iOS 4.2: An 'ace' for iPad, a 'meh' for iPhone Monday was iOS update day for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod. "iOS 4.2 makes the iPad a completely new product," crowed Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a prepared statement announcing the upgrade — which wasn't actually released until 10am, Pacific Standard Time, despite the early-morning reports of the release. We installed it on both …
Listed as New and Original - haven't gone looking to see if I can add more....
You get to them by editing the contact details for per contact, or through the sounds preference for default. Hint, if you are on the standard Tri-tone SMS sound, try scrolling up for the new ones...
Another Apple FAIL - implementation of something in name only
It let's you assign a different built in tone to different contacts in your address book.
It doesn't let you add new tones to the existing set. How hard would it have been to add that. They already let you add ringtones, so why can't SMS/MMS choose from the same library - not exactly rocket science.
The REASON - Apple want you to stick to THEIR tones so that everyone on the bus knows you're a Fanbois when you receive a text.
I've got a mark1 AppleTV connected to my hifi and I've often used airtunes to stream music to the appletv and thus to the hifi. I had high expectations that I and friends would be able to stream from an iphone/ipod/ipad to the hifi, but my iphone won't see the appletv.
Okay, so I know that the old appletv won't be upgraded to support video streaming, but it's supported audio streaming (AirTunes) for ages now. and it can't just be some critical change in the protocol as airplay claims to support an Airport Express, which is older than the AppleTV isn't it? I can't see a good reason not to support audio streaming to an old appletv, apart from a financial one.
anyone else had more sucess?
OK, so e-Print compatible printers work. no link? no model search?
I can print TODAY from my iPhone to my HP printer which sits on the network, from 3 different apps. I've been doing that for more than a year. However, my HP printer isn't listed anywhere i can find. It's a near 3 year old multi-function job (c6150 i think).
Can they not simply throw in the old 900 series PCL driver (which almost every single color HP recognizes and can print from), and have the phone use that? the iPhone can find my printer on the network all by itself and print to it (and others I've tried too), so why would it not be supported? Oh, it also supports Apple's auto-detect printer driver thingy (it had a code word a few years ago, Rendezvous?), I'd be hard pressed if the printer already had that tech that the iPhone would not support it...
iPhone Airplay feature is a welcomed, i've been using an Airport to stream music wirelessly from iTunes on my macbook for a while now, after the update the iPhone can now stream to the same device over my wifi network...i'm also tempted to look into the Apple TV now as i can see the benefit of streaming video to the tv as well...Steve Jobs has definitely got me by the balls!
on a side note, Find My iPhone is a necessary service for anyone with an iPhone 4 and no insurance policy, you cant register for a free mobileme account using a 3GS but you can on an iPhone 4 and then use the account on a 3GS...very inconvenient Apple.
"it's a boon to what Apple modestly refers to as the iPad's "legendary battery life."
You do know it's got a massive 6400mAH battery in there?
Most of the cheap 10" Android tablets only have a 3-4000mAH battery.
I'm intrigued as to why no one yet has brought to market a 10" tablet with the same hardware specs as the iPad? It's not rocket science.
RIM have a nice tablet that outperforms the ipad by some margin. it's too big, just like the ipad is too big!
I say the ipad is too big for its primary purpose of being a casual handheld device IMNSVHO - I've tried it alongside the Sam Gal Tab, and the latter can be used one handed with great ease.
the ipad has a very large screen bezel, so it could be made significantly smaller; its shape - contoured back - is very cunning and helps hide a lot of bulk - mainly battery.
if you're going to carry the ipad around you're better off with a proper laptop, I've seen a number of people with relatively heavy-duty carrying folders, burdened by chargers and usb adaptor wotsits. might as well have an integrated unit!
They shouldn't need to be carrying chargers and adaptors around, I find mine easily lasts more than a whole working day on a single charge. I do have a carrying folder though, otherwise I arrive at my destination with a large hand print plastered across the front of the screen...
noone competing direct because a 10" device is not the device to have...its bulky, heavy, unwieldy, non pcket friendly etc. come on, this silly 'gotta be big' lust is whats wrong with tablet of yonder years - and why netbooks are no good when they actually become the size of laptops
Contrary to the comments from the non-owners above, who claim that the iPad is "not the device to have" or "too big for its primary purpose" (never mind that it's selling like gangbusters), the reason no competitor has brought to market a similarly specc'ed tablet is purely because of cost.
Do you remember all those rumours that presaged the coming of the iPad, and how they all assumed that the cost was going to be around $800 to $900 USD? That's right. It turns out that a device with a high-resolution, capacitive touch-screen, fast processor and on-board GPU, light weight but durable encasing, Wi-Fi antenna, and long battery life; is not really a cheap device. Apple utilizes economies of scale and exclusive deals to support its price point, and competitors are having a hard time matching it.
Or do you seriously think that Sony and Samsung's executives got together to discussed their respective upcoming response and said, "You know, if we ignore the fact that the iPad is selling well, we can conclude that nobody wants it. Therefore, we should make a smaller device with less battery life and sell it at the same cost. That'll surely make a killing!"
Right.
-dZ.
via another page and the back button? Not the way any other browser has chosen to do it. This is a kludge, like the cut-n-paste function that I've never tried to use but ended up triggering many time during browsing anyway.
The lack of buttons, or some realistic alternative, on these devices is starting to really get in the way of usability. Or Apple's designers aren't as good as they should be....
What do you mean by "via another page and the back button?" You type your term on the search box, a list opens up on the spot with the suggested results (just like the regular web search). At the bottom of the list a new item shows up, "Find "X" on This Page (n)"; where "X" is the search term and "n" is the number of hits found. When this option is selected, the matches are highlighted on the current page. No need to navigate out of the page.
It is simple and easy to use. The Register says it is unintuitive and a "kludge" because the search box still appears to suggest a web search, and I agree. That said, If they were to change the box to say "Search" or "Find" instead of Google, Bing, or Yahoo!--or just display the "magnifying glass" icon--the confusion would be gone.
-dZ.
hmm, So Steve Jobs states 'iOS 4.2 makes the iPad a completely new product' - excuse me? didnt iPod touch owners have to pay for their iOS upgrade because the upgrade gave them features that werent available with the initial release?
isnt there some Sarbanes-Oxley ruling about this?
ie U.S. accounting law requires that non-subscription devices that are upgraded have a fee associated with the upgrade under Apple and many analysts’ interpretation of the law. (quoted from a few web sites).
in which case, wifi only iPad should be coughing up some cash for their new features?
There is no such thing as US "accounting law" and Sarbanes-Oxley has nothing to do with this. It's either GAAP or IFRS (can't be bothered to find out which is now the standard) and it's just some BS Apple is citing to say "it's not our fault we're robbing you blind, it's the law so we have to do it."
I don't know exactly what Apple is trying to do, but it's probably about controlling when revenues and expenses get reported. A nice way to perform income smoothing.
S-Ox makes it illegal for companies to part ship products while charging for all of it in one financial year and then ship the remainder in the next financial year.
It does that because of the (previous) business practice of doing just that to make their end of year results look better by effectively booking revenue from the current year into last year.
Unfortunately, the position covering software updates to existing products was somewhat unclear where they provided new functionality rather than just bug fixes.
Apple (amongst others, e.g. Sony's PlayTV) took the "safe" route of applying a fairly small charge for the update to make sure they didn't fall foul of any interpretation of the law.
The position has now been clarified to show that they are not required to make a charge and the updates do not fall foul of S-Ox.
Do you understand what "accounting regulation" they were following now?
All this just highlights the stupidity of making knee-jerk laws instead of thinking things through like we used to do many, many (many) years ago.
N.B. This is different from the iPad launch announcement stating that iPad owners would get the first major update free, but subsequent ones would be charged for - that is normal business money-grabbing in action.
"The upgrade for our iPad was a hefty 551.4MB and for our iPhone 3GS a not-too-far-behind 401.4MB"
What are they doing? That's over twice the space required for a standard Windows 95 installation! Even Windows 98 with all the downloadable extras, updates and whatnot still weighs in at under 500MB!
"It appears that the days of "write tight" as a coder's mantra are long gone."
Crying shame. When the Amiga was king it was great to see coders pushing the limits time and again to get more out of the hardware with less code. Wish we saw more of that attitude these days, though admittedly a lot of Amiga coders ended up getting jobs as embedded device developers.
Yes, I quite agree, the original arcade Pacman code runs to something like 8KB. Spectrum games came in at 30-40KB.
Times changes, Windows 98 was well over a decade ago when we all had 1-2GB hard disks. Now you think nothing of having a desktop with a graphics card with 4 times that in memory on board, let alone the main memory at 8GB+ and disks sizes in multi terabyte.
Handheld devices are not Palm Pilot size anymore, there is bucket loads of code and frameworks, yes it seems odd but that's progress ( supposedly! ). There is basically an entire desktop O/S runningon those handhelds now and if people want shiny stuff and whizz-bangs in their GUIs, that's a whole load of code to get it working.
modern code is completely and totally bloated by it's inclusion of such unnecessary things as exception handling, high res resources, extra functionality etc.
In the past applications were crippled in an attempt to fit them into the available resources, if they went wrong, they went badly wrong. Now, without those limits, people can code defensively, and maintainably, rather than having to squeeze every inch of performance out of the machine.
It's always easy to whine, but I'm a happy camper now, even though my iPad crashed while updating and had to be wiped and restored over a few hours to work again.
The only real features added that I can use are the "multi" tasking, the folders, and the "Find me" feature. But those are *really damn useful* features. I am now able to do effective webmastering from the ipad (which requires an ftp program and an email program and an editor all up simultaneously). I couldn't before, so it's a big productivity boost.
I have some confidence that if I lose my iPad I can find it again, or at least wipe it.
I have some ability to organize my apps.
I am happy. All the other features were not important anyway. All hail the Mind of Steve.
installed ios 4.2.1 on a iphone 3g. had just restored it after 'capacity other' had grown to 1gb after a few weeks since i last wiped it. hoped that this update might fix that so i installed it.
no real difference so far and only time will tell if the 'capacity other' problem goes away. one bug seems to be that my tv shows are now lumped into one group called unknown instead of episodes listed under the shows name. sorted in season order it's a very annoying mess.
looking at setting the device back to ios 3.1.3
not a happy camper. thank goodness i have an android phone as i no longer trust iphone for anything other than media an occasional sms or voice call.
I've already update several 3Gs to 4.2, and all are working really well. Fixed the embarrassing repeating alarm problem too, thank goodness. If you're having problems with 4.2, it might be a problem with your phone. Take it into the Genius Bar at an Apple Store - they're always really helpful and it costs nothing.
Thanks Ralph, this is the only thing I wanted to know about iOS4.2 for my iPhone: "Fixed the embarrassing repeating alarm problem too, thank goodness."
None of the supposed fixes worked on my phone so this makes 4.2 must-upgrade-today for me. After the kerfuffle about this bug at the end of last month, I'm puzzled why this didn't make the main copy.
"they're always really helpful and it costs nothing."
I'll second that. My boyfriend had an iPhone on contract from Vodafone (in the UK) and it was playing up, the screen kept stopping responding to touches, and requiring it to be locked and unlocked again.
We were on holiday in Canada a few months back and popped in to an Apple Store. They got the phone on a diagnostic tool and identified app crashes and while it didn't fix the fault it's not been freezing as much.
This didn't cost a penny - for a phone that wasn't bought through them and wasn't even bought in the same country!
(And yes I know the phone would have come from Apple anyway, but there are plenty of companies who sell products through resellers but only support these sales through the resellers.)
"Take it into the Genius Bar at an Apple Store - they're always really helpful and it costs nothing."
Slighty unrelated. Battery on girlfriend's MacBook wasn't playing ball. Genius ran a test, implied that battery had gone into "deep sleep mode" (or something) as it hadn't been switched on for 5 days and was therefore toast. The solution would be to fork out £100 for a new battery, despite the fact that the one that had just commited suicide was previously fine with less that 350 cycles in a 2 year period.
You've found one bug and now you can't "trust iphone for anything other than media an occasional sms or voice call"? Seriously? Get a grip! Although the OS is supposedly cross-compatible, why not stick with the IOS designed for your phone, or get an iPhone 4, instead of trying to make your phone something it's not, and then complaining about it!
contacts - if i have more than one phone number on a contact i can't tell which number just smsed or rang me. very irritating as my brother swaps mobile numbers a fair bit. not an issue if i want to send an sms from the iphone but if i want to use the number on a different device then bloody annoying.
ical - month display has sunday as the first day which really irks me. more so because my palm devices had an option to set monday as the start of the week more than 10 years ago and psion way before that. ical on the desktop has this option but not ical on the iphone.
notes - i stored 100s of notes in this app as i did in the app on my nokias and palms before that. notes on the iphone corrupted frequently losing data.
capacity other - i will only know if this is an issue in a week or so as the number grows from the 300mb that it currently is. i have already noticed that itunes sometimes stops copying files mid copy which is what seems to cause it.
general sluggishness of os 4 on 3g hardware. 4.2 does seem a lot more zippy that the previous 4.x updates.
so not just the all tv shows are unknown bug.
don't get me wrong android is not perfect but it seems to irk me less and i haven't lost data... yet. notes going corrupt on iphone really turned me against it.
i still have no problem recommending iphone to people who want a fluffy easy to use device but i do point out these little things that annoy me.
ymmv
Can't help with the rest, but to see which number texted you, scroll to the top of the text conversation and tap the Contact Info button: the relevant number will be highlighted in blue.
For calls, go to the call history, tap the blue arrow button and it will show the number highlighted in blue, or red if it was a missed call.
I updated my iPhone 3G to iOS 4.2 overnight. Not any discernable new features, but its now as responsive as it was with whatever version of iOS was on it when I bought it. It looks as though Apple have stopped trying to sell me a new phone by slowing down my existing one ;)
Interesting the people that followed the crowd to get an iPhone are now following the crowd to get Android phones.
Upgraded both iPad and iPhon overnight - 650Mb download for the iPhone, 550Mb for the iPad. Now standing on a commuter train for an hour with no music as both devices are stuck "cancelling sync". Power cycling has no effect.
The fix apparently is to re-synch both. Not bloody possible whilst standing so no music for me:-(
Somewhat pissed off with Apple over this.
At least multi-tasking works at last.
Damn fail icon won't work on the iPad
Listen you iTard sheep cultard, if you want to just suck up fawning praise for everything nasty grandad does, right or wrong, then macrumours or some other temple of isycophancy is where you need to be, not here where the intelligent people can have criticism, analysis and dissent against nasty grandad's BS
How come El Reg feels the need to take a dig at apple every time they can, that the latest and greatest software updates aren't available on hardware that's two releases out of date?
Apple are a damn sight better at providing software updates than any of their competition, I raise you Nokia and Sony Ericsson for a start. Even your golden child of Android is beholden on the whims of some consumer electronics companies for any kind of update once shipped.
How about an entire article devoted to hot LG and Sony Ericsson still think it's fair game to sell you a *new* phone with Android 1.6 on it?
Such an idiotic change to turn the very useful orientation lock into a fairly pointless mute switch and of course with typical apple arrogance people aren't even allowed to have the more useful functionality as a user option because after all one switch is so much worse than the tap, tap, slide and tap that it now is.
Who on earth would downvote that comment? Does any sane person think it's reasonable that Apple have taken away functionality provided with the iPad at time of purchase (ie the orientation lock) to arbitrarily replace it with something else (a mute switch) on the basis that they're so fucking clever that they MUST know better than we do about what we want.
Yes, I'm sure plenty of people prefer it as a mute button. And I'm all for choice. But to change it to a mute button without giving those of us who like it the way it is the ability to keep it working the way we are used to is just absolute typical Apple arrogance.
At least we do still have the choice about whether to upgrade or not. I know it's a silly thing, but I'm not upgrading my iPad yet. I'll wait and see if someone does a jailbreak app to return the orientation lock button, and I'll upgrade then.
All I wanted for Xmas was:
1) customisable alert tones (for messaging and email) - the number of threads out there on this subject shows I'm by no means alone, so come on Apple - listen to your users !!!!
2) perhaps this one is just me, but a "kill all" button for the taskbar would be nice. It's a bind killing them all one by one. (How about shake to kill all ?).
Other than that the only useful feature for me on my 3GS is the Safari search (which is most welcome)...
Anything in the task list is suspended and possibly even terminated. iOS looks after resources for you. When you switch to another task an app must save it's state. It then gets no more CPU resources (excepting in limited circumstances if the app has registered background tasks) and if resources are running low it may be terminated by the system at any time.
Doesn't all these new complex features such as folders and printing fly in the face of the simplicity that the iphone is famous for?
I fear for iPhone/Pad users who are at increase risk of having to think and make decsions that they are so used to the iOS device doing for them. This surely risks chaos, spontaneous combustion and even the downfall of Jobs zombinet.
Please refer to the non-changeable beachball icon that has been non-changeable for years on all macs - still no sign i might be grown up enough to choose my wait animation. Maybe i could have one of the money dropping into apple's coffers... it could be real time and everything.
The one thing I really need my iphone to do, is to wake me up in the morning on time. And I'm talking about monday to friday rather than every day. And also not having to set an alarm each night (I know I'm being demanding here, but hey!)
Has 4.2 on the iphone fixed this particular feature?
As far as I was aware this stopped being an issue if you reset the alarms - they only get upset at the actual point of DST change. They've got plenty of time to fix it before the next one (but then, they knew about it from New Zealand with plenty of time before it hit Europe or the US).
Just a few HP printers!!! No way Jose... I found this preferences extension which make it work from my iPhone to all my printers, including the one my mini can see over wifi from the Time Capsule.
Printopia
I'm not trying to sell it, so Google away. However it works a treat for me and I'm sure there are other alternatives out there.
The question is then, why has Apple not just done it? Come on Apple this is lame.....so it's a FAIL from me.
"Switching between the two has been an odd exercise in time travel, as those of you whose PCs at work are still lumbered with Windows XP, even though you've moved to Windows 7 long ago on your personal box."
There's something very odd about that sentence, and it's not just the novel definition of "lumbered" that I was previously unaware of.
-A.
to transfer file, rather than having to install a custom app on the host PC/Mac - and also a 3rd-party add-on app for the device itself such as FileApp or via cumbersome iTunes.
Inconvenient, when simple compliance to USB mass storage class would have sufficed. Also prefer not to jailbreak such device to make this work.
Big fat meh!
Airprint - no supporting printer therefore useless. Workaround is Dropbox.
Airplay - streams the wrong way, I wanna watch films on ipad streamed from front room PC whilst in bed. Workaround is paid app (AirVideo - 5 stars, recodes anything whilst streaming, quality app).
Still no Flash - workaround appears to be jailbreak, still holding off on that.
Button changed from screen lock to mute - never use either.
Multi tasking - I guess if I want to research something whilst penning an email is ok.
Folders - so obvious, should'a been there from the start, but gratefully received.
Things I want: 24 hour decision on apps bought, Flash (for the very few occasions required), streaming to ipad from PC, text recognition, Dropbox integrated into the OS 'cause it's bloody brilliant - so you could drop files in there and ipad would know how to open them, pdf's, ebooks etc.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
