iOS 4.3 Review
by Andrew Cunningham on March 9, 2011 11:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- iPad
- iOS 4
- iPhone 4
- iPod Touch
- iPad 2
- Mobile
Those are probably the biggest functional changes, but there are some smaller things of note, most of which are best demonstrated with screenshots.
A few of the more user-facing: a new Noteworthy font in Notes app joins Helvetica and Marker Felt:
The Location Services menu has been moved to the top level of the Settings menu, giving you access to all of your Location Services-enabled apps:
The iPad’s switch, turned into a mute button in iOS 4.2, can once again be used as an orientation lock.
If you set the switch to work as an orientation lock, you can now find a mute button in the multitasking bar where the software orientation lock used to live:
And, of course, there’s a slew of even smaller changes: users can now delete an app which is currently downloading instead of having to wait until it finishes downloading, the iPhone now vibrates twice for text messages, and there are plenty of bugfixes that you can read about in the release notes.
Still MIA is an improved implementation of the AirPrint feature, introduced in iOS 4.2, which was originally intended to allow iOS users to print to any printer shared via iTunes by a PC or Mac. This feature was scaled back at the eleventh hour to support only direct printing to a handful of mostly-new printers built to support the feature. Workarounds exist to get it working with any printer, but official support for any ol’ printer has never materialized, and Apple has never offered much of an explanation.
Developers and/or tinkerers can also use XCode to unlock some iPad touch gestures that may be candidates for inclusion in the next iOS. These gestures use four or five finger swipes to reduce the number of times you have to quit what you’re doing to poke at the Home button: you can pinch to get to the home screen, you can swipe upward to see the multitasking bar, and you can swipe left or right to navigate between open apps.
Buried or not, these gestures could tell us something about possibilities for iOS 5: These functions look to enhance the existing iOS multitasking experience, but not necessarily to replace it with something else. It’s possible that Apple will look at Android and make some UI changes based on what Honeycomb does well, but if these gestures can be taken as an indication of things to come, we may not see any iOS UI overhauls when iOS 5 is unveiled later this year.
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tipoo - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
Yeah...Still sucks though, considering the 8GB Touch they were selling last year was 2'nd gen hardware, thats an awfully quick end of support.PrinceGaz - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
I would have thought that iTunes Streaming would be the most useful feature for 8GB 2nd gen iTouch users (like myself). Having only 8GB of space (in practice less than 7GB) onboard for all your music, video, and of course apps means being able to stream music and especially videos/movies from home when in wifi coverage would be a great addition, and one which would certainly be well within the capability of the hardware (it can already stream videos from YouTube, BBC iPlayer, etc).vol7ron - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
Just upgraded... don't really see a difference, except Safari was like "can't open this page" - is that how it's supposed to be faster?bplewis24 - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
It's opening the page so fast, your eyes aren't able to process the render... so you only see the subliminal image by default.Brandon
tipoo - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
Its just saving you from porn by not showing any of the web. Its a feature!sprockkets - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
"Sorry, iPhone 3GS users, but this feature won’t be available for you."Officially, lol.
"Still MIA is an improved implementation of the AirPrint feature, introduced in iOS 4.2, which was originally intended to allow iOS users to print to any printer shared via iTunes by a PC or Mac. This feature was scaled back at the eleventh hour to support only direct printing to a handful of mostly-new printers built to support the feature. Workarounds exist to get it working with any printer, but official support for any ol’ printer has never materialized, and Apple has never offered much of an explanation."
One apple nutcase thought it is because HP has the methods of doing so all patented.
kigoi - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
those sunspider results for the 4.3 iphones are both off their typical scores by about 15%. do they have background processes running?Azsen - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
Have the provided a function to close down all the open apps at once? It's so slow having to do it one by one.MobiusStrip - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
Have they provided an option to close apps when you "close" them under Mac OS? Nope.Apple has some kind of stick up its ass about quitting things. They love to see resources wasted. Never mind the fact that the user manually launched the app, so he should be able to manually quit it just as easily. Otherwise, why not launch every app on the system at startup?
More Apple hypocrisy.
Vadatajs - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
What the hell does that have to do with anything? This isn't about OSX.Furthermore, Mac OS has always closed applications when you _quit_ them.