iPhone rant revisited, AKA Welcome iOS4

So iOS 4 is finally here, figured it was time to do another rant and revisit some of my old problems with the phone. There's not much else to say about it so lets dig in and see what on my wishlist came true and what didn

• Native support for recording phone calls and saving voice mail as an audio file.

Allright, this is still a major issue, but given that the OS now allows for multitasking, maybe there will be a 3rd party app that can help this. Time will tell if Apple will allow it given that this wish has legal issues in some places. For example, I know that in 11 states in the US it's explicitly forbidden to record conversations, even if you partake in them. Whereas in Sweden it is fully allowed to record any and all conversations, over the phone or in real life, as long as the recordings are not made publicly available. In the instance where they are evidence of a crime, you should go to the police with them instead of sending them out online.

• Unoptimized aka. "un-fucked up" photo synchronization.

This hasn't been resolved either, it's better, but still nowhere near as good as it could be. I have however found a way to get full quality images to view on it by sending them to myself in an email attachment and saving them to the iPhone through the mail app, in which case they end up unoptimized in the camera roll. This way they are viewable in full quality and also retrievable from any computer that you can access the cameras storage from.

• File access, what is that?

Nope, not resolved either. Too bad really, would really be kickass to have command line control over the iPhones functions. Ability to build user scripts and other fun stuff is yet to be realized.

• FLAC and ogg Vorbis support.

As far as I have seen, neither FLAC nor ogg Vorbis works on it, though i haven't tested it fully yet. Maybye someone else knows who have actually tested it?

• Native support for syncing notes and text files.

This one is actually fixed in a manner, the notes app now gives you the option to store the notes in your IMAP mail account (for instance gmail gets a new lable named notes where they are stored as emails sent to yourself). Very handy and has done tons to alleviate the sense of claustrophobia I had with the notes app in the beginning.

• Built in equalizer.

Also not resolved, a graphical equalizer would really be sweet. As far as I have found no real changes from the iOS 3 version of the equalizer settings has been made.

• Native support for building and editing playlists.

Fully resolved! YAY! Ok, so the on-the-go playlists have been sent to the grave and you now have full access to edit, rename and delete any and all playlists in your media library. The immortal words of Carman sums up what I think of this: "Kickass!".

• Editing audio and video meta data.

Nope, not resolved either. Sucks really..

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So what other nifty features have come to light then, lets start with the ones I find most important:

• Ability to turn off cellular data.

Go into Settings > General > Network to find your brand spanking new and shiny Cellular Data switch! Once again "Kickass!"

• Alphanumerical password for your iPhone.

This is so sweet! Go into Settings > General > Passcode Lock and flip the Simple Passcode off to get a full alphanumerical password instead! Rock'n Roll Baby!

• App Folders!

This feature is the perfect fix for the appoholic in me. Just hold on an app in your home screen until you enter edit mode (all icons wriggle) drag one icon ontop of another to create a folder (will let you name it to anything you want, or uses smart naming if you don't want to name it and names the folder after the category of the app you dropped onto the other) . Each folder can contain up to 12 apps (which means if you fill up the entire phone with folders you can add up to 2160(!) apps) .

The only downside is that the Spotlight Search function doesn't search for folder names thus far. Would be nice if you have a couple of folders named for instance Games 1, Games 2 etc. Typing Game into the search would list the contents of all of those folders.

• Multitasking.

Multitasking in iOS 4 isn't exactly like multitasking in a computer, the app "freezes" if it's not built for iOS 4 and when they are built for it only certain threads may run in the background. But it's really nice to pick up where you left off instead of always having to go through all the huff and puff to get to where you were when you got sidetracked.

• Homescreen and Lockscreen wallpaper.

Finally here, my homescreen looks so beautiful now with a nice background don't you think?



It really makes a difference no?


Problems:

iTunes or BloatTunes is still a horrendous piece of bloatware that is slow, laggy and generally sucks bigtime. Apple really needs to get rid of the people who wrote this piece of shit virus and hire some real programmers instead.