2013/09/20

iOS7: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Dislaimer:  I am fairly tech competent, but by no means an Apple "Fan Girl".  I am a PC user who doesn't like Android OS.  I have an iPhone 4S and the newest generation iPad, and I installed iOS7 on both about 24 hours ago.

Now, here's my irrelevant opinion.

The Good:  I think the best upgrade that I've found  so far is that you're no longer limited on how many apps you can stack in the folders. It only displays 9 at a time, but layers them in pages, so that's allowed me to reduce a lot of folders. I also like that you can choose vibrate patterns and can activate LED notifications. That may get old, but I like the flash.  The multitasking feature (double click the home button) is interesting as well. The jury is still out how they've rearranged web browsing.

The Bad:  The upgrade wiped a lot of my pictures so I have to go and get them back. It's also crashed some of my apps and has been a huge battery drain. I did slow the battery drain problem a bit by disabling the parallax, but am torqued off that some juveniles programmed a feature that sucks the life out of my battery for something that only looks marginally cool and serves no real purpose. The calendar is almost unusable and the contacts, are difficult to navigate.

The Ugly:  The appearance...oh how I hate the appearance. It's cartoonish. The white is garish. A 3rd grader with an 8 pack of crayons could do better with the iconography. The apple design legacy apparently died with Steve Jobs.  I don't like what it does when it "color coordinates" with your background, because visibility is poor. There's an option that allows you to reverse the color scheme, so everything becomes white on black.  The appearance of that inverse interface looks pretty sharp, but then all of your photos, games, and web browsing look like X-Rays, so the scheme's not usable, which to me is just more pretty, fluffy, wasted space.

Again, I've not been using it that long, but this is what I have so far.  I'll update as I find more stuff, and check out suggestions and comment.

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