My iOS 7 Experience So Far

The Good
At first sight, this new iOS looked very colourful, cheerful and the word cartoonish came to mind but after meddling a bit with it, I found that the user experience had improved such as the Control Centre that slides up from the bottom. Easy access to turning on/off things such as wifi, Bluetooth, Do Not Disturb and brightness control. What I hoped to find there is the ability to enable/disable mobile (or cellular if you are at that part of the world) data and GPS which eat up more battery than wifi and Bluetooth.

I did discover that Siri had improved a lot, recognised my speech and could turn off mobile data (and a slew of others)! Nice! I think I might just start to use it.

I've been using Google Chrome a lot for browsing lately and was not really impressed with what I've read about the new mobile Safari until I used it. What I liked about Chrome were its unified search and address bar and switching between tabs by swiping left or right. iOS 7's Safari has the unified bar, a cool screen to switch between tabs (not on the iPad, though) AND by swiping left or right, you can go back or forward of your history! Wow!

All the new transparency effects make the new UI look modern and that is certainly most welcome. The current flat design (that's what everyone calls it at a time when cinemas and TVs are all promoting 3D) sure looks fresh compared to the older skeuomorphic design though I'm a little horrified that a lot of apps are going flat, too. Gasp!

Multitasking seems to be up a level with Apple opening up for background app refresh though I've yet to notice that happening despite one of my favourite Pocket claiming it does.

The "I Don't Care"

The parallax effect is so subtle that it didn't matter if it existed or not. Nice to check out the first few times and after the third day, I didn't bother with it. I read that Flipboard is using that effect for some thing, so I've got to try that out, though.

The dynamic moving bubble bokeh wallpapers looked nice but besides moving when titling the screen, they were mere display that it's not possible for animated wallpapers. Developers come out with some cooler ones already!

The multitasking "bar" looks good now that it displays the screen since the last use together with the app's icon and you could close the app by swiping up. Well, it looks cool, but I don't really care, actually. Besides that, on the iPad, swiping up with four fingers would normally reveal the row of icons at the bottom but now it would open up to the whole multitasking "bar" which I felt had some continuity problem.

The Bad

Since updating to iOS 7, I've "successfully" got it to hang a few times:

1. Twice while messing around Settings.

2. After a call, the screen froze and rebooted.

3. Can't remember what happened.

Occasionally, scrolling on the iPhone 5 was no longer as smooth as it used to be. That's not very nice and I suppose iOS 8 would make the phone so slow that I'd need an iPhone 6. Oooh, I like that. XD

The Notification Centre now has three tabs - Today, All and Missed. I get "Today" and I get "Missed" but I don't get "All". I'm still puzzled because it only has notifications. I thought "All" would mean everything. I guess I must have misunderstood. Also, to clear a notification, I've still got to touch on the "X" rather than do a swiping motion. Not so nice.

The new folders have only 9 icons when open and since they can have multiple pages, it could take awhile to find some apps from the same category. I have lots of photo apps and games so these two proved to be the most problematic so I had to rearrange the more commonly used ones on the first page or make another folder for the least used ones.

Wrapping up this post, I love the new ringtones and tones but they (ringtones, especially) are too soft and could not replace the "Old Phone" ringtone that I've been using... even that sounds softer after the update.

Generally, I'm loving the new update because the whole experience is great and I could live with the "I Don't Care" and "Bad" ones, too.