Apple iOS 5 Review
by Vivek Gowri, Andrew Cunningham, Saumitra Bhagwat & Brian Klug on October 18, 2011 3:05 AM ESTCalendar
The Calendar app in iOS 5 closes the gap between it and more full-featured calendar software like iCal, Google Calendar, and Outlook. Most of these changes apply not just to calendars stored locally on your device, but also to calendars synced with iCloud or with Exchange servers.
Game Center
Introduced in iOS 4.1, Game Center is Apple’s response to Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network, and it features many of the same bullet points: Achievements, friend lists, and the rest.
The additions to the service in iOS 5 are both small and obvious: Users can now set a profile picture, see Achievement point totals across all games played, and get friend recommendations based on your friends’ friends and the types of games you play. You can now also buy games directly from within Game Center, though the recommended games I was shown seemed to have little to do with the games I actually play. You also now get native support for turn-based (or “asynchronous” in game dev lingo) games like Words with Friends, taking responsibility for building those frameworks out of developers’ hands.
Game Center itself features no built-in cloud saving mechanism, but once game developers begin taking advantage of the iCloud APIs, they should be able to support playing a game on one device and being able to pick up where you left off on another.
Newsstand
To promote subscription-based apps from numerous magazines and newspaper publications, iOS 5 consolidates all your subscriptions using Newsstand, a dedicated place for all your subscription-based apps. Apple has also released new APIs for developers that wish to upgrade their apps to enable support for Newsstand.
Newsstand is not really an app. It looks and functions exactly like a folder, but with an iBooks-style wooden background that looks like a newsstand. Popular subscription-based apps like Wired have already been upgraded to show up in Newsstand, and other updates will likely come in the next few weeks. While its not exactly a tremendously useful or groundbreaking feature, it will still help in keeping things organized.
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ddarko - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
"Unfortunately, iTunes Wi-Fi Sync asks that your phone be connected to a power source for the feature to work. This shouldn’t be too hard to grasp considering the massive power drain issues people would have inevitably faced had it not been otherwise."A quick but notable clarification in the review which gives the impression the wi-fi sync function requires a device to be powered to work. It needs to be plugged in to work automatically once a day. However, a device can manually be synced over wi-fi without being plugged in. Go to settings -> general -> iTunes Wi-Fi Sync and hitting the Sync Now button.
darkpaw - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
On the last pic in the find my friends section, you blurred out the account name at the top,. but not where it appears again at the bottom of the screen.teetee1970 - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
You mentioned the newton force etc to take a picture. You can actually take pictures now with the headset using the up volume button. So you could hook up to a tripod etc or set the phone down somewhere and click away as fast as you can press the buttons on the headset. You could probably use a bluetooth up volume button too.Guspaz - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
I've yet to have WiFi sync actually automatically sync my phone when plugging it in for the night. Perhaps iTunes must be left running on the computer, but that kind of defeats the purpose of automatic sync; I'm not going to leave a bloated app like iTunes running 24/7 just in case my iPhone decides to sync.If this is a requirement, WiFi sync will be largely useless for me until they can at least have a service launch iTunes on the PC when the phone wants to sync.
ddarko - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
Yes, iTunes has to be running for the wi-fi sync to initiate automatically. No, the iOS device won't launch and then quit iTunes.One other thing I've noticed is that leaving iTunes running with wi-fi sync enabled is an enormous power drain on the battery on my iPhone 4. I've noticed my fully charged phone will be down to 40% charge by the morning. Of course, if you leave the iPhone plugged in all night, it will still be fully charged in the morning but apparently, there's a lot of power-draining activities going on between iOS device and computer during the night. This is one reason I've decided not to use auto wi-fi sync since I don't want to keep iTunes running and unnecessarily using power overnight. I still like the wi-fi sync option a lot but I manually sync wirelessly and then quit iTunes.
Geigco - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
I was a Palm/WebOS junkie since it came out."A company that executes consistently may not be competitive on day 1, but after a couple years of progressive iteration it may be a different beast entirely." sums up what WebOS failed to do successfully.
ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
Thanks for including results from previous iOS versions to see the evolution in performance as well as the analysis of iPhone 3GS and iPad 1 performance.http://www.barefeats.com/iph4s01.html
I was wondering why GPU benchmarks weren't included? The results at Barefeats show that Apple seems to have much improved GPU drivers in iOS 5 compared to iOS 4.3.5. Devices seem to show around a 25% improvement in GLBenchmark for instance. It would be good if you could validate this result in GLBenchmark and GLview as well as add in the iPhone 3GS which Barefeats is missing.
And do you know how GLBenchmark's online results database reports it's scores? For each device, in the details they seem to list multiple GPU driver and OS versions, which makes me think they are using a running average of submissions. Seeing performance changes with OS version, that would make he GLBenchmark online database very inaccurate. It's great that you are able to run the benchmarks on your own devices so that the results are unambiguous.
MyTechLife2 - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
I haven't seen many comments about the disadvantages of using iMessage. Here's some I've noted:iMessage costs more when not on wi-fi. I pay a flat $6 per phone for everyone in my family to have UNLIMITED SMS/MMS. Or if I use iMessage while away from Wi-Fi, it counts against my LIMITED $15/200MB per phone data plan.
Also, I've found SMS to be more reliable than data service in congested and rural areas. Try posting a Facebook status update or any other data service from a crowded football stadium, vs. using SMS. SMS always wins.
lukarak - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
Most people don't have it like that. But then again, most normal people use Whatsapp. It has really been a revolution for me and my friends.P.S. I have 50 sms free per month, and 1GB of traffic.
repoman27 - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
iMessage packets are very small though. You would have to send on the order of 8000 iMessages per month to use even 1% of your 200MB plan. I'm guessing concerns regarding data plans are also the reason why Apple implements compression for iMessage MMS's when even one client isn't on Wi-Fi.