I was looking forward to iOS 7 for a few reasons. I was glad to be rid of the skeumorphic design elements (stupid shit like the “Notes” app looking like a yellow notepad) but also glad to get the Control Center to turn off Wifi more easily – I only need Wifi to be on when I’m in my house or my office. It’s just a battery drain elsewhere. Ideally iPhone would just do this via geofencing, and the fact that it doesn’t is beyond retarded.
So I upgraded the night it was released. Two days later the novelty had worn off. I tried to roll back to iOS 5 (I never upgraded to 6 due to Maps). Failed with error 3194. I tried DFU mode. Failed with error 3194. I was stuck. They released 7.0.2 this past Friday or Saturday night and I hoped it would solve my problems but it didn’t. Here’s some of what’s happened:
Battery life is gone. I lose about 1% per minute at times, even with just 1-2 apps running and the phone in airplane mode. To go from 100% to 75% usually takes about 90 minutes.
Phone doesn’t show up on computer at all – not in iTunes, not as a camera, nothing. I’ve reinstalled iTunes several times.
It doesn’t check email any more. It tells me no new messages even when I login to Exchange and see new messages. Same for Gmail.
Audio is broken. The hardware toggle switch appears to be ignored randomly – it won’t make sound at times, and then other times makes tons of sound. On the train, when I unplugged my headphones while listening to a song, it kept playing the audio out the loudspeaker and the volume buttons were ignored.
The phone randomly powers off when it gets under 30% battery life. The behavior is what I used to see when it got around 3%, but now it happens at 30% or so. When I turn it back on, it says there’s ~25% left so I don’t know why it shut down.
iCloud backup does not work. It gets to “1% remaining” or something and then says “iCloud backup failed.” The last successful one was from the day I last ran iOS 5.
As of this moment, as I write this, my phone is completely wiped and I’m attempting to restore it from backup. But the phone won’t show up in iTunes for me to restore it. Last time
I went to the Apple Store in Grand Central the “genius” was useless, told me my phone was fine even though it was barely getting 8 hours battery life with no use – his advice was to power the phone off at night. It’s a 4S so not sure what recourse I have, it’s definitely not under warranty anymore. I have work tomorrow and as of right now a useless phone.
I guess my point is, don’t upgrade to iOS 7 if you have an iPhone 4S.
Update, Oct 21, 2013. I took my phone back to the Apple Store and they essentially confirmed that my phone was broken somehow – it wouldn’t even connect to their Macbooks, though it would charge. They offered me a new 4S for $199 (no contract extension) but I didn’t want to do that. Last week I took my phone to Best Buy and got $100 for it towards a new 5S. The 5S is great and IOS7 works fine on it, though it does still have quirks and bugs.
I got my first “smart” phone, a BlackBerry Pearl, in 2007. I got it from LetsTalk.com for $0.00 with a 2-year AT&T contract. It was EDGE-only – no 3G – and certainly had a lot of problems, but I loved it. At some point the ball fell out of it and it became unusable. The iPhone 3G was out by that time and I ended up getting my wife an iPhone 3G for Mother’s Day in 2009 and one for myself a few weeks later. I pretty much fell in love with the iPhone, and my concern about the on-screen keyboard was negated by having a real web browser after suffering with Blackberry’s for so long. And 3G was an amazing step up from EDGE speeds.
My Blackberry Pearl in its final days
One of the reasons I was reluctant to get an iPhone was my hatred of iTunes. iTunes is a bloated, huge, slow piece of junk. I know it has fans, mostly among people whose primary environment is Mac, and it certainly runs better there than on Windows. Prior to iOS 5, you had to connect your phone to your computer and back it up via iTunes periodically, and also had to connect via USB cable to copy movies or MP3s onto the device. This isn’t something I do that frequently, though, so it wasn’t a big deal, and as I said, the iPhone was so amazing that it was worth the pain. (And, with iOS 5 doing backups to iCloud I haven’t really had to touch iTunes much over the past year).
But the list of “cons” for the iPhone is still pretty long and the “pros” haven’t really grown at all. It’s always bothered me that the iPhone uses a proprietary data/charging cable, and with the iPhone 5 Apple doubled down on this idea by introducing the “Lightning” connector – with the added bonus of obsoleting all devices designed to work with previous generation iPods & iPhones, such as the Sony clock radio we have, or the 500 watt stereo that’s “made for iPhone.”
Another annoyance is that I can’t simply plug the phone in to any computer and have it show up as a hard drive and copy music files onto it – I must still use iTunes for that. Sure, I can do the actual transfer now via wifi rather than via the USB cable, but it still requires iTunes, and can only be done from my “main” computer – not either of my two other home computers or my work computer.
Videos are even worse, since they have to be in m4v format using a proprietary codec. A downloaded .avi will need to be converted to an Apple-compatible format, and that’s not trivial – or quick. To get a video onto my phone I need to
Download it
Transcode it to iPhone format (~20 minutes on my laptop for a 60 minute video),
Copy it to the one computer that my phone is “bound” to via iTunes
Copy the video to the phone.
There are other quirks with the OS that I find annoying, but lately it looks like Apple’s just been putting all its money on Siri as its killer feature. Personally I hate Siri and have disabled the feature on my phone – it didn’t work about ¾ of the time when I tried it and was more an obstacle than a convenience. It kept activating randomly when I’d hold up the phone to my face, so I disabled it and haven’t looked back. The Maps debacle in iOS 6 is common knowledge at this point, but thankfully I never upgraded to iOS 6, and at this point I don’t ever plan to, since the only new feature in it of any use to me is Do Not Disturb, which Apple didn’t even implement properly (see below).
I like my iPhone a lot, but there are some basic features I would like to see in it, many of which seem to be available in many Android devices already. Ars Technica recently posted an article on this subject and the realization that there are other people feeling these frustrations is what prompted me to write this.
Number 2 on their list, customizing “do not disturb,” seemed so unbelievably obvious that I can’t believe it wasn’t included as part of the feature in iOS 6 – you can schedule DND, but you can’t set different schedules per day? WTF? And the default weather app always shows it’s 73 degrees and Sunny? Why? Surely by now they could make that live-update. And why can’t the phone be smart enough to enable wifi only when I’m at home or at work, and disable it the rest of the time? Android can do that… iPhone has geofencing already, so there’s really no reason they couldn’t do it, they just choose not to. Disabling wifi on the iPhone is a 6-step procedure: Unlock phone, enter passcode, find settings app, open settings app, click “wifi”, move slider to “off.” Then repeat to turn it back on when you get home.
While I’m not crazy about the all-glass construction, the 4S is a nice piece of hardware, and for the most part it “just works.” Personally I’m not a big app user – I spend almost all my time using the built-in default apps. The things I do on my phone, in order of decreasing frequency, are email, web, Twitter, Facebook, phone, weather, music. But iPhone isn’t the only game in town anymore, and the Samsung Galaxy line of phones is looking very attractive, if for no other reason than I can stop looking for “discount” iPhone cables for $3 each from shady Hong Kong stores and just use standard USB cables. Since Apple decided that upgrading to an iPhone 5 would render my current $300+ worth of accessories worthless anyway, I don’t really have any incentive to stay with the iPhone platform. I mean, I’d like to, but I’m not seeing anything compelling coming down the pipe from Apple, and Samsung has hardware that’s arguably as nice (or nicer) and features like a removable battery, a micro SD card slot for added storage (without having to buy a completely different phone for $100 more…), and the aforementioned MicroUSB charger. Plus you can just mount the phone as a hard drive and drop your MP3 or video onto it and play most standard formats without any ridiculous transcoding – things I was able to do in like 2005 on a “personal media player” device. I haven’t seen any real improvements in iOS since 5.0, and as I said, Apple appears to be pushing Siri as the “killer app,” . One of the bullet-point features for iOS 6.1 is the ability to buy movie tickets through Siri. Yay…
I’m halfway through my 2-year contract with my current 4S so I have a while yet before I go phone shopping, but as it stands now Apple isn’t offering very much to keep me happy – the $30 “Lightning” cable bullshit is definitely a step in the wrong direction. But I mean, I have a couple episodes of Walking Dead on my computer. They’re .avis and I want to watch them on my morning train ride. I was looking at the Samsung Galaxy Player (which appears to be essentially a Galaxy phone without the phone functionality) but I don’t want to have to carry a second device just to watch videos. It’s really obnoxious on Apple’s part that they stick to their way of doing things despite how much it annoys people, but I guess that’s been the standard Apple complaint for over 20 years. Frankly I didn’t mind it with the iPhone as long as they had no real competition, but if there’s a better product at the same/comparable price then it seems foolish to stick with them.
Updated 2/12/2013: After I wrote this rant I started hunting down reviews of Android phones to see which are the best. I found this great review of the Nexus 4 on Anandtech. It wasn’t really a comparison with the iPhone 5, but taking a look at the benchmark results on that page, it’s pretty clear that the iPhone 5 is the best-performing phone on the market, especially for the things I use most (e.g. browser):
This has tempered my anger with the iPhone 5, but not made the decision any easier. I was hoping newer Android phones would be the clear winner on the hardware front but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Another important factor seems to be the quality of Samsung & LG phones’ screens, which judging by the video reviews I’ve checked on YouTube, are pretty inferior to iPhone’s – much more variation in color, with yellower whites. http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/MIWYp6ZXe-s
Plus, the Nexus 4 basically only runs on T-Mobile in the US, and I don’t have any interest switching to T-Mobile. And, icing on the cake, the Nexus 4 has no SD card slot. So rather than making the decision easier, research has made it harder, because it appears that Android phones’ hardware is still not on par with iPhone’s. Or maybe the performance issues are software-based, but if the Nexus 4 is Google’s latest flagship device I’d expect it to be running a fully tuned & tweaked OS. So if the best they can do is nowhere near iPhone’s current baseline, that’s pretty sad.
In an attempt to teach myself Objective C, and because I couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted, I wrote a little utility to display the currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac taskbar. Originally I had it display the full track name right in the taskbar but it was too much text for such a small space (especially on a 1440×900 screen), so now you click a little musical note and it shows you the info in a menu.
Here’s a screenshot:
The code is all in github. If you’re looking for a similar utility, and are brave enough to try my first-ever Obj-C app, you can download it here. But the freshest version will probably be in the github project.
As an aside, I was surprised at how easy it was to cobble this together having never written ObjC before. I found some good examples that I mostly ripped off, but it was still remarkably easy to have the app listen to iTunes for track changes, etc.
Last week I returned from my first trip to Walt Disney World. We had a great time, and I figured it might be helpful to relay some of the things that helped make the trip better.
Walt Disney World with Kids 2011 – I had my doubts about this book but it had lots of good info for someone who’s never been to Disney World before, like which rides are best for kids. If you’ve never been to Disney World, this is worth reading. I didn’t know Fastpass existed until I read this.
Disney’s own mobile phone site – Disney’s smartphone page. They have wait times here, but I found them to be pretty inaccurate. E.g. the page may say a wait time is “see now” (i.e. no wait) but there’s actually a 15 minute wait. However, this page was very useful for finding character locations and Fastpass availability.
The best tip for maximizing park enjoyment is to get there as early as possible. We got to Magic Kingdom at 8:30 AM, which was already kind of late compared to the book’s suggestion of arriving 30 minutes before the park opens, but the lines were pretty moderate and we got almost everything we wanted to do (Dumbo, race cars, Philharmagic, Buzz, a few others) done by noon and spent the rest of the day walking around exploring.
Update: I forgot to mention that if you stay at Disney’s resorts, there is no wifi internet. This was a big shock to us, since the hotels we stayed at on the way down (and up) all had free wifi. Disney’s resorts charge $10/day for internet access, which is available through a single ethernet port in each room. There are usually a couple of ethernet ports, but only one works for data (the phones use RJ45 connectors as well). This was pretty annoying because we had two computers and only one port, and the 3G signal in our room was pretty weak so I would have liked to connect my phone to wifi. If you want wifi at a Disney resort, I suggest bringing your own router. I’ve been having good luck with the TP-Link TL-WR841ND Wireless-N router, which Amazon usually has for under $40. I haven’t tried this at Disney so I can’t say for sure it works, but it’s worth a try if you want wireless.
Some people may not be aware that photos taken with the iPhone camera have the GPS coordinates of your location embedded in the EXIF metadata of the file. This means that when you post the picture online or send it to someone, you’re letting them know where you were at a certain place and time. If you’re ok with that then there’s no problem. But if you want to disable it, it’s pretty simple.
The procedure is basically the same as the one I described in this post about enabling Facebook Places. The difference is that once you’re in Location Services you’ll want to make sure “Camera” is disabled. Photos taken from that point on won’t have GPS embedded in their metadata. If you want to turn it back on, just set Camera to “enabled” in Location Services.
I’ve always hated iTunes. It’s a huge pile of bloatware and it’s slow as poo. It’s like 100 mb or more for an mp3 player. I remember winamp playing mp3s when it was a 500k download. Anyway.
I keep all my music on a Linux machine running samba. This way it’s available to every machine in the house. When I had Winamp on all my machines this was wonderful. But now that I’m forced into iTunes (thanks to having an iPhone), it turns out to be a major pain. In iTunes I unchecked the box for “let iTunes keep my libary organized” to prevent it from copying the entire library to each computer’s local disk. Initially adding my library of ~4000 tracks to iTunes takes over an hour (100 mbit wire) – it would take about 5 minutes in Winamp, even reading the ID3 tags for each track as it was added (rather than lazily as the song was played).
But the thing that iTunes does that is so annoying it prompted me to write this whiny rant is:
iTunes 'Song Not Found'
If, for some reason, my M: drive (where the Samba share is mapped) is not connected when iTunes starts, every song in the library gets this “!” exclamation point of doom. If I attempt to play any of these tracks, I am given the option to locate the file. Nice in theory, but locating all 4000 tracks isn’t realistic. If I quit iTunes, reconnect the M: drive, and reopen iTunes, the ! persists. The only solution I’ve found to this is deleting the entire library from iTunes and re-adding it, which as I said, takes an extremely long time.
I have other reasons for hating iTunes, this is a blog, not a book.
I decided to see how “Places” stacked up with Foursquare. I reactivated my Facebook account and reinstalled the iPhone app. Went to “Places” and clicked “Check In,” and… nothing. It mentioned something about turning on Location Services. I know I already have that enabled because other apps are using it without problem. Turns out you need to enable Location Services explicitly:
First, go to the Settings app and select General: Settings -> General
Select Location Services: Location Services
Make sure Facebook is enabled (On) if you want to use Places. If you want to disable Places, make sure this is set to Off. Make sure Facebook is 'On' to use Facebook Places.
I decided to see how “Places” stacked up with Foursquare. I reactivated my Facebook account and reinstalled the iPhone app. Went to “Places” and clicked “Check In,” and… nothing. It mentioned something about turning on Location Services. I know I already have that enabled because other apps are using it without problem. Turns out you need to enable Location Services explicitly:
First, go to the Settings app and select General: Settings -> General
Select Location Services: Location Services
Make sure Facebook is enabled (On) if you want to use Places. If you want to disable Places, make sure this is set to Off. Make sure Facebook is 'On' to use Facebook Places.
Lots of outlets seem to have picked up the story about the new Vonage iPhone app that lets you call your Facebook friends free. I don’t understand why this is even newsworthy. There are a bunch of free VOIP apps for iPhone already, with Skype being the one that comes to mind first. But a couple of other things have me scratching my head about this story:
AT&T doesn’t offer the unlimited data plan for iPhone anymore, so this “free” call could end up being pretty expensive over 3G.
If you’re making a call to another friend with the iPhone app, then your friend probably has an iPhone. They’re also probably also on AT&T, so a regular voice call to them would be free anyway. So just call them?
This might make more sense to me if your friend is outside the US, or they come out with a similar app for other platforms, but even then… so what? Free VOIP calls aren’t new. Is it just the Facebook tie-in? I don’t get the buzz. Maybe it’s because I have 5,000 rollover minutes with AT&T.
Evan Hoffman's Blog 