Siri

Expectation: This is an iOS 6 issue, but I expected to use Siri on a near-daily basis.

Reality: I use Siri on a near-daily basis. With iOS 6 she got better, and I frequently have a desire to send and receive texts while operating a motor vehicle. Looking at the phone and typing while doing this, I’ve heard, is frowned upon. So I use Siri instead. For the most part, she does a decent job. I’ve learned the hard way to keep my messages short. I don’t really use Siri to create Reminders, move calendar events, and the like. I do, however, use her to check on when the Red Sox are playing and what the score is.

What I’d like to see improved: I don’t like her all-or-nothing option to change a text message. I’d love to be able to tell her to replace a word. Often, in a multi-sentence text she’ll get it correct, except for that one word that’s crucial to understanding the meaning of the message.

The camera

Expectation: I expected that the iPhone 5 would continue to replace my point-and-shoot camera.

Reality: Even with the purple haze problem, the iPhone 5 has indeed solved my needs for a point-and-shoot camera.

What I’d like to see improved: Maybe a little better image focus and stabilization. If I’m shooting a picture of a handheld object and my hands are slightly shaking, I’ve noticed the iPhone auto-focus is tad sensitive. I imagine the camera on the iPhone 5S (or whatever the next-generation iPhone is called) will be better in ways I won’t be able to detect, but I think the iPhone 5 camera is good as is.

The screen

Expectation: It would be really different than the iPhone 4S screen.

Reality: Well, it’s certainly taller.  The extra row of icons is helpful. With the previous screen size, I always had apps I use frequently sitting on the second screen. Now, all the apps I use often are one screen. Apps like Twitter, Facebook, Notes, and Evernote feel more comfortable with the taller screen. The Kindle and iBooks apps feel like I’m reading from a weird legal size paper. Other apps seem to think the extra real estate is perfect for showing me more ads — I’m looking at you, The Weather Channel.

I was hoping I would use Pages more, but it still doesn’t seem to adapt well to the large screen. In fairness, this complaint may be me moving the goal posts since even on my Nexus 7 I’m not doing any writing. Nor do I feel my life is really missing an iPad mini, either.

What I’d like to see improved: I agree with Andy Ihnatko’s take on the Samsung Galaxy S3 screen. I frequently keep my iPhone in a car mount where it sits right in that hard-to-see range for my old guy eyes. I want to see Apple release a larger screen. There are few things that tempt me towards Android phones, and the screen size is always the demon on my shoulder.

My workflow

Expectation: The iPhone would continue to be command central for my life.

Reality: It still remained command central, but my iPad usage for non-leisure activities increased. This isn’t an indictment against the iPhone per se, and it likely has more to do with buying an iPad with cellular connectivity this time around, along with a keyboard case. However, the majority of my communications, note-taking and task management functions have been on the iPhone 5. What was previously an 80-20 split is now about a 70-30 split. For long-form writing away from my Mac, the iPad will likely always win that battle.

What I’d like to see improved: A system-side sharing feature like there is in Android. I absolutely love that I can send links to Instapaper and Evernote in Android with one easy click, as long as the app is installed. No messy bookmarks to install.

Final thoughts

My only regret with the iPhone 5 is self-created: Instead of opting for a 64 GB phone, I bought the 32 GB and AppleCare+. I should have bought the 64 GB as I’m now struggling to find room for my music. I’m swapping out albums more than I’d like. I bought AppleCare+ because I expected for financial reasons that I’d skip the 2013 iPhone update and wanted the extra coverage — I was too far off my upgrade cycle for any discounts last year, so I’m going to wait until I don’t need to pay the off-contract price.

I’m impressed with the overall sturdiness of the iPhone 5. I don’t keep it in a case, and with the metal back I don’t feel like it’s going to shatter with a bad fall. I don’t seem to have as many weird cell reception issues as I had before. I work in a section of a building with notoriously bad cell coverage (about 1 bar), but outside of that, I don’t seem to have many “you’re holding it wrong” issues. The LTE speeds are nice, I just wish AT&T’s coverage net was wider. I get LTE at work, but not near home.

Overall, I’d say the iPhone 5 met my expectations. While I’d likely buy an iPhone with a larger screen, I do like that the iPhone 5 is the same width as previous iPhones; it’s not too bulky in my pockets.

Next time, though, I’m getting the largest storage option available. I guess size does matter after all.

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The issue was found to affect the iPhone 4S, an older model of the iPhone. Some who had upgraded to 6.1, released a few weeks ago, reported having problems, including degraded 3G connectivity or trouble making phone calls or connecting to the internet at all. Other users reported problems with Microsoft Exchange after the update, and AOL said 6.1 interfered with its mobile meeting software for iOS.

Last week Austria’s 3 and Germany’s Vodafone warned their subscribers not to upgrade to iOS version 6.1 until Apple had a chance to address the issues. The update issued Monday is supposed to have addressed all of them.

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The updates:

• More LTE carrier coverage. CEO Tim Cook announced this was coming on Apple’s earnings call last week.
• Purchase movie tickets via Siri. You could previously search for movie times via Apple’s voice interface, and get showtime results via Fandango — now you can buy tickets in the same interaction.
• iTunes Match subscribers can download individual songs from iCloud.
• A new button that allows users to reset the Identifier for Advertisers. In iOS 6, Apple tried to wean advertisers off of UDIDs with the new IFA. It also gave users more control over whether their in-app behavior was transmitted to app developers or advertisers.

The update is available via iTunes or over the air update. iOS 6.1 is available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users.

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Buried in the Apple’s iOS 6 beta code are references to the 128 GB of storage and was found by Twitter user @iNeal this past Saturday:

We should be seeing 128GB iDevices soon. iOS 6.1 beta 5 has 128G system partition key in BuildManifest.—
Neal (@iNeal) January 27, 2013

Assuming Apple does introduce a 128 GB iPad model, I’d expect the price jump to be $100 over the current 64 GB versions; Apple typically adds $100 for each step up to higher memory for its iOS devices. That would put this model at $799 for a Wi-Fi tablet, likely to appeal more to those who use their iPad as a primary device in place of a laptop. Or those that want to carry every MadMen episode in high-definition with them on their iPad.

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The iOS game Letterpress and to-do list app Clear, for example, look like they’ve parachuted onto iOS from another planet. The team behind Clear very intentionally steered away from a traditional iOS user interface — instead choosing a theme that is very flat and geometric with vivid colors. Besides Apple, its creators also drew on inspiration from other apps and sources, including rival Microsoft’s Metro style, Phill Ryu, one of the three co-creators behind Clear, told me in a recent interview.

Letterpress

While Ryu has great respect for Apple’s skeuomorphic design style that leans heavily on real-world metaphors, extra bells and whistles weren’t appropriate for his category of app.

“We felt as an app to help you get stuff done, the interface should 100 percent focus on those things and nothing else, so it was an exercise in keeping the number of puzzle pieces minimal,” he said.

A much larger team at Google, meanwhile, has been wowing Apple users with its revamped Mail, Maps, Search and YouTube apps. The look is coherent across its iOS apps, while at the same time abandoning Apple’s menu styles and UI touches like page curls. This came about after the company started devoting teams to developing apps for iOS that retained their “Googliness.”

A new era for iOS

Clear

We’re witnessing a turning point for design in the iOS era. From the time Apple opened the iOS App Store in mid-2008, it has been the main influence on third-party app makers. Through the iOS SDK as well as benchmarking best practices for developers at its WWDC conference, Apple’s design teams set the tone and made it arbiter of taste for design and user interfaces on iOS.

As we’ve seen, there’s now a limit to that influence. Some designers are just flat-out sick of the same old Apple look. Depending on how you look at it, this change could be considered an embarrassing turn for Apple: One of Steve Jobs’ most important and enduring legacies is his eye for design. The intuitive desktop metaphor of the original Macintosh, the ultraslim packaging of the MacBook Air, and the basics of iPhone software have inspired untold numbers of copycats and homages.

That designers are beginning to go their own way on Apple’s mobile platform is a sea change in the iOS era — but it may also be inevitable. Some of the app makers now working on iOS have been at it for nearly half a decade. The diversity we’re seeing in user interfaces and design language can be attributed to the platform’s maturity, users’ experience, as well as the need for brands to stand out among the more than 700,000 other apps Apple offers.

Trying not to fit in

Because of the size of the iOS store, companies naturally look for ways for to stand out from the crowd. For companies like Google, that means distinctive branding.

“[Apps] extending their brands are looking different because it’s now possible to build really complex apps on mobile,” said Daniel Raffel, who created the Snapguide app. “People need to distinguish themselves and their brands.” The downside is “it just takes a lot of work.” And not every app-making team or company has the time, resources or know-how to spend time on customized widgets or rewriting whole parts of apps.

That explains why there are just a few really skilled or resource-rich teams that are doing meaningfully different iOS design successfully.

Experienced designers can take creative license

Loren Brichter, the creator of Tweetie and Letterpress, tries to apply a different standard to his app than roughly 99 percent of others. He’s not drawn to design fads; he just gave his word game a very simple look because he believes that kind of design is what works most smoothly with the iPhone’s graphics engine, as compared to more popular, complex designs. “Flat, simple shapes lend themselves naturally to [the] current hardware,” he told me.

But Brichter is vastly experienced and regarded as one of the best developers working on Apple’s platform today. Ryu, who helped build Clear, compared Apple’s basic design principles to style guidelines for writers: “It’s like MLA writing style guides and stuff, it’s a great guide for beginning writers when you are most worried about making mistakes. But then you grow as a writer and start developing your own style, and bending the rules to suit various stories, and the MLA rules start holding you back from potential greatness.”

The case for skeuomorphism

You can argue what’s drawn hundreds of millions of mobile users to iOS devices over the years is Apple’s reliance on skeuomorphic design in its software. It’s what let everyone from “2-year-olds to 90-year-old technophobes” feel instantly comfortable interacting with an iPhone or iPad, Ryu pointed out.

Apple’s Find My Friends exemplifies its taste for skeuomorphic details like stitched leather

There are some in the design community who advocate thinking beyond this style, not because it’s “tacky” or old, but because of who the average user is now. Floppy disks, for example, don’t mean “save” to young people who have never used a floppy disk in their life. “Because we have so many people who are digital natives that don’t know the thing being referenced, it’s probably not an appropriate design fad going forward,” said Raffel.

But tablets are obviously not exclusively the province of educated Millennials. Plenty of people still need Apple’s basic design cues, which can act as “training wheels,” Ryu said. Sure, some people may not need them anymore. “But the way the smartphone market is still growing, I would posit it still makes sense to include training wheels by default.”

The future of iOS design

Jobs was the driving force behind the preference for those skeuomorphic details in iOS. He loved the stitched leather and spiral notebooks and torn pages. But as has been previously reported, a war over the future of that philosophy has erupted as those in industrial design head Jony Ive’s circle wanted to move on from that look.

Now that Ive is in charge of all of Apple’s interfaces, it’s a good bet he will get his way and a new era of iOS design will emerge in Cupertino. But it’s probably not going to be radical and it’s probably going to happen slowly. If the company sticks to its yearly release schedule that means that the next chance for Apple to exact any big or even medium-sized iOS design changes won’t come for more than six months.

It’s a testament to the flexibility of Apple’s platform and the dedication of its third-party developers to work hard to create the most innovative and forward-thinking apps for its platform. But it’s certainly a strange turning of the tables — not only that Microsoft and other designers are inspiring Apple developers, but that Apple itself is no longer the main influencer of what is considered cutting edge design on its own platform.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user jikatu

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Across the 12,000 apps and 12 ad networks it tracks, MoPub saw impressions from devices using iOS 6 rise 29 percent between last Tuesday, Dec. 11 and Saturday, Dec. 15, it told Techcrunch. MoPub believes that change is caused by people finally upgrading to iOS 6, after holding out for Google’s alternative to Apple Maps. As in, they wanted to stay with an earlier version of iOS in which the old version of Google Maps was the default navigation app, instead of upgrading and having Apple Maps as the default service.

That’s not a bad hypothesis. Anecdotally, I’ve observed this trend of waiting to upgrade among my friends and family. MoPub’s report differs from what Chitika had reported last week — that the rate of devices running iOS 6 (at least in the U.S. and Canada) grew just 0.2 percent between Wednesday and Friday last week. Taken together with MoPub’s data, it could be that many waited until Saturday to upgrade.

Apple already enjoys an incredibly quick adoption rate of its latest mobile OS whenever it releases one — for iOS 6, north of 60 percent just one month after release in September. Google’s latest version of Android, by way of comparison, is at just 2.7 percent adoption as of November.

Either way, while the entire Maps episode doesn’t improve Apple’s reputation with online services, it does show that users continue to stick with Apple devices anyway.

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When releasing the software update, Apple didn’t specify the nature of the bug. But a look at the company’s online support forums show a variety of complaints related to accessing some local networks.

The complaints popped up after iOS 6′s release in September, and the problems persisted even after Apple released 6.0.1 in November.

The update is available now via iTunes.

iOS 6 was released in September and is already Apple’s fastest-adopted mobile OS. According to one measure, in the U.S. and Canada iOS 6 is the fastest-adopted mobile OS yet.

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Exactly how many iPhone users downloaded the app is not clear — neither Google nor Apple has released any such statistics just yet. But zooming to the top of the free charts, bypassing mega-hits like YouTube, Angry Birds Star Wars and Snapchat, indicate a very large volume of downloads.

Its instant popularity is no big mystery. It was one thing for Apple to remove the very popular Google Maps as the default navigation app on iOS, but worse, Apple’s own Maps app was panned from the moment it arrived. While it included features like offline mode and voice-guided navigation, which Google’s app for iOS did not, it also lacked integrated public transportation directions and suffered from bad location data.

Google’s return is being especially well received because of the improvements the app makes over the previous iOS default app, including the addition of turn-by-turn navigation. But it is still missing a few things, such as offline mode and a dedicated iPad version.

Still, many users are relieved simply because they now have the option to revert to using a navigation app whose brand they know and trust not to lead them astray.

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AllThingsD was first to report Google Maps’ imminent arrival. The app has a very different look than the one Apple collaborated on with Google for previous versions of iOS. Google says this version will load faster, and has smoother tilting and rotating for both 2D and 3D images.

Google’s app has been much anticipated since Apple removed it as a default app with the launch of iOS 6 in September. Apple ditched Google Maps reportedly because Google had declined to include turn-by-turn directions in the iOS version of its app.

Apple’s own Maps app, its first-ever effort in this area, landed with a thud back in September. Users immediately complained the app offered poor directions, mismarked landmarks and bad 3D imagery. Apple also chose not to build public transit directions directly into the app, but instead left that task to local, third-party apps.

Apple CEO Tim Cook apologized for the app’s condition and promised the company would improve the app. Though there’s been no definitive word about what Apple has done to make improvements, Cook said in an interview last week that Apple has “a huge plan to make it even better.”

In the meantime, however, a third-party app from a familiar brand like Google will be welcome to iOS users. It won’t automatically work the same as when Google Maps was the default app but Google has released an SDK that will allow developers to display Google Maps and Google location data within their own app, instead of defaulting to Apple’s Maps app.

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Embark is free and is distributed as individual apps tailored to 12 major public transportation hubs in the U.S. and Europe. Prior to September, Embark apps had been available for nearly a year, but its apps remained well under the radar for most. Then Apple’s new Maps arrived with the iOS 6 update and during just the first week afterward, Embark saw 100,000 downloads. It was a huge and sudden boost for Hodge and his team. And that post-iOS 6 boom has continued. Hodge wouldn’t give me an updated figure on the total number of downloads Embark has seen since then, but user sessions in the last two months have grown by a factor of 2.5 to 10 in all markets, he told me on Tuesday. Downloads have grown by near the same measure.

Embark PHL, one of Embark’s transit apps for 12 major U.S. and European cities.

New York City, Embark’s largest market, has more than doubled its user sessions since September. But the biggest growth area has been abroad: The app has seen 10 times as many users in London since then, after being available for 10 months prior to Apple’s Maps debut. “Granted, London was a smaller market at the time for us, but what iOS 6 proved was that if you had a good transit app, all of sudden people would find it,” Hodge said.

People are finding the app because Apple has created a special section of its Maps app that recommends local transit apps. Embark is just one of these apps, and has much bigger brand-name competition: Navigon and Garmin are two of the heavyweights it competes with.

It hasn’t been just users who have discovered Embark since September. Potential investors came out of the woodwork too: the former Y Combinator startup is now an official BMW investment. The German automaker announced the investment — without disclosing the sum — at an auto industry event last week.

BMW is along for the ride

As far as what Embark is working on for BMW, Hodge won’t say just yet. But he noted that BMW is looking at how all forms of transportation are an issue for big cities everywhere. They call it “intermodal mobility.”

“They’re talking about how people are driving to the train station, asking when will the train arrive. That’s one possibility,” Hodge said.

Apple Maps’ suggested list of local transit apps in Philadelphia.

What will be interesting is how Embark continues to fare as all-in-one mapping and routing solutions from more name-brand competitors begin to pop up. Nokia, for instance, is now selling its Here app on iOS with integrated transit directions — though early reviews weren’t great. It did manage to beat Google to the iOS App Store, but it is widely assumed that Google will bring its own Maps app to iOS 6 eventually. And that’ll be tough to compete with: Google was the default public transit routing app for many users before Apple removed it as the default option.

But Hodge isn’t spending too much time worrying about larger competitors. He really likes his chances as a small startup.

“The biggest challenge we see in this space, for Nokia, for Google, Apple, they have to immediately go to scale when they launch. They can’t perfect the formula; they have to do it everywhere at once.” The fact that public transit directions in Nokia’s San Francisco maps aren’t very good “reflect a lack of focus,” Hodge says. But, considering the task at hand, of having to map every metro area at once, he says “it’s understandable.”

Embark thinks its secret to success is getting the little things right. Like timing how fast people walk between subway stops in New York City, or knowing which bus lines tend to be unreliable. Those details, which lead to accuracy and ease of use, the company believes, are what will continue to win it customers.

Though Embark is just in 12 markets, the company says it’s happy it started small first. “We’d rather start by doing a great job in a few places” than be mediocre everywhere, Hodge said.

The influx of money from BMW is going to help them with that. The first order of business? Expand to more markets.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Buddahbless

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