In my head - iOS5 - The back button is all that’s missing now (and a decent home screen)

June 10, 2011

iOS5 - The back button is all that’s missing now (and a decent home screen)

I am an Android user.

I started with the Samsung Galaxy, moved to the Nexus One and moved on to the Samsung Galaxy S.

In between, I had an iPhone 3GS for a short while, hated every minute, and just wanted to go back to Android. It had nothing to do with multitasking and technical stuff like that. It was all about the basic stuff like user experience in the broader meaning.

The iPhone’s contacts management is terrible. I manage my contacts in Gmail. Synching to Android is transparent (obviously) but synching to iPhone was a nightmare. Setting it up was confusing, it messed up my contacts in Gmail, a cable was required (is it the 90’s?) and updating in one place (Gmail or iPhone) required another synching. Having it as master(pc)-slave(iOS) is just stupid.

It appeared to me that Apple are on a crusade to make iTunes the center of the world and that nothing could change that.

Apparently I was wrong…

But wait, one more thing I couldn’t stand about the iPhone lame notification system - an annoying and ugly popup. The Android’s notification drawer is so much better (as Apple indirectly admit with their new notifications system). Was a javascript’s alert the best apple could come up with? Even now with the new notifications it amazes me that a company like Apple released such a none user friendly feature.

Here I want to take the opportunity and close some open bills with iPhone groupies I know. They are so into following apple blind-folded, they actually tried to convince me that the popup notification the best notification system! Well apparently you were wrong…

One more thing that the iPhone misses is a back button. A real back button that can get you back from a browser window to the app that opened it. The crippled soft back button can’t do that and I use it a lot. I don’t consider closing the browser and then looking for the application again a good user experience. Please don’t argue on that groupies.

The home screen of the iPhone is a issue in itself. Dropping all the installed apps over there (and the folders don’t really help) make it looks like a feature phone on steroids. Cleaning it up and adding widgets could really help.

As I stated before I am an android user and a happy one. However, the iCloud is amazing, it is actually something that can make me move to the other camp. It took the good things that android had and did it even better. When I take a picture with my Android phone, I have to “explicitly” upload it to picasa. With iCloud it will just be there (if I got it correctly) as it should be.