The iOS 7 review
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
But I wouldn't say Apple "reeks" of insecurity... We don't really have any knowledge about how much they have up their sleeves, and they've had a long time over the last half-decade to lay foundations for future maneuvers. Besides, if they can convince the everyman that they thought up modern design all by themselves, they could gain a massive advantage here.
I think Apple is trying to capture low-end market using iPhone 5c (well... China), yet the production is not efficient enough to make it significantly cheaper. It's also a failure because Apple consumers are not that price sensitive. In addition to gold version of iPhone 5s (for the vain), and flat UI I upgraded last night, if their only innovation is finger print scanner, I'm not impressed at all at Apple this year.
Apple are definitely playing catch up on the software design front, but signs are that they're heading in the right direction. iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 will be interesting to watch, to see what the Apple's design team can manage with a little more breathing room in which to work.
But instead Apple chose to price it the same as the previous iPhone 5 and expand their margins.
The 5C is built cheap. It has old, high-yield silicon, a plastic case, and a small screen. It is almost certainly cheaper to manufacture than, for instance, a Nexus 4 (which, as much as Apple wants to criticize "junk", is one hell of a well built device for $199, no contract). Where Apple needs to compete with cheap I have every belief that they will do what is necessary with the pricing of the 5C.
The 5c has the same size screen as every other Apple phone.
The 5C is built cheap as a facet of its entire construction, one part of which is the screen. Your screeds about other devices is utterly and entirely irrelevant, and is your own hangup.
All that to say, for all intensive purposes, iOS 7 will be the mainstream's introduction to flat UI elements. My guess is that Samsung will actually drag Android kicking and screaming further into iOS 7's "flat 3-d" model than Matthias Duarte would like.
All they need to do is somehow figure out how to add web search to Spotlight, use the exact same UI and Google's in big trouble.
Right now I have absolutely no idea how much I like or dislike the new design. I've been able to do everything (very few things so far to be fair) I wanted to do, and encountered some small frustrations and nice surprises. I'll see how I feel in a week or two.
How long have you been using iOS 7 for?
IMHO a fundamental, ground-up revision of the UI was inevitable and indeed widely expected the moment Johnny Ive was put charge of UI design. I can't see him even considering taking on that job without making sure he had as much authority over that revision as he would ever need.
Also: Helvetica Neue? What were they thinking?
I continue to feel it's not an overall positive - glitchy, stuttery and slow animations, degraded battery life, UI inconsistencies, touch lag and inaccuracies ( never thought I would say that about iOS ) are all significant downsides for what is essentially a paint job and a one that I happen to not like very much.
But then maybe it works better on newer hardware. This would be the second time in Apple's update history that older devices got a poor update experience.
Curious what new features people like enough to offset the downsides.
i have iOS 7 on an iPhone 5, iPad 2, iPad 3 and iPad mini. no touch lag, "slow animation" or "inaccuracies" so far.
I suspect it has something to do with auto correct/spell check but I haven't tested anything yet.
It's a pita, but it helped me in this situation.
So it was with interest that I observed my wife and MIL's reactions to the upgrade on their iPads, which was really no big deal at all.
A cogent reminder to me that there's a vast difference between us and them.
I think they are both less than ideal for this reason, because it is no longer obvious what is a button and what is not.
But it's pretty.
It's really obvious on Windows Phone what is a button and what is not apart from a few shitty 3rd party apps. This is regurgitating one of the many fables about WP.
Thanks for being rational - you are spot on.
And Microsoft deserves some credit for developing their own design language and UX ideas with Metro.
I have two Windows Phone 8 devices and an iPad. And indeed, they are nothing alike. Live tiles are a central concept in WP and does not really have an equivalent in iOS 7.
Another use difference (although it's a bit undermined by Microsoft's Facebook app) is that iOS is app centered ("There's an app for that."), while Windows Phone centers around hubs. E.g. you wouldn't go to the Facebook app to look up e.g. the latest Facebook status updates for a person. You go to that person in the people list (or that person's live tile) where you have information of different social networks integrated.
WP8 and iOS7 are about as different as you could possibly get.
http://www.droid-life.com/2013/06/10/ios7-vs-android-a-quick...
This is what annoyed me a lot about WP7, too. Long "cool" animations that slow you down with each action you perfor, get boring very quickly, and eventually become frustrating.
On my Android phone, I've even set the animations to be faster than they normally are, precisely because I want stuff to be done fast, not watch a 1-second long animation each time I tap on the screen.