iOS 7 review

IOS7 review    

Apple  deserves more credit than anyone for the way our smartphones look and work, but six years after our first glimpse of the iPhone a lot has changed.
Google continued to design and re-design Android; Windows Phone introduced a colorful, vibrant operating system; yet iOS stood mostly still. Until this June, that is, when CEO Tim Cook announced Apple had been working on “the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of the iPhone.”

That change is iOS 7, a complete aesthetic overhaul of the interface millions of iPhone owners have known for years. From the moment you turn on an iPhone running iOS 7 through nearly every interaction you have with it, it’s different. This free update changes every menu, every option, every app. Even Siri has become an entirely new person, with new thoughts and a new voice.

But for all the sweeping statements and pervasive changes, when we first saw iOS 7 it felt like change for change’s sake — a fresh coat of paint on the same old house. So what is iOS 7? Is it a new idea for a new era of smartphone users? Or is it a veneer of innovation on top of a familiar foundation?

The key conceit of iOS 7 is simple: you already know how to use a smartphone. Where previous versions offered explicit visual guidance at every turn — this looks like a Rolodex, so it must be my contacts! — iOS 7 assumes you know to click on "Inbox" to go back to your inbox, or that you swipe from left to right to open your phone. You know how to use an iPhone, Apple seems to be saying, so we’ll just get out of your way.

Except iOS 7 doesn’t get out of the way — not quite. Skeumorphs and guidepost icons have been replaced mostly by bombastic animations, which tell you both what to do and what’s happening. On the lock screen, light glides left to right across the words "Slide to unlock," hinting at the direction you should be swiping, in case the arrow pointing to the right wasn’t hint enough. When you tap to open an app, it appears to open from within its icon, expanding to fill the screen; when you close it, it disappears back into its icon once again. The animations are fun, but annoyingly slow — waiting a half-second for every app to open like a beautiful flower doesn’t feel good to me. It feels like lag.

I mostly like the look, with its white backgrounds unencumbered by borders or chrome. Every screen looks bigger and richer without black borders and big overlays. A light Helvetica Neue is everywhere, and it’s understated and handsome even if it’s a little hard to read on the iPad mini’s lower-res screen. The one huge aesthetic problem is Apple’s new app icons. They’re a devastating mix of ugly — the four colored bubbles of Game Center, the generic magazines in Newsstand, the too-big Messages speech bubble — and inscrutable, like the color pinwheel and the oven burner that supposedly represent Photos and Settings.

These odd, gradient-rich icons come on a bright, airy wallpaper, and the combination comes off toylike and childish. The parallax wallpapers are cool, giving your phone a deep and dynamic home screen that appears to move around as you look at it. But if you simply change your wallpaper and move your icons around a bit, the effect isn’t nearly so intense. My home screen looks like it always has, just with slightly flatter colors and gray folders instead of black. And it moves a little.

Where there used to be big, gray icons, now there are only letters. Nearly every clickable item is just a word, which can get really confusing if you don’t know your way around. There’s little guidance, only feedback; the only thing the new version tells you about itself at first run is that you launch Spotlight search by swiping down from anywhere on the home screen. For everything else, you just have to tap on something blue and hope it works. iOS 7 isn’t harder to use, just less obvious. That’s a momentous change: iOS used to be so obvious.

TAKING PICTURES IS EASIER, FASTER, AND BETTER

Just about every app has been improved, but with the exception of the camera and possibly Safari, none are yet good enough to make me switch away from the likes of Fantastical, Simplenote, and Mailbox.

From a performance standpoint, there’s little to report. There are some definite bugs on the iPad with iOS 7, which is clearly well behind the iPhone in the development cycle, but even those are mostly minor. I’ve seen no worsening in battery life on any of the recent devices I've tested, only the occasional stutter and lag, and generally really solid, stable performance.

IOS 7 COULD 

Apple’s on a mission to convince buyers that it’s still relevant, still innovative, still interesting. iOS 7 is full of big, sweeping changes to that effect, and there’s real power in making something look fresh and bright, but in the end the new visuals don’t offer much change under the surface. Not yet, anyway.

There are plenty of APIs and tools in iOS 7 that might make it easier for developers to build beautiful new apps that offer remarkable functionality and tie into the interesting new parts of the OS. But Apple needs to help. The Today screen could eventually be a fantastic Google Now-like experience, with all the information you need quickly, but only if developers can access it. Siri could get better and better, and ultimately let you do everything on your phone with your voice, but only if Siri learns what Evernote is and how she can search it for me. There is finally a more robust sharing menu, but it’s woefully underpopulated. Apple needs developer support, yes, but it’ll get that; what I don’t know is whether Apple will open its doors and give developers access to its best, most integrated features, rather than deciding for its users which three places we want to search or send our photos.

Today, as it rolls out to users everywhere, iOS 7 is still on most levels the same operating system it’s been for six years. Meanwhile Android has become a fun, efficient, flowing operating system that makes it easy to move data between apps, easy to share things, and easy to see only the information you need at the moment. Where iOS 7 still feels like jumping in and out of a series of apps, the best moments of using Android make it feel like a cohesive, unified platform. There’s no question iOS 7 has the foundational strength to match that experience, but Apple has to throw open the doors and let its huge ecosystem build on that potential.

iOS has always been an excellent operating system, and iOS 7 remains an excellent operating system. But if Apple’s goal was to match the power and flexibility of its rivals, iOS 7 feels very much like the beginning of a project rather than its conclusion.

its a Official Folks geek Review