iOS 7 First Impressions

[TheStu]

To be fair, you can't just pick up an iPhone and it works the way you want, you have to go through all the settings, and there are a ton.

You could use an Android phone just like an iPhone if you wanted, big grid of icons with no widgets.

Unfortunately for Apple no matter how much they improve iOS, the thing that's going to push my wife from iOS to Android is iTunes. She hates iTunes with a passion. It really has become a bloated mess of a program.

What does she need iTunes for? Just music and movies? Anything that you've purchased can be downloaded to the phone directly.

Yes, it has become quite ridiculous in the past couple years.

 

[Rakehellion]

Yeah, iPhones are computer-free as of iOS 5.

 

[Red Storm]

She tried it for photos, but she takes so many that it just wasn't working. We both have Apple IDs, so when we got married and she tried to login with her Apple ID on my laptop, she somehow cleared all the content on it and then the phone had my name on it in iTunes. That happened a few times and now she never hooks her phone up to the laptop anymore lol.

Yeah, iPhones are computer-free as of iOS 5.

Not if you take lots of pictures.

 

[Rakehellion]

Not if you take lots of pictures.

There's always the 64GB model or the SD card attachment. And iTunes doesn't manage photos, so you'd use iPhoto or Image Capture.

 

[TheStu]

She tried it for photos, but she takes so many that it just wasn't working. We both have Apple IDs, so when we got married and she tried to login with her Apple ID on my laptop, she somehow cleared all the content on it and then the phone had my name on it in iTunes. That happened a few times and now she never hooks her phone up to the laptop anymore lol.



Not if you take lots of pictures.

Then you never install iTunes, you plug the phone in, and the OS takes care of the rest. The photos specifically are accessible as soon as you plug in the device. Nothing else is available, but the pictures are. Every time I plug my phone into my work laptop to charge, XP asks me if I want to pull the photos off.

And you can still use Photo Stream without iTunes installed, that's part of the iCloud control panel IIRC.

Also, I have a suspicion, not that I would know personally of course, that iOS 7 is going to address the 1 phone-many computers issue.

 

[bearxor]

Okay, now you're just being ridiculous. It functions exactly the same as the old one, only is more useful now. I think you just like to complain.

Again, I'm looking at it from usage. I almost never used the multitasking bar to begin with. I simply don't want to have to manage my phone. I just want it to work. If I felt like I needed to do things like close applications to manage memory, i would have switched to Android a long time ago.

It's one of the reasons I loved the Treo 700wx over every other PPC phone at the time. Palm went in and heavily trimmed down the version of WM from the defaults so it was a lot more lightweight and customized for the device and always had more resources free than other phones I used. Unlike the HTC method which was 'We're going to load the full, stock version of Windows Mobile on here and then we're going to load all kinds of crap on top of that.'

The biggest time consuming setting I mess with on my iPhone is the Notification Center settings, just to make sure nothing shows up in that crutch of a drop-down shade and turn off app badges for most things. I don't mind dropping it down to get the weather but that's about it.

 

[slackerinabox]

She tried it for photos, but she takes so many that it just wasn't working. We both have Apple IDs, so when we got married and she tried to login with her Apple ID on my laptop, she somehow cleared all the content on it and then the phone had my name on it in iTunes. That happened a few times and now she never hooks her phone up to the laptop anymore lol.



Not if you take lots of pictures.

I basically never hook up my iPhone to a pc - iCloud photostream's a super easy way to sync photos, and the added redundancy's nice too.

 

[Red Storm]

I basically never hook up my iPhone to a pc - iCloud photostream's a super easy way to sync photos, and the added redundancy's nice too.

Doesn't photo stream have a storage limit? Like 5GB?

 

[slackerinabox]

Doesn't photo stream have a storage limit? Like 5GB?

Don't believe so, from apple:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4858

iCloud: Photo Stream limits

There is no limit to the number of photos you can upload to Photo Stream over time, but iCloud limits the number of photos that can be uploaded within a given hour, day, or month to prevent unintended or excessive use.

Photo Stream upload limits

The Photo Stream limits below are established based on anticipated upload patterns. Currently, Photo Stream upload limits are as follows:

Uploads to My Photo Stream per hour: 1,000 photos
Uploads to My Photo Stream per day: 10,000 photos
Uploads to My Photo Stream per month: 25,000 photos

And from macworld: Photo Stream photos won't count against your 5GB limit.

 

[TheStu]

Doesn't photo stream have a storage limit? Like 5GB?

I think you're thinking of the 1000 photo rolling cap on what it keeps on your iDevices. But I think that only applies to your Photo Stream, not the Camera Roll.

 

[Red Storm]

I think you're thinking of the 1000 photo rolling cap on what it keeps on your iDevices. But I think that only applies to your Photo Stream, not the Camera Roll.

I think you're right. So you're saying it keeps X number of the most recent ones on the device, while the older ones are stored online? So with Photo Stream she can take as many photos as she wants and they'll all be accessible from an iPhone/iPad or computer to download or do whatever with?

 

[TheStu]

I think you're right. So you're saying it keeps X number of the most recent ones on the device, while the older ones are stored online? So with Photo Stream she can take as many photos as she wants and they'll all be accessible from an iPhone/iPad or computer to download or do whatever with?

This is what it says on Apple's site:

iCloud manages your Photo Stream efficiently so you don’t run out of storage space on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. If you have Photo Stream enabled on your iOS device, every single photo you take appears in a special Photo Stream album that holds your last 1000 photos. You can delete any photos you don’t want from the Photo Stream.1 To touch up a photo or keep a favorite shot permanently, simply save it to your Camera Roll. iCloud stores new photos for 30 days, so you have plenty of time to connect your iOS device to Wi-Fi and make sure you always have your most recent shots handy.

So, let's say she has Photo Stream set up to download the photos to your computer, and it's set up on her phone as well. She takes 1100 photos. The most recent 1000 are in the Photo Stream album on the phone, all 1100 are in the Camera Roll on the phone, and all 1100 are in a folder on the computer. Any that were taken in the last 30 days (up to apparently 25,000) are on iCloud.

 

[Rakehellion]

In messages, it now shows the first initial of the person with whom you are conversing's last name instead of the full name. I'm not sure I like this change.

Now it's just the first name and no initial. I think this is to anonymize screenshots.

 

[TheStu]

Now it's just the first name and no initial. I think this is to anonymize screenshots.

Why would that be a big enough concern to do such a thing?

 

[bearxor]

I haven't installed Beta 5 yet, but is it not changeable like it was in b4?

Settings > Mail, Contacts and Calendars

Under the Contacts heading, the Short Name option.

 

[TheStu]

I haven't installed Beta 5 yet, but is it not changeable like it was in b4?

Settings > Mail, Contacts and Calendars

Under the Contacts heading, the Short Name option.

I was looking in the Messages settings... thanks man.

 

[lotust]

Ios7 beta 6 loaded

 

[Oyeve]

Well, I finally got around to loading beta 6 on my test iphone 4 today. Beta 1-4 made my ip4 totally useless. I mean really useless. Plus, bejeweled blitz would not run at all. Well, after a couple of hours installing ios7 beta 6 my test ip4 is now useful again and bejeweled blitz now works albeit very poorly. I may push this to my work ip5 just for the hell of it.

 

[Eug]

Not so sluggish anymore on the iPhone 4? If not that's great. One can only hope it will be even faster at release and beyond.

http://9to5mac.com/2013/08/19/the-gold-iphone-5s-fingerprint-scanners-and-the-future-of-ios/

iOS 7 beta 7 is rumoured to be imminent, and I suspect that will be the general master since the new iPhones are launching in 3 weeks, so I'm really looking forward to performance assessments of the iPhone 4 on that beta too.

We have an iPhone 4 and iPad 2, and it'd be nice to have both these machines running the same iOS 7 as the iPhone 5S or 5C I may buy, at least for a year.

P.S. I'm typing this on our iPad 2 on our vacation, as my MacBook Pro died here. I hadn't been using the iPad much for the past year since it is really my wife's machine, but it's not as sluggish as I remember it being when I first installed iOS 6. I'm thinking that the subsequent OS updates may have improved performance on this device (and probably the iPhone 4 too), but I don't know if I'm just not remembering the performance correctly.

 

[Oyeve]

Not so sluggish anymore on the iPhone 4? If not that's great. One can only hope it will be even faster at release and beyond.

http://9to5mac.com/2013/08/19/the-gold-iphone-5s-fingerprint-scanners-and-the-future-of-ios/

Yeah, my 4 is mostly usable again after B6

 

[MrX8503]

Something to note about photostream that a lot of users don't know about.

You don't get the full res non compressed photo from an iDevice, you have to retrieve it from your computer's photostream.

This really irked me when I found out cause I loss some high quality photos.

 

[ubercaffeinated]

You can also use dropbox to sync/back up your photos if you want to go iTunes free.

 

[TheStu]

You can also use dropbox to sync/back up your photos if you want to go iTunes free.

Turn on PhotoStream and install the iCloud Control Panel for Windows, no need for iTunes, or DropBox.

 

[dlock13]

Turn on PhotoStream and install the iCloud Control Panel for Windows, no need for iTunes, or DropBox.

Right, or you could just forego using anything iCloud related other than backing up and keep using 3rd party services that work on most devices/operating systems. DropBox for storage, Google Cal for..... calendar, etc.. etc..

 

[TheStu]

Right, or you could just forego using anything iCloud related other than backing up and keep using 3rd party services that work on most devices/operating systems. DropBox for storage, Google Cal for..... calendar, etc.. etc..

Or I could forego that and use the built in utilities that let my PC, Mac, iPad and iPhone stay in sync seamlessly. I'm not sure how your solution is better than my solution. Especially since other than having to install the iCloud Contral Panel mine isn't exactly hard or even all that involved. It's pretty set it and forget it. If you want to still use dropbox or skydrive or whatever else, just point it to the Photostream folder.

Edit: I am out of date on dropbox, it seems to have also gotten quite seamless.