I gave into temptation tonight and downloaded and installed the gold master of the new iPhone operating system tonight. I’ve held off on the earlier betas, but after seeing the Apple keynote this week I wanted to check it out for myself. After the first few hours there are a couple of features that are a huge improvement.
1. Folders for apps. I’ve really been annoyed lately with how many apps I’ve had on my phone and how to organize them. This new feature goes a long way to fix it. I think the process of actually making the folders is a little janky though. You create or add an app to a fold by dropping an app on another. The problem with this is the apps like to jump away from each other during this process. I haven’t tried to do this in iTunes, maybe it’s easier there.
2. Background apps. This is one going that people have been asking for since day one of the iPhone. I always hated this on my old windows phones because it constantly caused crashes and battery drains. It was also always a pain to close running apps. Apple really got the implementation of this right, switching is easy and I can see that this will be a huge click saver.
3. UI. They’ve really put some polish on the look of things. Transitions between screens is nicer. I like the ability to put pictures as backgrounds behind the app icons, but you really need to be careful what you use, the wrong picture can make it almost un-usable. The visual flow between the new folder apps and background apps works really well.
4. Unified Inbox. I don’t know how many of you have multiple email accounts, but i have 4 setup on my phone and sometimes it was tiring going between each one to check new messages. Now you can get all your accounts in one central inbox. But don’t worry, you can still access each one individually also if you like the old way. The only problem I had with this was looking at my email almost became overwhelming, but I think I deal with more email than the average person.
There are a few things I still wish they would deal with (notifications, more info on the lock screen) but overall it’s a solid upgrade. I already miss some of the new features when I switch over to my iPad. Looking forward to that upgrade this fall.
What do you think is still missing?
Personally, I think the best thing about iOS4 is In-app SMS functionality, which means that there is finally an app for MASS TEXT MESSAGE. It’s awesome and it’s a tool that every youth worker needs to connect with students and leaders. Check it out at http://MassTextMessage.com