Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2011 > October > 19 > Entry
A week or so with Apple’s new goodies: part 1 - iOS 5
If you have an Android phone (or, if you’re still hanging on to a BlackBerry in these tough times), it would be understandable if you were completely sick of hearing about Apple, iPhones, iOS or even Steve Jobs.
It seems as if the past week has compressed months of waiting, speculation and anticipation into one big whirlwind of software updates across a variety of Apple devices (Pads, iPhones and iPod Touch media players). The iPhone 4S debuted nearly a year and a half after the iPhone 4, an unusually long delay after previous like-clockwork yearly refreshes.
And then Steve Jobs died, making each of these pieces of Apple news seem more significant, more important, more of a commentary on the man’s legacy and importance.
Even for those of us who use Apple products every day, it’s felt a little overwhelming. There’s a lot to pore over.
So let’s get to it. Here’s a few observations over the last week of updates: iOS 5, the operating system update for those mobile Apple devices; the iPhone 4S, Apple’s latest flagship phone; and a few new pieces of significant software — Siri, iCloud and some apps that Apple has more quietly rolled out you might not have heard about. Today, we’ll look at iOS 5. Friday, we’ll examine the iPhone 4S and Siri. And on Friday, we’ll look at some of the other new apps from Apple.
If you’re in the tank for Android or BlackBerry, feel free to ignore these blog posts unless you’re just curious.
iOS 5
The new software for iPads, iPhones (3GS, 4 and 4S) and 3rd- and 4th-generation iPod Touch devices is slick. It’s got the long-awaited “iCloud” feature, which makes it easier to backup your information without connecting to a computer and share photos or documents across multiple i-devices.
It was also a huge pain in the tuchis to install for a lot of people. Some reported that the update wiped out their devices, some data on their devices or made them (the devices, not the people, though I bet it was a little of both) unusable for hours at a time.
I installed iOS 5 on three separate devices, an iPad 1, my iPhone 3GS and my wife’s iPhone 4. All the installations worked, but they all took a very, very long time (anywhere from 90 minutes to two or three hours) and on the iPad, it required rebooting the computer and the iPad to get past some strange errors that wouldn’t allow the iPad to be restored from a backup, one of the steps in the upgrade.
It took two days to get all three devices up and running on the upgrade, which seems excessive. And, because of the way iTunes does its backup, you don’t always know what will be restored to the device or what you’ll need to go back and sync later. In my case, my music was synced on a different computer, so when the upgrade was done, I was left with no music, but with all my apps and other data. (It wasn’t hard to restore the music, but it required a separate hours-long sync.)
Once installed, though, there’s four big changes that make the upgrade worth the trouble, even on an older device like the 3GS:
Wireless sync — This is a feature that’s long been missing from iTunes and that Android users justifiable crow is no big deal. Once the update is installed and you check off a box for wireless sync, you can start updating apps, music, podcasts, contacts and other information from your computer to your i-device without plugging it in with a USB cable. Of course, since iCloud is supposed to do some of that already — keep your photos, music and other data consistent across all your Apple products — it feels a bit redundant. Still: wireless sync! Feels a little bit more like the future!
iCloud — Not all of iCloud is fully baked yet. You can’t view your Photo Stream via the iCloud website yet (you can see photos through your photo program and on your phone or iPad). But the parts that do work, like Contacts, Find Your Phone and being able to view your contacts from anywhere on the web are impressive. I’m not sure that I trust the backups yet, though. If I lost my phone and needed to restore from a backup, I’d want to get the last backup from my computer, not from iCloud, at least until I trust that it’s going to work properly. iTunes forces you to make the rough choice of backing up to your computer or iCloud, but not both. Or maybe there’s a way to do that; as it’s worded now, I found that option confusing.
Notifications — My favorite thing about Android phones that the iPhone completely lacked was an elegant way to collect notifications in one place instead of having intrusive, ugly blue pop-up windows interrupt whatever you’re doing all the time. The new Notification screen slides down from the top of the screen. It’s still not as elegant as on Android in that sense: on an Android device, the top-of-screen status bar slides down. In iOS 5, a tray appears, but you have to know it’s there to use it; you could easily forget and it’s not apparent to new users. On iPad, it’s a little easier to find. If you stick your finger up near the top of the screen, a small tab appears for you to grab. The Notifications screen can be set up to display emails, Facebook updates, Tweets, calendar entries and, by default, weather and stocks. There are lots of options on how notifications from individual apps are displayed. It’s a neat system. When a notification pops up and your phone is locked, you can jump directly to that notification’s app by sliding your finger across the screen with that app’s icon. It takes a little getting used to, but it’s much improved over iOS 4.
iMessage — If you do a lot of texting with other iPhone owners, this could save you lots of money. Like BlackBerry’s BBM service, it integrates seamlessly with the Messages apps and allows you to send instant messages instead of texts. That means that texting works like normal, but the texts don’t count as SMS messages. Yon can tell what’s a text and what’s an iMessage by color: iMessages appear in blue bubbles. The nicest thing about it is you don’t have to think about it. iOS 5 knows when you’re sending a message to an iPhone/iPod/iPad owner and transmits your text as an iMessage automatically.
There are some other new changes like Reminders, which is a to-do app that connects with iCal. I found it pretty to look at but not as functional as other to-do lists I’ve used and there’s no easy way to connect it to Google Calendar.
Twitter is integrated more tightly into the OS. You can send photos and weblinks directly from apps as Tweets without opening up a separate Twitter app.
There are now keyboard shortcuts, making it a good update for anyone who hates being erroneously AutoCorrected.
And the Camera app has mercifully been updated; you can now get directly to it from the lock screen by double-pressing the home button. And the Volume Up button now doubles as a shutter button.
What still needs work? Maps are still much better on Android phones. Contacts still don’t integrate with Facebook and Twitter as well as they should. (Perhaps that’s a blessing in disguise.) Wireless sync is great, but I’ve had it stall on me more than once. Facebook integration should be just as tight as Twitter integration. Reminders, to me, still feels too slight to be useful. And for non-iPhone 4S owners, it’s disappointing that Siri (a voice-recognition personal assistant we’ll talk about on Friday in depth) isn’t available on other iOS devices, especially the iPad 2, which certainly has the hardware horsepower to handle that.
Overall, though, iOS 5 is remarkably polished and offers enough reasons to go through the perhaps troublesome effort to upgrade. Or, if you’re buying a new iOS device, that’s even better: you won’t have to deal with the software update at all.
We’ll take a closer look at other new additions like the “Cards” app and “Newsstand” on Friday.
(Read part 2 about the iPhone 4S and Siri right here.)
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Applications, Phones
Comments
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By Bob Owen
October 31, 2011 5:54 PM | Link to this
The Omar's analysis pretty much mirrors my own experience updating my iPad 1, although it doesn't really capture my horror when I saw some of my private data (passwords, contacts, etc) being uploaded to the iCloud.
After about two weeks, my iPad mostly works like it should, with a few App-specific exceptions.
For example, a clock app I really liked - ClockPro HD - is essentially destroyed by iOS5. Where under the old iOS4 operating system ClockPro could multi task, it no longer works in that mode. Previously I could set an alarm (say a wakeup at 6am) and the alarm would go off whether ClockPro was running in the foreground at alarm time or not. Under iOS5, unless the ClockPro app is actually on the screen at alarm time, nothing happens.
Means that instead of going to sleep while reading, I have to wake up, kill the ebook reader and load ClockPro. The ClockPro people tried, sending out two program updates "to insure iOS5 operability" then gave up and just documented the new, trimmed down mode of operation as a 'new feature'.
And I still don't trust the iCloud. Probably never will.
Oh, yes - even though Apple says iOS5 works with both the old and new (iPad2) iPads, not so. Many of the new features are iPad2 only.
Sigh.
I guess that in the end there is no avoiding the upgrade since Apple will push it onto your device at every chance. Waiting for a while to actually do the upgrade is definitely better since both Apple and the Apps providers are frantically fixing (mostly un-acknowledged) bugs. I've downloaded over 50 App updates since installing iOS5.
Sigh again.
By John Brejot
October 20, 2011 7:29 AM | Link to this
I lost my iTunes library as well during the upgrade and had to reload over 5000 songs. This took at least 15 hours. The next day they disappeared. Off to the Apple store where the resident genius was not (a genius). So now I suppose I have to do it all over again and see what happens. Interesting thing though is that all of my purchased music seems to be hiding in the iCloud, where I can download them one song at a time. I think Jobs took my tunes with him. We are the same age and probably have similar musical tastes, although my Bhuddist chant selection is limited.