New Fone, What This

February 7, 2026

So, recently, one of my older siblings gifted me an iPhone 14! She had heard of how funky my Galaxy S7 has been getting (no hotspot, Android 8 losing support), and she had upgraded to a Galaxy S Ultra series phone anyways, so she felt that it’d be better for me to upgrade. Setting it up was initially rough, though. She accidentally forgot that phone’s passcode, and at first, I thought that I could just restore it with a computer. Yet, over and over, the restore process would keep failing with an 1109 error code. Worse, it was not reassuring that on the Apple forums and Reddit, others’ solutions were too drastic to be feasible for me, such as that they have had to restore with their Macs, which I don’t own, or restore with Windows 10, which would take hours of backup and reinstallation. I personally had to turn off the firewall and anti-virus protection on Windows Defender during the restore process, which is dangerous for the computer for obvious reasons. Still, though, I was eventually able to get the phone restored with that solution. Another problem was that even after restoring, the phone was iCloud-locked, requiring me to type in my older sister’s iCloud account information. For many others, this shit means an iPhone is now e-waste. You just cannot use a device like that anymore. This was not too bad for me, though, since I just told her that it needed the iCloud login, and unlike the passcode, she still remembered it. Afterwards, the rest of the iPhone setup was smooth-sailing.

As for the iPhone user experience itself, I’m adapting to it so far, though I still miss a lot of features that were on my Smasnug phone. For one, the images I transferred to the iPhone show up on the “Photos” app, not its file manager. This is annoying. I cannot re-title images, and I’d have to manually group my photos in Albums when they used to be neatly organized into folders. Though I still imagine I could get things organized using these Albums, especially since the “Photos” app itself works nicely, file management on desktops is just far more flexible. Another thing is that one-handed use, which I often loved to do on my previous phones, is fucked. Many UI elements on iOS, including crucial ones for backing out, are up top, where it is hard to reach. Though this has also been the case for older phones, such as the Galaxy S7, this phone’s screen is much bigger at over 6 inches. Unlike those older phones, your fingers are just not long enough to reach all of its edges. Meanwhile, the Galaxy S Ultra that my older sister has was specifically designed to work well with one-handed use, as most UI elements are on the bottom, where her finger can actually reach. It’s pretty awesome that iOS also has a thriving open-source community, though. There’s Delta, one of the best Nintendo emulators out there, NetNewsWire, a cozy RSS client that helps me keep up with other cool bloggers out there, Monal, a sleek XMPP client that works well for chatting with online friends, and certainly much more that I haven’t even heard of. Supporting the much more user-focused open-source is always a good thing, and I feel that you can always do so even if some aspects of it may not fit your life. Another thing is that iOS itself works well. It has minor glitches here-and-there, but basic apps like Notes, Clock, Mail, and Weather both look stylish and feel smooth to use. It’s even fairly customizable, when before, its lack of such was one of its most hated aspects of iOS. I’ve gotten my Home Screen spruced up so that there’s rows of folders, each representing a category of apps I need, for example. In the future, even as someone who still prefers Smasnug phones, I imagine that I can get even more settled with iOS over time.