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With Apple’s launch of iOS
5 this week, we’ll soon be getting stuck into a smorgasbord of new
features for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. A new notifications system and
lock-screen shortcuts are just a couple of our favourite features, but there are many more, so check out
our iOS
5 complete guide for the whole shebang.
Just as there’s always room for dessert, though, there’s always room for improvement, especially since we
missed out on some of our most-wanted iOS 5 features. We’re also hungry for some of the great
suggestions from the readers who commented on that story, so
check it out.
Here are the areas we think Apple should focus on for iOS
6, and beyond.
Game Center
Game Center received some improvements in iOS 5 that could drag
it out of the doldrums. In his presentation, Steve Jobs bragged that, in
nine months, Game Center has acquired 9 million users, compared to the 30 million
that Xbox Live has garnered in eight years.
That’s rather disingenuous, though. Game Center is
on millions of iPhones and iPod touches, and it only takes a second to
sign in and then ditch it. With Xbox Live, Microsoft can brag about dedicated gamers
who’ve invested in an Xbox and who spend an insane numbers of hours on it.
In a bid to make Game Center more than a momentary distraction, iOS 5
improves your ability to find friends to play with. You’ll be able to
see the friends of the people you’re already playing with, as well as
send and receive friend recommendations.
It all sounds like a good start, but we’d still like to be
able to look up friends en masse by connecting with our address book,
Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Syncing with multiple computers
We’re thrilled that iOS 5 will bring wireless syncing and
software updates, so you won’t have to connect to your computer with a
USB cable to grab your music and other data. Instead, you just have to
be on the same Wi-Fi network, as well as plugged in and charging.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like iOS 5 will allow syncing
to multiple computers. Currently, it’s a logistical nightmare to share
most kinds of files on your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad
between different desktops, and this doesn’t look set to change. To take Steve Jobs’ words about iOS 5 slightly out of context, it’s “a real hassle and very frustrating
to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your
devices”. Indeed Steve. Indeed.
You can already sync plenty of stuff wirelessly from the cloud, like your contacts and calendars from Google, for example. But, when it comes to podcasts, photos and updates, it’s currently
iTunes or no tunes.
Apple’s new iCloud
system should help, since it will sync even more of your stuff to the
cloud. Music, photos and back-up data will all go into the great
beyond, ready to sync up at will. Sadly, it looks like we won’t get
iCloud in the UK until well after our American cousins, who’ll be getting it in the autumn.
iMount
It’s possible to use an iPod touch as an external drive, but
not your iPhone or iPad. Why? We don’t know — maybe you can tell us in
the comments section below.
We’d love to be able to use our devices
as straight-up hard drives, and take advantage of the gigabytes that we
paid for. It’s clearly possible, and we resent having to cram USB sticks in our tech-laden breeches when we’re already carting around our iStuff.
Quick controls
Saving battery life on most smart phones is a fine art. Having
easy access to Wi-Fi and brightness shortcuts would make massaging these settings much quicker than having to trawl through the settings
menus.
The multitasking dock, which currently contains shortcuts to
open apps, the screen-lock function and iPod controls, could be a smashing place for
Wi-Fi and brightness controls, as well as, dare we add, GPS and Bluetooth
shortcuts.
Flash in the browser
We know Flash in the browser is as likely as Satan skating to work, but we
still want it. We don’t care that Flash is the source of most crashes
on Macs, or that it can suck battery life.
The lack of Flash support is the main thing that makes Android tablets better for surfing the Web, despite
the iPad’s lightning-fast browser. With Android, you can also turn Flash off or set Flash to run on
command, rather than by default.
We’ll harp on about this issue until the day that every website has switched to HTML5, or we finally
get what we want.
One more thing…
We’ve given up on getting an FM radio, and we can’t be
bothered with network printing. If Game Center doesn’t
pick up soon, that will end up on our indifference list, too.
We’d like to hear what you want from iOS, so let us know in
the comments section below or on our Facebook page.
