Not Good
If you enter “Revert back to iOS 5 from iOS 6” into Google you get 938,000 hits, several of which on the front page explain the procedure in detail.
Apparently the newest iPhone operating system has eliminated some features that use Google services like Maps and YouTube, and the replacements are not ready for prime-time. Users are not happy.
I understand why Apple doesn’t want Google benefiting from its products, but a lot of people do depend on Google resources, and this may be a deal-breaker, especially among people in urban areas.
6 comments
I don’t have to worry about that since I retired my two-year-old iPhone 4 in favor of a Samsung Galaxy S3 :twisted:. Android IMHO is finally ready for prime time. It wasn’t ready two years ago when I bought the iPhone 4, but it decidedly has hit critical mass today, and the Galaxy S3’s is better than any iPhone ever created. Just the fact that you can remove the battery and swap it with a spare — in a phone that’s *still* lighter and thinner than any iPhone ever while having a bigger screen than even the iPhone 5 — is a major plus. The ability to put a 64gb micro-SD card in the micro-SD slot is almost gravy on top of that.
Now if Microsoft could only get their act together and create a release of Windows that was worth using. Windows 8 ain’t it — Windows 8 is a forlorn mess (yes, I’ve tried out Windows 8 thanks to MSDN, yes, our software runs on the “classic” mode of Windows 8, no, I have absolutely no desire to use Windows 8 on a daily basis because it is a kludge on top of a kludge).
Two of my neighbors work at a cell phone repair shop. They make a mint servicing iPhones. They love the design of the on-off switch – a metal dome with a plastic bead in the center. It is their top-selling repair because if you press the button at an angle the bead breaks off.
The device has a lot of nice design components, but the package is less than the sum of the parts. There were too many last minute tweaks that have created major problems, and too little real-world testing before release.
Oh, that will be Windows 9. With M$ it’s every other version that is worth upgrading to and then, only after Service Pack 1 has been released.
I only use my cellphone to make actual voice calls, although it has a browser and texting capabilities.
My first smartphone was a Palm Treo, which replaced my old Palm Pilot and eliminated one of the things I had to carry to organize my life. I still use my smartphone for pretty much the same stuff as back then — TODO lists, calendar, contacts, notes, email — but with the addition of stuff allowed only because of the massive amount of memory and horsepower that today’s phones have — specifically, GPS and pretty much every worthwhile song in my music collection (roughly a week’s worth of songs). So when I travel I don’t need to carry a GPS, I don’t need to carry a music player, I don’t need to carry a stand-alone phone, I just have one thing to carry, one thing to plug into my car stereo. When the GPS program talks to me, it mutes the music. When the phone rings, it mutes the music. That kind of integration can’t happen with stand-alone gadgets.
All the other stuff the phone will do is sort of gravy on top of that meat and potatoes — nice to have, but not why I have it. The above, however, is the holy grail I was yearning for from the moment I first turned on my first Palm Treo — one box that organizes my life, gets me where I’m going, lets me answer my phone calls, and also plays my music (music being important to me, as you might expect from my blog).
Mine [LG800G] can do the music and has a camera, but I only need it for the phone because I have other gadgets that are better, and I don’t have to travel like I did in SoCal. A smart phone would have been great back then, but they came out well after I really needed them.
I can see your point, and it makes sense for you. It’s nice to have a choice because no one solution works for everyone.
Yah, my life is a bit complicated right now (especially since I’m about to start house-hunting again now that I’ve identified a place that can serve in retirement).
BTW, you laugh at the camera. But I’ve found a good use for the camera on my smartphone: Taking movies and photos of Linux kernel panics. As I’m sure you’re aware, Linux kernel panics can be devilish to debug if you’re in front of a box with no network connections for IPMI console and no serial port for KDB over serial. Yesterday, for example, there was a system being manufactured that crashed consistently during system boot, and I was called in to see if it was the new release of the software causing the problem. After taking video of two totally different crashes, one during SAS bus reset and one where the init process died in midstream, and slowly walking through the video of the crashes as they happened, I shook my head and said “Hardware.” Because I know where (and why) the new release crashes, and those two places ain’t it :). (The latest Linux kernels are just *full* of races in the block layer where, if something loses the race, you get a kernel oops as something being deallocated attempts to access something else that’s already been deallocated… who in the world schedules a block device drain tasklet on disk device deallocate where the next step in the process of tearing down a disk drive is going to be to deallocate the block device queue that the tasklet needs in order to drain the device? Madness!).
Yeah, I can see the need for GPS. if you are house-hunting in California. They have such interesting ‘standards’ for street names and numbers, especially if there are any freeways involved.
I don’t laugh at the camera, but the one in my phone isn’t very good. It wouldn’t produce readable screen shots, which is what you can do with yours. That would be very useful. My camera will do HD video, but it is much larger than a phone, and not usually carried.
That’s like multithreading a landing sequence for a drone and not understanding that you need to be sure the vehicle in on the ground before you turn off the engine. [Not that anyone would ever do that… really… trust me… ]
It works for you, so you need it.