Earlier this week, Apple reimagined their mobile software to bring new life into it. It has been a tremendously busy week for me thus far as I finally got around to downloading my iPhone 5 with the beta version of iOS 7. I, personally, have been waiting for a change in the iPhone’s software even though I’ve been using it since the 4S was released. Am I pleased with it? Step inside of my thought-bubble below.
For starters, the new iOS is like a Bizarro version of the software we all knew and grew stale with since 2007. Whether this was in the pipeline when Steve Jobs was alive or not, this marks the first, big change for consumers as part of Tim Cook’s Apple.
We all heard about the new ‘flat’ look incorporated throughout the entire OS. The company has moved to less detail within icons as well. I would never thought to say this but iOS now has animations. Whenever you touch an icon, the app opens by zooming in and the opposite happens whenever you hit the Home button. With Call Blocking, bill collectors may have an even harder time get in touch with you. FaceTime gets its own icon as it now supports audio-only calls as well as video calls. Apple’s Maps adds turn-by-turn walking directions. Better search within the Mail app. You can now natively annotate PDFs. For now iTunes Radio is very Pandora-like where you can skip only 6 songs and make wishlists of songs to buy from iTunes.
You can now redeem iTunes gift cards using the camera. The Notification Center has expanded to show the weather along with events on your calendar (a la Google Now) for the day. The Control Center is Apple’s Quick Settings you can access by swiping up from any screen. The new multitasking brings back the good memories of webOS w/ their card-style. Siri gets a nice facelift and adds more ways to get info for you via Wikipedia & Bing. The Clock app gets a ‘live’icon as it really tells the time but Weather didn’t get the ame treatment. But at least its not always 73-degrees outside. Inside of the app they combined the look & data from Yahoo! Weather and the Weather Channel. I pretty much deleted previous weather apps. And finally, Search is now accessed by tapping anywhere (that’s not an icon and swiping down.
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| New look to the native Camera app |
Does it matter if people think Apple mimicked bits from several manufacturers? That is evident. The real question is: Will users be happy with it?
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| Siri and the native Weather gets a facelift too |
Of course there are some hiccups at play – like opening an app with a number notification on the icon, the red notification gets stuck for half of a second before disappearing. Non-Apple apps open as if it on iOS 6 where you get the old signal bars underneath the new signal dots briefly before correcting itself. This is a beta software but just sharing my observations.
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| The new Safari |
To wrap things up, Do I like it? Yes. But not in love with it yet. I’m not crazy about the new icons but enjoying the new font + minimalist approach to everything. I am expecting some changes to occur on the finalized version that is set to launch int he fall alongside the next iPhone. Despite how you feel about it. This is easily the most radical thing Apple has done in a long time (not including the design for the new Mac Pro).
