow on our MDM solution. So my choices were:

a) Corporate issued iPhone and replace my own myself, in which case I am carrying two phones.

b) Replace mine with a model we now allow on the MDM network. When my One Plus died its exception died (it had a ROM on it made by IT and we don't do that anymore).

I chose B because that way the phone belongs to me and corporate pays a lot of the price (as in 60%). Our choices now are all iPhones - I could choose the 8 or the XS.

I chose an XS with 512GB memory.

I will post more impressions as I get used to it - remember my past two plus years were on a special AOSP ROM our IT wrote for security.

 

[Overmind One]

About a week ago my old reliable One Plus died, putting me in the position of needing a replacement but also a replacement that corporate IT would allow on our MDM solution. So my choices were:

a) Corporate issued iPhone and replace my own myself, in which case I am carrying two phones.

b) Replace mine with a model we now allow on the MDM network. When my One Plus died its exception died (it had a ROM on it made by IT and we don't do that anymore).

I chose B because that way the phone belongs to me and corporate pays a lot of the price (as in 60%). Our choices now are all iPhones - I could choose the 8 or the XS.

I chose an XS with 512GB memory.

I will post more impressions as I get used to it - remember my past two plus years were on a special AOSP ROM our IT wrote for security.

How does that work? We use JAMF and NoMAD and Airwatch for MDM. Keep us updated.

 

[Joelist]

Our setup is MobileIron based and partitions the phone memory so all company stuff is on the company partition - necessary because of our PII and PHI policy requirements.

 

[Overmind One]

Our setup is MobileIron based and partitions the phone memory so all company stuff is on the company partition - necessary because of our PII and PHI policy requirements.

I am still totally in love with my Huawei Honor 6.

 

[Joelist]

First set of impressions:

Physical build is impressive. The whole thing is encased in a new type of scratch/impact resistant glass, and while I am not about to test it by doing something like hitting it with a hammer it so far has stood up to routine abuse with no issues. It has a nice heft in my hand and the size of the regular (not plus) phone is fine. It is as large as I would be willing to go.

One effect of the casing design is it is Qi rechargeable, so I will be looking into that. I also noticed it supports fast recharging, and typically I'm at 100% after less than an hour.

The display is very interesting. The XS uses an OLED panel manufactured to custom specifications and it is spectacular. In fact, I am running it on lowered brightness because turned all the way up it was crazy bright especially the whites looked to be pure white (of course the blacks are pure black also - it is OLED after all). Everything is also VERY sharp to the eye on the display. As I am coming from an LCD this is a big change.

Last item for this set - Face ID.

I had major reservations about it, but so far it is working well. It recognized me glasses on, glasses off and even sunglasses on. I had others try it, even wearing my glasses and it did not open. Ditto the old picture trick. So preliminary tests seem okay.

 

[Joelist]

Next impression - speed.

There are no two ways around it - this phone is crazy fast at everything. Screens transition extremely fast with no stutters or slowdowns, apps blink open and closed, even scrolling is very quick. I suspect this is a combination of the OS being written tightly to the hardware and also that not only is the A12 Bionic a VERY advanced SOC but also that the GPU is powerful and there is also a third processor (called a neural processor which apparently is actually a dedicated machine learning chip).

Either way the speed is impressive. Next stop will be camera and as I am going on holiday to the mountains of Western PA there will be ample opportunity to test it.

 

[Lord Ba'al]

Looking forward to your pictures. You can post them in my mobile photography thread.

 

[Joelist]

Pictures.

I am still learning this camera as it is dual lens with a raft of capabilities I have not had before. Here are some samples I took so far: