What I like (and not) in iOS 7 beta (2) - Smart Phone

A Smart Phone should be smarter than a phone.

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Lock screen with default wallpaper.

Let’s start again from the lock screen with default dynamic wallpaper. And here’s my friend Leen’s question (while seeing the bottom arrow):

Shall I slide UPWARDS to unlock? That’s what I understand, but I don’t get the unlock I get a bunch of buttons.

The moving shine on the text is not so powerful as an obvious arrow, and you can’t expect everyone to:

1. have experience with iOS [old]
2. use a custom wallpaper which blurs the arrow like I do, especially when your default wallpaper is not like that

Control Center

So let’s see this bunch of buttons, and sliders.

In general, I like the feeling of “quick settings”. It feels intimate, direct, and just quick to do settings. (I don’t need to go inside a turbine for that.) But obviously you cannot set everything quickly of such an advanced system, and if you insist, that Control Center would be crazy.

What’s the difference between quick settings and crazy settings then?

The best button I like on the top is the moon button. I set “Do Not Disturb” every night. But the others I don’t really change often.

• Airplane Mode: I fly each a couple of months so, a switch right on top of Settings is fine.
• Wifi? I only turn it off when I think it’s not working and want to “restart” it, which is luckily rare.
• Bluetooth: It’s almost dead in my iPhone. But now I wish I could use it, because of AirDrop.
• Orientation Lock: It’s set once and never changed again.
• 3G/4G? Sadly it’s not here, although I may turn it On/Off multiple times a day. (I don’t have so much battery for 3G all-day.)
• Brightness: I set it…twice after I got my iPhone maybe.
• Music: But the progress? I don’t even care about the progress. If I occasionally want to fast forward, it’s worth to open the app.
• Air Play: Good. It’s not only a shortcut, it feels like the right place where it should be. (Again, I wish I could use AirDrop.)
• Light: So sweet, and finally, I don’t need to open an APP to do that. It shouldn’t be heavier than a “system plug-in”.
• Clock (or is it a timer but it just goes to a clock?): I use it everyday but I’m still used to open the app on home screen, that’s really fine. (Maybe I can be changed I’ll see.)
• Calculator: I rarely use it so, skip.
• Camera: I can already reach it from the lock screen, and home screen, wouldn’t it be a duplicate here? (And a duplicate taking some valuable space doesn’t make me feel comfortable.)

All-in-all: It’s pretty busy (16 elements in total), and 7 are useful for me (moon button, music controls, Air Play, and light), 9 not, 1 I wish but not here. (Sorry for so many bullets above.)

I do believe which shortcut is useful varies from person to person. But that’s not the reason to put a lot there (and miss something). And the number of controls should be handful. (Now it’s already beyond that for me.)

So this must be the difference between quick settings and crazy settings: useful and handful. What I’d love would be like Music app: there’re a handful spots, where you can add your shortcuts.

Phone Call

Leen calling me.

This guy called me when I was rushing in subway yesterday. And I got nervous with the left screen, because it’s even easier to not answer it (even more with the right screen!) and thus I had to put my attention answering this phone!

How to answer a phone?

How to answer a phone.

Right? That’s how you do it, it costs very little attention. But if an advanced device does the same tiny thing costing me much more attention, you know what, Nokia just released a pretty simple phone.

Messages

Messages with Nick, and swiping back to the list.

Messages look a little bit less than fine, because of the gradient.

It works good though. Apple adopted the advancement that a lot smart apps made on navigation, and applied it not only to Messages but also to all the whole-screen navigations. (Developers get that functionality from UINavigationView for free now.) It’s simple and intuitive, and just because of that I like it a lot.

Smart, Phone

This is what I wish:

A phone does basic works better and better, saves human more and more energy from those basic works, does some small extra things as long as it can, and takes care of itself well. This is smart enough to be called a Smart Phone.

To be continued…