Wednesday, June 23, 2010

iOS

Sorry, not a lot of postings. Yesterday I upgraded my iPhone 3G to iOS 4. I started at 10:30 and it took a while, over three hours. I wouldn't have minded so much if the progress bar under the label "Backing up iPhone" had moved at all past that first "a" in a hour. I thought it was hung, but let it go and it eventually made progress, including three reboots that said "Restoring..." something different each time. I went out for lunch while it was finishing and only wanted my phone 3 times in the hour. If I had it, I would have gotten a picture of that groundhog I saw.

Anyway, it's nice. On the 3G I don't get multi-tasking or wallpapers or bluetooth keyboard support. I'd only use the first one of those anyway. I did get folders and updates to Mail, Calendar, and lots of other things. The folders is very welcome and I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday arranging the 9 or so screens I had into folders. I've only had two apps give me trouble. One was Apple's new Apple Store app which wouldn't start. I deleted it and reinstalled it and it worked fine. The other Pandorabox which I've used at time to find apps on sale in the App Store. It's dead now but they claim they're working on a fix to make it run on iOS 4.

I also found the face dialer I liked, Dial 9, is no longer in the App Store at all. It still works but it's always been slow. It's a nice little app that instead of using a scrolling list of names like in Contacts, lets you pick 9 people per page and shows their pictures (if you have pictures in the Address Book, which of course you do). You click on them and then are given a choice to dial one of their phones numbers, or send a text or email to one of their addresses. I liked it because it's prettier than the Phone Favorites or Contacts and remembers a preferred number for people. Anyway, I found Faces! instead which has a free lite version that supports only two pages but 12 people per page (the paid version supports 14 pages).

Otherwise it doesn't seem much different. I do like being able to show several calendars at once instead of all of them or just one. Threading in email is pretty nice.

Still I look forward to upgrading to an iPhone 4 in a few weeks, after any problems shake out. I want the better screen, camera, faster processor, compass (for star charts), multitasking, and hopefully better phone reception in my house.

6 comments:

paul said...

Upgraded yesterday on the 3GS. So far no problems, and I didn't have the looooong install you and others have reported. The camera is now wicked quick, much better than before, and the digital zoom is nice to have even if the quality is so-so. Tried iBooks as well, looks really good.

Howard said...

I tired iBooks too and it was interesting. I"m not sure I'd want to read a whole book on it, but if I had an iPad it would be great to have my book on both devices with my position sync'ed.

Also, I know some have reported iOS on a 3G being slower. Mine is not. and I watched the video comparison of it being run against an iPhoneOS 3 machine and my times were always the faster of the two.

The Dad said...

Forgot about iBooks, will have to try it out. I didn't experience the long install either, just the 3+ hour download the evening it came out, but I did that overnite anyways. All in all I'm really liking it on the 3GS.

I had something weird happen today though. I went to check my voicemail in the phone app and all of a sudden it was demanding a voicemail password. I've had the phone for over a year and it never asked me that, so naturally I had no idea what it was (after guessing several times). I had to make a call to ATT, and they had to reset my voicemail account. No clue if it was related to iOS4 or a random fluke.

Howard said...

I went through this list but had no issues with any of the items. I see some others have the voicemail password issue.

Howard said...

I noticed that my Gmail settings didn't include the option to show google calendars as some screenshots I've seen show.

I deleted and re-added my gmail account and now it appears. Actually I deactivated my gmail account, added another one and then deleted the old one. Also Google now recommends using the default settings the iPhone gives the account and no longer recommends you fiddle with the advanced settings.

AM said...

Update the 3GS Monday at 1:10 was done by 2:00. I did need to reboot after the update was done for mail to start working.

I got the same message about my voice mail password, but when I entered it in it worked fine. It happened right after I got my first VM after updating.

With regard to Gmail I like the new option on IMAP where it archives instead of deleting the email, but with the exchange connection you get your email pushed.