Apple iOS 6 review OK, so when iOS 6 arrives in an hour or so, you'll rush to download it no matter what. You may as well, it's free, especially if you're not using any old apps that might warrant compatibility fears. Apple has promised the new operating system delivers more than 200 new features, but the vast majority of those aren't user- …
I can't believe these kinds of features are only just being implemented on modern smartphones.
I'm pretty sure the auto reply with text feature was available on my Ericsson T28 if not it was definitely on the T39.
The Do not disturb feature used to be part of Windows mobile you could set the phone to switch to your meeting profile when your calendar showed you as busy. Of course this feature (along with almost everything else) went missing in WP7.
>> I can't believe these kinds of features are only just being implemented on modern smartphones.
Samsung TouchWiz has had this for a while now.
>> I'm pretty sure the auto reply with text feature was available on my Ericsson T28 if not it was definitely on the T39.
I don't remember it on the T28 - never had a T39 so I couldn't say.
Not on the T28 http://www.lokety.com/ericsson_t28s_manual.pdf
that was my favourite phone though. could stand up to being thrown around, dropped, super slim, long battery...
couldn't browse the internet, read email, check the weather, play any decent games, but I loved mine.
Don't think it was in the T39 either
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxlcmljc3NvbnQzOW18Z3g6NjViZGJlOWIwMjBkNDMz
Unless you buy your nexus from one of the many operators that install their own firmware on the things, or Samsung's superspecial Yakjuxw, rather than Google's own Yakju, in which you might still be waiting.
Of course, you could root the thing yourself, unlock the bootloader and change it to Yakju, but that rather defeats the point for 'normal', i.e., the majority of phone purchasers, no?
And idiot? That special condescension app that comes with Android phones seems to be getting a real workout today, eh?
Did you have to upgrade your operating system just to get the latest version of the maps or email app, etc? I'm still on gingerbread but have all the latest stuff that I want and when ICS is announced for this phone it will be a lot less than 9 months to wait.
Ios 6 was announced months ago. They've spent a lot time getting it ready for specific devices, just like android OEMs do.
"Ios 6 was announced months ago. They've spent a lot time getting it ready for specific devices, just like android OEMs do."
Nope. iOS 6 was in beta and announced so that 3rd party developers could support it. Once it's out of beta, it will be available to everybody.
In contrast, when Google is done testing an OS and releases it, THEN you can start waiting for OEMs to do their testing.
It's a whole extra step.
Just like the other guys suggest, nexus will get you the latest on the day providing your hardware supports it. Unfortunally its closer to iPhone prices too when sim free.
Besides, iOS 5 to 6 was more like a service pack, where as gingerbread to ICS was a real os update.
Having said that, my ICS xperia S is feeling very clunky now when compared to much smoother jelly bean on my nexus 7, so I'll probably pay the extra next time and get a sim free nexus instead of a free phone with contract renewal.
You might be in luck. The AOSP (android open source project) are adding (experimental) support for the xperia S:
http://www.xda-developers.com/android/sony-xperia-s-added-to-aosp-as-experimental-device/
And Sony appears to be playing ball:
http://www.xda-developers.com/android/sony-releases-xperia-s-binaries-for-aosp-support/
So it's possible that the next android release will run directly on your current phone...
"...it took Apple a week or so from announcing iOS 6 to being able to update."
Big difference between announcing to the public and working on it behind closed doors.
Do you really thing they are releasing something that's been knocked together in a week (including testing?)
Don't tell me Android cannot do proper profiles either? I knew the fruit could not but the 'droid too? Oh my.
My Nokias (both Symbian and MeegGo) know what time it is, how much power they have, where they are (by oodels of sources including cell-id, WLAN, NFC, BT…) and have apps that make them act accordingly in all sorts of ways. I never really change settings manually anymore. Very useful.
+1 for Tasker. It's not expensive and it can do all sorts of clever things, e.g. direct phone calls from certain people direct to voicemail when you are in a given location; prevent the screen locking when headphones are plugged in but lock asap when they are removed, only poll for wifi when you are specific locations etc.
Really? Downvotes?
Unless they're in answer to his question (in which case fair enough, kinda), then that is utterly pathetic fanboi crap. Seriously, iOS has bugs, like any other OS - yes including OSX.
Maybe I should make a post saying I prefer pears as they're generally jucier and taste better.
JDX,
I'd wait to update if I were you. Not long, but just to see if there is anything major out there.
It took Apple ages to fix the WiFi problem on the original iPad, it kept disconnecting itself from the network and I had to give it a fixed IP address to make it work even vaguely properly. Then when iOS 4 finally came to the iPad 1, about 6 months after the iPhone got it, they resurrected a similar bug. Which they fixed pretty speedily this time, to be fair.
I'm tempted never to upgrade again. Because they only gave the iPad 1 half the RAM of the iPhone 4, I don't think it ever worked as well once it was 'upgraded' from iOS 3. It always seemed just that little bit slower. Mostly it would work perfectly, but every so often you'd get an annoying stuttery lag, and I had to start rebooting it weekly (not a major pain admittedly). It makes me wonder if I should leave the iPad 3 well alone.
One thing to watch for; if you have your music compressed on your phone but not your PC, previous updates would fail as they tried to restore the uncompressed music and then failed when they ran out of space.
Also, my 3GS doesnt currently have turn-by-turn navigation in Maps; isnt that one of the main features added by this upgrade (and therefore worth doing?)
I actually typed 'memory', then erased it and stuck in 'RAM' to avoid confusion. Or so I hoped... But then the use of a Joke Alert icon has me confused as to whether the poster is in fact aware of the difference between memory and storage, or not.
I'm all confused. Insufficient memory error: Reboot head.
My very expensive ipad 1g 64gb with 3G won't get this update. Technically possible (as the iphone 3gs with the same hardware gets it) but Apple want me to spend £700 all over again.
Screw them, they think of their cash mountain and shareholders before their long term customers!
The iPad (1) has the same A4 CPU as the iPhone 4, but suffers from having only 256MB of RAM. Running iOS 6 on it would probably render it slower than a drunk slug with a limp. iPhone 3GS on the other hand, has the same 256MB of RAM with a much slower CPU, but drives a much smaller screen.
My very expensive ipad 1g 64gb with 3G won't get this update. Technically possible (as the iphone 3gs with the same hardware gets it) but Apple want me to spend £700 all over again.
Screw them, they think of their cash mountain and shareholders before their long term customers!
--------------
That's it you tell Apple where to stick it. Your next purchase should be an Android tablet. It'll probably come with honeycomb or ice cream sandwich, but don't worry Jellybean _IS_ coming!!!!!
And don't give me crap about jailbreaking the tablet to install a custom ROM
I have been waiting for this for about 9 years, ever since my Nokia 6310i gave up the ghost.
It' useful for teachers and other people who just can't have their phone disturb them during the day; with the switch on the side, sometimes you can forget you put the phone on mute ages ago.
I'd like to see a "battery saving mode" which switches off Location Services, 3G, Bluetooth etc. - rather than having to manually adjust all the settings when you're away from home and realise you are about to run out of battery with no way to charge the phone.
Notice, though, that this didn't stop The Register writing a 'review' of iOS 6 used on a device that isn't even capable of demonstrating many of the features that said iOS delivers?
Seriously, Reg, what kind of shit article is this? If you're going to try objectively report on iOS 6, put your hands in your pockets and buy your staff a phone capable of running it. Either that or spin this god awful excuse for a 'review' into a massive slag off piece about why Apple chose not to implement half the features on the iPhone 4.
Grow some teeth, pick a side and run with it but stop putting up these useless reviews.
The new version of Maps is utter pants anyway.
I regularly use Goog Maps on my i4 as a mini GPS. I don't care about turn by turn - I just want a good map with a shiny blue dot on it.
Maps is not a good map. Rural A roads and smaller aren't numbered. They're not even named correctly. Only dual carriageways get proper numbers.
There are also really bad, really obvious mistakes. One village near me is in completely the wrong place. If you try to route to it you - quite literally - end up half way up a hill in the middle of nowhere.
I don't mind Apple getting rid of Goog maps. But this version of Apple Maps is nowhere close to being fit fo purpose. And really, when you're the biggest corp in the world, how hard is it to check these things and get them right?
Once the punters try it, I predict more bad PR for Apple.
This might be a stupid question but I can't work it out from comments or the article. Can you still use the Google maps on iOS6? I presume you can still access the online version. Is it possible that Google will release an App that provides it in a more useful format and / or other app writers can use Google maps instead of the Apple maps?
The iPhone4 came out two years ago, though. Is it reasonable to ask that devices always be built with hardware capabilities two years ahead of current needs? Is the expectation that hardware development should always be ahead of software development? Do you expect the OS writers to say 'this hardware they've given us, we shouldn't use it to its full capabilities so that when we release a new version two years from now, it will still run on this hardware." Is that coherent?
it seems that most of the improvements are in Apps rather than the OS.
The OS is the stuff that enables the Apps to function, not the functionality of the Apps.
Maybe there is a big difference between iOS5.1.1 and iOS6, but this article doesn't give us any clue about what that OS difference is.
Please let us know if you have info on that.
There are a bunch of new APIs under the cover. None of it is earth shattering and significant parts of it are more to do with offering centralised and properly updated support for things you could have achieved by other means (eg, the Facebook integration, the helping hands for UI state preservation and the new constraints-based layout framework, the latter being no doubt to enable iPhone 5 support) but there's quite a lot there nevertheless.
In the world where Chrome is on version 21, Firefox is on version 15, etc, I don't per se see anything wrong with incrementing the version number just for significant internal changes but I think your main point is correct — if this is of interest to you at all will mainly hinge on what you think of the app updates.
Thanks ThomH, that's quite a helpful insight. I guess that whether it should be labelled iOS5.2 or iOS6 has as much to do with Apple wanting a "New" iOS for the iPhone 5 as their software release and QA process.
I've been trying to figure if I should upgrade: The leap from iOS5.x to iOS6.x suggested some significant core improvements or security enhancements. But, since the changes to the Apps don't do much for me personally, I think I'll hold off until maybe there is a security fix required or other significant core change.
I'm sorry but that interface looks so exhuasted and outdated it's embarrassing. It would have looked cool and hip in the 90's/00's but ffs, haven't we moved on since then?
Say what you want about Windows Phone (and yes I own one), but at least I've got a phone that has the balls to do something different. This phone has just got 'Footloose' written all over it (original film, not the remake) - I.e, bad hair styles, crap music, shite dancing (when looked at from a 2012 perspective).
Apple, time for a reboot?
Apple prefers to put the information that it expects people might want into the notification area — so in there you get weather, stocks, a summary of your inbox, your Twitter activity, etc. Third party apps are restricted to posting text summaries but otherwise put whatever you want in there. So it's not that iOS still doesn't have them, it's that Apple has chosen to implement something else instead.
If you look at the history of widgets elsewhere — banished from Windows, ignored in OS X, the related clutter a driving force behind the average user's preference for search engines over web portals — you can sort of understand that position, even if you're part of the large group of people that don't agree with it.
Android puts new information (new messages, etc.) into the notification area too. But that's not quite the same as being able to put live information direct onto my home screen, like financial prices, task list, sports results, etc. - these things you don't want notifications for, you want to be able to pick up your phone and see them at a glance. Windows phone has live tiles, which seem to be somewhat similar in that they can be made bigger or smaller and display live info.
I think you'll find that when Apple to eventually add this (and they will), it'll suddenly go from being that thing that nobody really wants or needs to being an essential life-changing experience that you simply cannot do without.
In moving from Android to Win Pho, widgets, and the control of the home screens is the one thing I really miss. I can't complain, because one of the reasons I moved is that I wanted a simpler OS - I want a phone with a great address book, that also does computery things, not a mobile computer. I'd be even less happy with an iPhone. And Win Pho 8 looks to be copying some of the widget goodness from Google - which is all to the good.
I don't really understand people saying they don't like widgets because it makes the home screen look cluttered. But the strength of Android is that it accommodates them as well. The ability to ruin the designers' idea of uncluttered elegance is what makes widgets so great. Sure Google, Apple or MS may not think that being able to change screen brightness from the home screen is important, but they're wrong! Phone screens are still crap in sunlight, and you have to dial the brightness to max, but with Android I could leave it low in side, and know I only had to hit one button to make the phone usable outside. So my Android had a bar that allowed me to change brightness, turn on the satnav and turn off mobile data. I could also leave a gap where I swiped my finger down to open the notification area, and avoid accidental presses
In my case, it's not so much the email type widgets (I'll use the full app), as the phone control ones. Though on a tablet I'd love both. But Android is streets ahead, because it puts the customer in control. MS are catching up, but Apple seem to have made very little improvement. And the notification area becomes totally pointless once you've got more than a handful of updates, because it's then just a big old scrolly list, and no use to just glance at.
Apple puts live information into its notification area, not merely new messages. So, for example, the topmost thing by default is a five-day graphical weather forecast, which is updated live.
Apple's notification area also lists new information as per its Android inspiration but it goes further. It's not merely posting notifications for weather, stocks, etc.
Looking at the screen shots in the article, much of IOS, especially the grid of icons and the buttons for call handling look really dated to me. I don't think it is a particularly nice looking bit of design.
However, I'm a happy Android user and I'll defend Apples decision not to have widgets - I only have a few icons for things I launch often on my home screen because the widgets don't have a uniformed look and I feel my home screen looks cluttered with them on. The only exception is the power options widget which I have on the second screen to the left, so I can just swipe left and change the screen brightness, etc.
In Safari go to http://maps.google.co.uk/ and create a homescreen icon for it. Enable Location Services for Safari, if not already, and you can then use your new icon for Google Maps. It's not as slick as the original dedicated app but it's got the all-important detail and can route, etc.
I just upgraded my 4S and poor old Siri no longer sounds anywhere near as clear as before... perhaps they only tested the US female voice, the UK male voice sounds more like Stephen Hawking's machine after the upgrade.
I synced my phone before upgrading, now to work out how to revert...
>UK male voice sounds more like Stephen Hawking's machine after the upgrade.
It was like this for a while during beta with US siri, the hq voice returned only recently. The speech is streamed from NV - my guess would be they are working on cache for UK language and are thinking of the Eskimos. Either way it will be fixed without requiring an OS update.
Half of them are moaning about how the UI is 'dated' and Apple should focus on making it more snazzy and whizzy like android
The other half are moaning about how both android and iOS are only now getting round to implementing useful functionality that feature phones had implemented a decade ago
Clearly Form Vs Function is still a challenge for everyone
Aren't these pretty much a bunch of app updates all released on the same day?
Android users get things like this added as the apps are updated (except the DND settings). But things like the facebook integration or any other integration all come when you install a new app such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype.
Browser sync and stuff comes with Chrome or Dolphin browser install.
Let me tell you about the evening me & my mate Dave decided to use the Google Maps app to try and find a Karaoke bar in central London.
We walked 10 minutes to a Karaoke bar which was boarded up, another 15 minutes to a Karaoke bar that wasn't open that night, and eventually ended up 15 minutes later in a gay bar where a couple of straight men were *not* welcome. And it wasn't Karaoke night anyway.
We would have done better getting pissed where we were and then walking the streets singing Delilah at the top of our voices. (Maybe Siri would have suggested that.)
So yeah, POI databases - don't really care about the size. Large doesn't mean useful, and may mean the opposite.
Upgrade my 4 to iOS6 last night and I'll be restoring a backup as the new Maps suck! Though it won't be long before I jump ship to another phone as Apple really seem to have lost the plot. They've spent more time building a higher ring fence with the maps, and YouTube removal, without adding anything worthwhile for the users (you know Apple the people that pay your wages).
Arse. Restored the iPhone to 5.1.1 then tried to recover from the backup... alas this is "incompatible with the old version of the software". I don't have a TM backup to hand, so I'll have to restore it to iOS 6(.6.6) and re-try this later.
Key to this is getting the "iPhone3,1_5.1.1_9B206_Restore.ipsw" file from Apple.
Apple's going off the boil IMHO.
...you know, the one where you have an email in the Drafts folder, you open it and press Send, but a random email-server authentication error occurs and the email isn't sent, and has disappeared from Drafts and is nowhere to be seen in the Outbox. So you have to retype the email all over again.
First found that bug in iOS3, still hasnt' been fixed in 5...
It’s great that Apple provide these updates quickly and for free but if I was happily using Google Maps on my iphone (I don’t own one by the way) and I upgraded to iOS6 would the Google app get removed? What about all my saved settings? Can you get Google Maps separately? Is this the same for all apps in an upgrade where Apple chose to provide their own version?
What’s the behaviour like on Andriod; I’ve never felt the need to upgrade mine?
It seems a bit off to me that you may have paid for an app that you can no longer use because the handset manufacturer decided they wanted you to use their version.
If that's true it'll be because Microsoft will supply its OS to anyone that wants to buy it and bundle it onto a phone, exactly like Google. So if WP8 were to start picking up steam then the sales people at Microsoft will be chasing Google's immediate customers, which should manifest itself as a benefit to end customers through market competition and diversity, and lead to WP8 being in a similar price bracket to Android.
Conversely the marketing support for iOS is locked in.
Even when there's potentially hundreds of reviews, you can only see 4 or 5.
That's a really easy bug to spot in the general testing of operations. It's very visible, and they fucked it up.
The QA dept. needs to be given a good kick in the tick-box for missing that one.
'Especially when the iPhone gets NFC as it almost certainly will next year. By then sellers will be not only supporting Passbook, but will have begun building an NFC service infrastructure the iPhone can use.'
So Apple are going to sell an NFC iPhone next year (which, by the way, there is absolutely no indication of let alone it being 'almost certain') knowing that the infrastructure won't be there yet, but it will be once loads of people have bought NFC-equipped iPhones (which they initially won't be able to be use the NFC in very much) and that encourages businesses to actually install NFC equipment, so that maybe six months after buying the phone, people can finally actually use this new feature that's actually been around for ages but nobody gave a crap about because it's a solution in search of a problem.
Are you really running that as an argument? Really? What incentive does Apple have to design & manufacture something into the iPhone design to support an infrastructure that isn't widespread and that they will make no money off but will make a lot of money for other people? And what incentive will there be for people to buy these new NFC'ed iPhones, purely on the promise that at some point in the future they'll possibly be able to use this new feature to do some things they don't find a particularly inconvenient process without the new fangled tech anyway?
I mean, what? Do you own shares in NFC chip makers or something?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
