There’s a blog on technologizer about how Apple products != jails

I’m sick of the smug insults delivered by some people at Apple users – simply because we *choose* to use an Apple device.

So we can’t hack it and play around with the source code and … Good. I’m glad. I have no desire to waste time doing so. Those who do can choose something else.

Oh. Hang on. They can be hacked and customised? You can even run Windows, Linux, or even Android on your iPhone?

Oh.

Right.

I have no need to “defend” Apple – any more than Apple has need of my defence – but the mindless knee-jerk “you have an Apple product therefore are stupid and can’t think for yourself; I have an Android phone therefore I’m super-awesome” rot gets on my nerves. I have used, and do use, plenty of non-Apple devices – many or most of which are not as engaging, even pleasurable, to use as my various iThings. If something better suited to me comes out, fine. I’ll go with that – whether it’s from Apple or anyone else – even (gasp!) Microsoft. I just haven’t seen it so far.

And that doesn’t make me stupid.

It appears I’ve really been rather fortunate (once I finally got the damn thing on my phone...). Text entry was laggy (was … I’ll come to that), but otherwise my 3G has been running pretty much as fine as it did before…. Well, most of the time. I do find myself using Memory Sweep more often, to free up memory. I find the system running out of memory and getting clunky more often now than with iPhone OS3 – but still not that often.

Ah now, text entry. Here is where to sort your iPhone out (particularly alongside installing a utility to free up memory). At the suggestion of Davmac I disabled autocorrect in the settings. No more laggy text input. Also no more having its “corrected” to it’s …. Also no more correct corrections, so I have to be a bit more careful, and correct mistakes myself – but then again, it often got it wrong anyway: if I typed of instead of if (or vice versa) it wouldn’t know to correct it; if I typed id instead of if it’d make it “I’d” … and so on. By the end of the first day without autocorrect I had got a lot more accurate as well, and generally I don’t miss it, as it really has dealt with the one significant bit of laggy yuckkiness on my iPhone. I would recommend it most highly to any iPhone 3G + iOS4 user.

Now I have folders!

And a global inbox.

I don’t much care about the rest: neither the features I do get, nor the ones I don’t (multitasking, wallpaper … though the ability to lock the screen to portrait orientation would have been nice, and I can’t see how it would have caused a performance hit – which was Apple’s reason given for denying some features to the 3G).

The folders though are fan-tas-tic. Instead of 9 pages of apps, (through which I had to trawl for quite some time. at times, no matter how often I tired to order all the apps/pages) I now have 2. Yeah, all those folders look a little ugly without wallpaper, but the functional improvement makes up for that

Global inbox is a great thing too. I have three personal email accounts, and previously had to page forwards and backwards to go between them to view all my emails. Now they’re all in the one place, and I’m a happy chappy.

Now, the adventure: iOS4 came out at around 3am Tuesday 22 June in Australia. My daughter happened to wake me that morning at 1/4 to 5  :| so I plugged in the iPhone, downloaded it, and chose update. It started to do a backup…. An hour or so later the progress bar hadn’t progressed at all, as far as I could tell. I cancelled, and fiddled about and started again – same crap. Meanwhile my wife plugged in her 3GS, and in 10-15 minutes the update was downloaded and installed, and her phone had rebooted and was ready to go. Hmmph.

I gave it up as a bad joke at that point, as I had to go to work. In the evening I had another go, heartened by a couple of comments from contacts on twitter that their progress bars had jumped suddenly from almost nothing to 90% done.

Not meeeee……

Then I had a suggestion from yet another tweep: instead of choosing update (in the “summary” screen in iTunes with the iPhone connected), choose restore. I decided to give it a crack…Now I thought a backup was a backup was a backup. But apparently not, as this one worked. Slowish (2 1/2 – 3 hours) but it worked, then the install did its instally thing, and when I got up in the morning I got to choose to restore from the backup (I could have set it up as a new one, but that would make a bit of a mockery of doing the damn backup in the first place). That worked a treat – and I didn’t even miss my train for work

Honestly, I reckon the folders and global inbox alone were worth the hassle, and so I would recommend the upgrade to any reader who hasn’t done so yet.

One thing though: if you have a 3G, I would suggest you choose the option to restore your phone with factory settings, rather than the update option.

Good luck.

Backtrack … My wife has had trouble getting a phone to really suit her, in terms of ease of use, size, and looks. She’s not a geek, a tech-nerd, an ardent handheld computer whiz or anything like that. Though to me she’s anything but average (awwwwwww…) when it comes to phones and computers and techy stuff, she is. She doesn’t care about the technical spwcifications or capabilities, she doesn’t need or want super cool utilities, she doesn’t want to tweak it, and so on.

Her Nokia N95 was bulky as hell, and she got fed up with it. Enter a Samsung F480. Small, pink, touch-screen … happiness.

… For a little while. Perhaps if she hadn’t got an iPod touch she might have struggled on with it till her mobile phone contract was up and she could get another phone for free, but the contrast in general ease of use really made that impossible. The touch-screen on the samsung is clunky: moving things around or changing screens feels to me almost “sticky”, and there were are a number of other interface oddities that just made it somewhat awkward to make a phone call or send a text – all she really wanted a phone for.

Enter an iPhone on Tuesday this week. Set it up Tuesday evening – and it magically recreated everything that was on her iPod touch. Using it through yesterday led to exactly zero frustration. It’s the first phone she’s ever been really happy with – simply because it’s just so easy to use.

All the oft-mentioned technical lacks and walled garden snarks really have absolutely no impact on the basic fact that it’s little and light, and is easy (and indeed pleasurable) to use. I anticipate both of us having the same opinion regarding the iPad when we get one.

Maybe my emphasis on ease of use marks me as an old fogey. I used to enjoy wrestling with DOS configurations – and was well pleased with my best of 622k free conventional memory for running DooM but now I just want to take something out of the box and have it do what I want it to. Currently – because Apple’s products do that consistently (even though I assume they’re not the only ones that would do so), I guess that makes me an Apple fanboi

Multi where’s that damn tasking for third edit button? Hang on party apps is one didnt i start itunes? Better of the features rumoured hey ten new tweets to be announced riiight click play today by Apple for oh crap don’t like that – next song the iPhone OS 4.0.

Yeah. We really neeeeeed multitasking. That’s exactly what we need. As the above paragraph says, multitasking for 3rd party apps is rumoured to be a new feature in the about to be revealed iPhone OS 4.0. At the risk of branding myself a Luddite, I really hope it isn’t. Why? Because I’d probably use it, and I don’t want to.

I tried this morning to recall the last time I just sat and listened to a whole piece of music, without doing anything else, or cutting it short. I really could not think when that was. Instead I have iTunes playing, half a dozen or more tabs open in safari, my email, tweetie, iPhoto, possibly iMovie and GarageBand … It’s stupid. On the iPhone right now I’m running the WordPress app. That’s it. All my attention is therefore focused on one task. Once I’ve finished with – or want to put aside – that task, I’ll move on to the next thing

… Such as email, since there was a buzzy beepy thing a few minutes ago notifying me there’s an email … With multitasking I would have already checked it. I would have switched my attention from this app to that and then back. Many people seem to think that would be desirable, but I really do not.

Our brains do not multitask. Well maybe some do … We call that ADHD In all seriousness, our brains aren’t really geared to doing many things at once. We can switch rapidly, but attention, focus, and performance suffer.

This is not something just to do with iPhones and iPads or indeed computers in general. Thinking back to my younger years, I would put on a record and just listen to it. I’d even have friends over and put on a record to play them. I’d want to sit and listen, but they wanted to talk and do other stuff. It could have been a discordance in our musical tastes, but I think rather it was to do with music as wallpaper: a basic form of multitasking.

Now this notion of multitasking is totally imbedded in our way of thinking. There are even jokes about women being able to do it and men not. Actually it seems clear that none of us can do it; we just switch between tasks, at a cost to our performance.

In summary: I don’t simply not mind the lack of multi-tasking on the iPhone (and iPad when I get one); I like it. I don’t want to split my attention and decrease my performance. I want to do a task, complete it, and move to the next task.

So I’ll be a lone (?) voice in the wilderness hoping that Apple don’t introduce 3rd party multitasking today – as I know it will be hard to avoid its siren call if it’s there.