Earlier today I upgraded my iPhone 4S and iPad mini to iOS 7, and here’s my review about Apple’s latest mobile operating system.
First, the download process. As expected from downloading iOS major upgrade at the first few hours of availability, it was not easy. I got few times failed download, then finally completes the download. Once the download is done, the new OS is installed without any problem.
If you haven’t upgraded to this new version, please don’t forget to BACKUP first before upgrading.
The overall design
One thing you will notice right after installing iOS 7 is that this upgrade looks visually different. Real different from all the previous versions of iOS. The icon design are flat, all Apple built-in apps are completely redesigned. Personally, I don’t really care much about the design change. I like the old design, but this new “flat-themed” design is also acceptable. So, no fuss in this area.
Folders
In iOS 6 we can only put maximum 12 apps in a folder. This was always one of my problem in categorizing apps. iOS 7 brings the capability of putting PLENTY of apps inside a folder. Love it !
Notification Center
We get improved Notification Center in iOS 7, with three main sections: Today, All and Missed. There are some settings we can choose from Settings app. Basically we can choose to display Today Summary, Calendar (today), Reminders, Stocks and Tomorrow Summary. Just like iOS 6, we can also choose what kind of notification will be displayed for each app. I rarely use Notification Center, so I consider this a nice extra. Some people might find it useful and appreciate it more.
Control Center
I don’t need to enter Settings app to toggle few basic settings. Swiping up from any screen will bring up Control Center. We can quickly toggle Airplane mode on/off, Wifi connection on/off, Bluetooth on/off, Do Not Disturb mode on/off and Orientation Lock on/off. We can also quickly access camera, calculator and clock app. We can control our music from the panel, including seek bar and volume. We can adjust display brightness or choose AirPlay output device. We can use AirDrop to quickly exchange files between supported devices. And finally, we get flashlight button ! (lol) Really love this Control Conter. This is one overdue feature that should exist in iOS long ago.
AirDrop
This new feature is borrowed from Mac OSX, making it easy for iOS users to exchange file. Just access it from Control Center and you are ready to send or receive files. As far as I know, this feature might not be available for some older devices. I suggest to turn off this feature and only turn it on when you want to use it to save battery.
Messages
Messages get a new look in iOS 7. The functionality is basically the same. But now we can check the time stamp of every message we sent (or received) by swiping our finger to the left when opening a conversation. Just a minor change, and I’m not sure if I will ever use it or not.
Apart from getting new look, there are minor changes on Mail app. One, in email list screen, swiping our finger to the left will show to options: More and Trash. Previously we only have Delete (or Archive) option. Now with the More option, we can choose Reply, Forward, Flag, Mark as Unread, Move to Junk and Move Message. List of Mailboxes can be rearranged now, any sequence we like. We can also choose to display flagged or unread mails only, display only emails that our address is in the To or Cc, or display only mails with attachments. Nice improvement.
Calendar
Calendar app is getting a new look and new navigation structure. I personally like the new navigation. Easier to move around. And we can see yearly calendar, too.
Reminders
Reminders app now looks like a pile of cards. Frankly, I don’t like this new look, it’s harder to navigate for people with lots of Reminder lists like myself. I much prefer the old style.
Camera
Camera app now has new look and some new options. The complete new features are Slo-Mo, normal video, normal photo, square photo and panorama photo. Different iOS device might get different sets of these features though. There are 8 Instagram-like filters to make our photos look different. I personally always want my photos to be as natural as possible without any filter, but, well, Instagram is popular, so there must be a lot of people out there who likes photo filter.
Photos
Photos app receives the new “Moments” feature. iPhone will automatically display our photos according to time and location we took it, making a dynamic album called Moments. If iPhone is your primary camera with your main photo collection stored in your iPhone, then this feature might be useful. I always downloaded my iPhone photos to my desktop computers, so this feature is not really for me.
The Shared view takes online collaboration using shared photos one step further. Since iOS 6 we can share photo albums with colleagues and we can comment on the photos, making it a good tool to discuss something with colleagues at different locations. The new Shared view in Photos app makes it easier for us to read and access those comments. Don’t worry, the old-style view of Camera Roll and My Photo Stream is still there.
Clock
Clock app now has icon that moves, actually showing the current time. This makes it the second iPhone app to have dynamic icon (after Calendar).
AppStore
Genius for apps from iOS 6 is gone, replaced by Near Me. It will display apps that are popular to people near my location. Will it be useful? Time will tell. For now, I’m not excited about it. A more useful feature is automatic app updates. To turn it on, go to Settings > iTunes & App Store then scroll down to Automatic Downloads section, turn on the switch for Updates. This is very useful. If you don’t want this feature to suddenly eat up your data allowance, you might want to make sure it will only work when you have WiFi.
Other Built-In Apps from Apple
Other apps are essentially the same with iOS 6 versions. Just new flat theme. Siri learns new tricks like searching for tweets or we can finally teach her how to pronounce our name correctly. Compass app gets a new feature: bubble compass to measure whether a surface is level or not. And… one honorable mention: Newsstand app can now be dragged into a folder !
Spotlight Search
The search box now moves to the top of our home screen, just swipe down from any home screen to make it appear.
Cellular Data Monitoring
Previously, we had no idea how much data is actually used by our apps when we use 3G/4G (no WiFi). Go to Settings > Cellular then scroll down, you will see a list of apps, their cellular data usage and on/off switch. An app will appear there only after they use at least 1kb of cellular data. Sometimes, an app is using data massively without we realize it, and suddenly we run out of monthly data allowance. iOS 7 allow us to control cellular data usage for each app. We can check how much data they actually use, and can choose to prevent some apps to use cellular data at all. This is a power user feature and I love it, very useful in controlling our data usage. However, ordinary users might not even bother with this.
Background App Refresh
Some apps can continuously update their data in background, even when we’re not using our phones. For some apps, this might be the correct behavior that we expect. But some other apps might do this without we realize, and we can turn it off by going to Settings > General > Background App Refresh. For example, I don’t really care with stock prices, so there is no point of me allowing Stock app to continuously update its data in background. By turning off unnecessary background refresh for some apps, we could save considerable amount of battery life. Love this feature, and if you think your iPhone battery drains too fast after upgrading to iOS 7, this is one of the settings you should be looking at.
Multitasking
Just like in iOs 6, multitasking view is triggered by double-pressing home button. This screen gets a new design now, allowing us not only seeing the icons of multitask-ed apps, but also the last screen of those apps. Closing an app uses different gesture. We can’t long press an icon there then using the small x to close an app. In iOS 7, we touch the screen of an app and swipe it up to make the app “disappears”. I like this new gesture, faster for me to close a lot of apps.
Lock Screen
The redesigned lock screen in iOS 7 will allow us to swipe down Notification Center and swipe up Control Center. If you don’t want this behavior, you can turn them off. Basically, we no longer swipe a horizontal slider to unlock, we swipe the entire screen to reveal the PIN screen. The camera shortcut is still there at the bottom right corner.
Parallax Wallpaper
iOS 7 can serve us moving wallpapers. The moving wallpaper is not just some animated image. It’s moves based on our movements. It looks cool and nice to play around for a while. But after the excitement is off, I turned this off to save battery life from unnecessary animation.
Since iOS 7 is designed with parallax effect in mind, even our “normal” wallpaper will get “parallax-ed”. My “old” custom wallpaper is displayed weirdly by iOS7, the text I put in the wallpaper image is cut. If you want to use normal wallpaper, want to keep parallax effect but want to display exactly what you want (without text getting cut or someone’s head is partially disappear at the corner), there’s a trick for that.
If given a “normal” wallpaper, iOS 7 will zoom the wallpaper a bit and only display the center area of the original image. It does this to have some “extra” images outside the screen to display when we tilt our phone. This is solvable, but you need a bit of Photoshop (or any photo editing) skill to do it. Basically you need to create a new picture, add 20% width and height from your original screen resolution. Say the original width is W and the original height is H. The new wallpaper should have 1.2*W x 1.2*H. Now make sure that your “main content” of the picture (the area you don’t want to get cut) stays inside the inner area of the image. The inner area is a centered area of W x H pixels inside your 1.2*W x 1.2*H new image.
Or you can opt to turn off parallax effect completely from Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion and turn it on.
Frequent Locations Tracking
iOS 7 can learn places we frequently visit in order to provide useful location-related information. I found this a bit creepy and decided to turn it off from Settings > Privacy > System Services > Frequent Locations. It’s up to you if you want to try this feature or not.
Number Blocking
Have annoying caller who keep on calling or texting you? iOS 7 allow us to block people from calling us (voice call or FaceTime) or from sending us message. Just go to Settings app, then choose the settings of each app (Phone, Messages and FaceTime), scroll down and you can define our own Blocked list there.
Other useful tips
If you don’t want apps to serve you with targeted ads, you might want to turn on Limit Ad Tracking switch from Settings > Privacy > Advertising.
This is actually an old tip from iOS 6, but still worth mentioning here. Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services and turn off the switches there for apps you don’t want them to have access to location. Scroll down to the last item and you will find System Services, go to that option. I usually turn off everything except Call Network Search, Compass Calibration and WiFi Networking.
Glitches I found
No OS is perfect, and I also found few glitches during my first few hours of using iOS 7. First, the setting of iMessage and FaceTime is not done properly. People can reach me when they send iMessage to my email address, but they can’t reach me when they send it to my mobile number. To “re-link” iMessage (and FaceTime) with our mobile number again, we need to go to Settings app, disable iMessage (and FaceTime) wait for a while then re-enable them. I need to repeat this process few times before finally succeeded, perhaps iCloud server is currently overloaded with everyone downloading iOS 7.
Another glitch is that sometimes the upper bar (the one with our operator name, signal strength, clock and battery indicator) sometimes fail to appear at home screen. When it happened and I opened an app, the bar showed up normally inside the app, but when I returned back to home screen it disappeared again. I’m sure this bug will get fixed in future updates.
Conclusion
Overall, my experience with iOS 7 is a love-and-hate relationship. There are new features that I love, but there are also features I don’t like. Some features require different habits and some people might struggle with the learning curve. People can love it or hate it, I choose to get used to it.
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