Every week here on iSource we run a series called Picks of the Week.  No, we haven’t gone digging for boogers. It’s typically a round up of each writer’s favorite app, accessory or whatever from the world o’ tech. This week however my Pick of the Week got rejected by our supreme iSource overlords. Why? […]
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Not so Pick of the Week – the iPhone Sucketh

Aug 18th 2011 by

Every week here on iSource we run a series called Picks of the Week.  No, we haven’t gone digging for boogers. It’s typically a round up of each writer’s favorite app, accessory or whatever from the world o’ tech. This week however my Pick of the Week got rejected by our supreme iSource overlords. Why? Well, because it wasn’t all sunshine, rainbows and butt-kissin, and it wasn’t technically a Pick of the Week. In my case, this was more of a “Let Down of the Month”.

So what’s going on you ask? Well, I guess lately I’ve just been blah on the whole iPhone. Four phones and a little over four years into the iPhone experience and iOS is getting boring for me. Frankly iOS is getting it’s ass kicked all over the place. The good part for Apple is that “all over the place” is quite literally where it’s happening. There’s not a single mobile OS out there that’s getting it 100% right (or I’d be there in a heartbeat). Here’s a few places I personally think iOS is falling behind.


No-tification Center:
If we’re being really honest, I still really miss the old Windows Mobile “Today” screen  with everything I needed to know instantly available, where I could see my calendar and get all my information (mail, calls, messages) from the same source the second I turned my device on. The iOS 5 beta completely fails in this regard simply because it doesn’t allow me to get to my info from the lockscreen or in any quick manner. I want to glance at my lock screen to see what’s coming up and move on. I don’t want to button –> slide to unlock –> swipe the springboard –> then scroll to get infomation. I want to tap the home button once and be done with it. While we’re at it – I don’t use the notification center very often simply because it is such a pain in the ass to get to. I don’t want to follow a 3-5 second process to see something that will take me half a second to process. Yes … I know there’s jailbreak apps for that. And no I can’t use them because I’m running iOS 5 and refuse to have to tether my phone when it needs a reboot. Apple knows people want their info in a central place (otherwise they never would have created Notification Center) so why did they half ass it and make it take forever to get to? Winner: Windows Mobile CE – from the year 2000


Camera Sucketh:
CAN WE PLEASE GET A DAMMED CAMERA THAT DOESN’T TAKE 2 MINUTES TO OPEN? And heaven forbid you want to take a video.You might as well go make a coffee and sit down on the john to read the paper before the camera becomes active. Ok, ok… it doesn’t take that long. But 10-15 seconds for the camera to activate when your kid is about to do something incredibly kid like (score the winning touchdown / run headlong into a tree) is an eternity. That’s the difference between $10,000 on America’s Funniest Home Video and 10,000 “Dammed slow camera” complaints when you miss the shot. Saving with HDR? Forget it. Put the phone down and go for a walk. To South America. Winner: Polaroids develop faster – since 1973

Wallpaper:
Show of hands… how many of you still live in a house that has wallpaper? My guess is not too many of you because its out dated. Who else recalls the time when Apple didn’t even let you have wallpaper on your iPhone? Yes, I realize that wasn’t too long ago, but what’s old is old. Guess what Android has had forever now? LIVE MOTION OMFG IT MOVES wallpaper. It’s like a window on your phone. Hell, they even have wallpaper that follows you as you move through the screens (see Captain America live wallpaper). Useless? Ab-so-lutely but fun all the way around. So, how about another OS that doesn’t have wallpaper at all like our beloved iPhone didn’t – Windows Phone 7. They have LIVE TILES. Don’t know what that is? Here’s the concept – you have weather app. That weather app tracks your local temperature and displays it on the icon. But then an alert comes through, the icon flips over and instead of showing you just the standard app icon, it shows you a picture of the gigantic hurricane heading your way and alerts your to get the hell outta town. Windows Phone 7 can do that. What can iOS do? Um. Yea. NOTHING. Winner: Windows Phone 7 icons can save your life. iPhone can display a bubble number.

Battery Life:
I love my iPad. I can charge it and forget about it for days on end. The iPhone? I can charge it and a few hours later (under heavy use or games) flip the switch on my Mophie Juice Pack Plus and charge it all over again. I have quite often forgotten just how cool looking the iPhone 4 is – because I haven’t seen it in months. I carry around a brick in my pocket because I can’t make it through the day using my phone – the way I want to. If I used it the way I suspect a lot of folks do – which is to turn it on and ignore it for the vast majority of the day until they check facebook at night and maybe play a game or two, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But my iPhone is always on. Between emails, texts, games when I need a break, music and movies occasionally for background noise when I’m working on something – my phone works its battery to death. Yes I could turn off 3G (might as well since AT&T 3G is slow as molasses most times), BT is already off, Wifi, Push etc… I could turn all those off. I could, but many of them are integral parts of my day. I grab files off a server (Wifi required), my servers notify me of problems via email so auto-checking every 15 minutes is not a good thing and using Edge – half the time email content doesn’t even load. So yea, I could turn my iPhone into a smartphone from 5 years ago sure. So – why complain now? The Samsung Galaxy S II – downclocks the dual core CPU (to as low as 200Mhz) when its idle and that fancy (huge) screen it has only lights the pixels being used to display content. No content (black) no power and therefore truer blacks at no power cost. Winner: Samsung for doing something the iPhone can’t – manage battery life.


iPhone Phone:
Thomas – The little engine that could. iPhone – The expensive phone that can’t. My mom was over for lunch the other day. She looked at me after her iPhone displayed “Call Failed” while trying to call her husband. She used two words: AT&T Sucks. And that pretty much sums up the entire experience using iPhone as a phone. Is that Apple’s fault? Who cares. The iPhone sucks as a phone. End of story. Winner: Not iPhone.

Folders with limits:
iPhone limits you to 12 items in a folder. I’ve got 14 default “Apple Apps” that I don’t want on my home screen at all. But you can’t fit them all in one folder because that would make the folder have to scroll – heaven forbid. I’ve got a hell-uva lot more than 12 games on my phone. Why should I have to have Games folders 1-5? Productivity folders 1-4 and News folders 1-3? Yes, I could jailbreak and use something like Infinifolders. But yet again, Apple has to know this sucks but they don’t do anything to fix what they half assed in the first place. Folders = great. Folder limits = sucks. And don’t even get me started on this stupid Newsstand icon folder THING in iOS 5. It’s there on your home screen… looking at you … laughing at you because it doesn’t do a dammed thing and you can’t even shove that never used POS into a folder. Winner: My File Cabinet.

Spotlight:
HAHAHAHA! You only thought you were scrolling back to your first screen. Show of hands – how many of you end up at Spotlight more than you end up back at your first screen? Another show of hands, how many of you are so disorganized with your homescreen layouts that you really need spotlight to help you find an app? How many of you can’t figure out how to use Safari to Google, but somehow managed to figure out using spotlight to search Wikipedia. I get that some of you might like Spotlight. I respect that. But for those of us who hate it with the power of a thousand suns… why Apple won’t let us disable it with a simple checkbox is beyond me. And why does it need a whole page to itself? Why can’t spotlight be a little section of Notification Center or something like a widget in Android? It’s a search bar. It does not require its own little planet. Winner: An actual spotlight – because I can shut it the hell off.

Multitasking:
The iPhone still doesn’t do multitasking. Call it whatever you want, but when a programmer writes code to “freeze” the state of the application and then writes code to “thaw” the application… it ain’t multitasking. It’s pausing the app. I’m not saying I want to have to fully manage memory anymore like we used to, but I also don’t want to have my phone lie to me and make me think an app is still running in the background when it isn’t. There’s APIs that make things like streaming audio stay running, but unless the app tells the OS it needs background services, said app takes a nap and not always does it wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed. Winner: Windows Mobile … that bad boy would run so many apps at the same time the device would crash before it stopped you!

So what are your thoughts? Anything else in iOS that is driving you nuts? Any more tech from 10 years ago that Apple still can’t catch up with?

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