What needs to change with iOS 5

Posted by Jamie Forestell

Later today Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) will kick off and will run until June 10. During this time, we expect quite a few announcements regarding the future of iOS and Mac OSX. The live event begins at 1:00PM ET and no live stream has been announced yet.

There are several things that still bug me when I think about the iPhone. After trying so many different handsets this past year, I still choose to hold on the almighty iPhone 4.

What needs to change with iOS 5?

Push Email

Definition of Push Email According to Apple:

Email accounts that use the push method for message retrieval enable you to have email messages delivered directly to you as soon as the message is received by your email provider instead of checking periodically or manually for new messages. On iPhone or iPod touch, push email is supported for the following email account types:

MobileMe
Microsoft Exchange
Yahoo!
Other email accounts such as POP, IMAP, AOL or Gmail accounts do not support push message retrieval on iPhone or iPod touch but can instead be setup to fetch mail at specified intervals or manually when the Mail application is opened.

Note: A Wi-Fi connection is required to send and receive email on iPod touch.

To adjust the push or fetch settings for push or email or other accounts on iPhone or iPod touch, tap Settings from the Home screen and then choose Fetch New Data. The setting screen below lets you turn push services on or off for all supported accounts and specify fetch intervals for accounts that do not support push or have push disabled.
Fetch or push settings can be configured for individual accounts in the Advanced settings area. Note that setting Push to OFF or setting the fetch schedule to Manually will supercede individual account settings.

 This to me is almost the deal breaker of switching to Android. After playing with the Samsung Galaxy and Galaxy Tab, I quickly to back to what it used to be like receiving email on a Blackberry, and that it is delivered instantly. With iOS devices, POP/IMAP email can only be received by fetching or manually requesting the send/receive.

Who still uses POP/IMAP? Most of our entire universe still relies on POP/IMAP.  For me I have several business email accounts and all hosting is on linux powered servers. I do not have the option of powering my mail server with Microsoft Exchange so a majority of my mail is all IMAP based. I find myself constantly unlocking the iPhone to launch the Mail app and trigger the “checking for new messages”.

Why after all these years are we still having to manually request for our email. Obviously there are workarounds, but none of them are valid for me, and I am sure many others.

One of the workarounds is to subscribe to MobileMe, but I wouldn’t exactly consider this a workaround. By subscribing you get your own @me.com address and that account is push enabled.
If you want any of your other email accounts push enabled, you need to forward all mail to the me.com account and work out of that mailbox.
This makes it dificult to manage your mail when you have several accounts and could possibly end up sending email from the wrong account.

Another option, which is identical to the first, is through your Gmail/Yahoo account which has push enabled, and again you can forward your other non push enabled accounts. Again, I find this dificult to manage my mail effectively with this method.

Widgets

Rumors have indicated we may be getting Widget support with iOS 5 and this has caused a lot of users to switch to Android in the past. Widgets to me are not a deal breaker, but it is a form of customization and as our lives get busier, who is Apple to tell us how to organize our day planners. If you want to have a big clock and weather on the home screen, let us. Hopefully these rumors are correct and we can be enjoying Widgets without jailbreaking finally.

Notifications

This has to be the most annoying feature of iOS, which is still unchanged after 4 versions.  Text messages and push notifications are obtrusive to say the least.  Again, rumors have indicated we can expect to see a change to how iOS handles our notifications and it may also appear a deeper integration with Twitter.

Reply to All (Mail client)

This is something that really frustrates me and really needs to be addressed. If you decide you would like to respond to an email you had sent previous to the same recipient, when you go into the Sent Items and select Reply to All, the mail client decides that you should now be recipient in the To field and all others are added in the CC: field.  While this may not be that bad if you could simply move the contacts around and arrange accordingly, you can’t! Is this too much too ask?

Stay tuned for more information about iOS 5.  The WWDC Press event starts at 1:00 PM ET today.