iOS 8 Top Features and What is Missing

We have been beta testing iOS 8 for quite a while now and have to admit there are a TON of new and improved features. Maclife was able to put together their top 50 new features with the OS.  A few of our favourites would be:

• Fine Tune the camera exposure
• Time Lapse photo mode
• Do Not Disturb (Group Mode)
• Battery Usage based on Application

There are so many to list, but what we would like to talk about are the features that Apple has missed.

• Personal Hotspot – While Apple wasn’t the first to deliver a mobile hotspot feature, they were well ahead of the pack. Since then, they have failed to deliver an improved user experience. While hotspot works well, there are several small tweaks that are required that Android and BlackBerry have realized. When a hotspot is active, it will show in the notification bar that you have a user connected to the hotspot. It fails to tell you who is connecting (by ip address or device name), and also fails to allow you to kick an unwanted guest. Sure you could enable or change the password but how hard would it be to include this information. Also as seen with other mobile operating systems, a breakdown of how long the hotspot has been enabled and how much data has been used and by which connection.

 

• Mail – This will not impact the majority of mail users but for anyone that has 5 or more mail accounts you will know exactly what I mean when I complain about the mail app..Anytime I am out of coverage whether it be in an elevator or underground area, iOS since its inception does a great job of notifying me that it is failing to connect to the mail account and I am presented with a popup notification that needs me to confirm the mail server is not responding and that I am aware. The issue here is that a series of these  popups are presented for each single mail account so if you have as many email accounts as I do, its quite annoying.

 

• Facetime – Microsoft burned Apple with a series of commercials that showed users during Skype calls and having the ability to multi task into another application and continue the video chat seamlessly. During FaceTime video calls, the user is still rudely presented with a warning that the FaceTime is paused and shown just a black screen. Apple really needs to find a way to allow a multi tasking approach to these video calls. As more and more of my family is using iOS, FaceTime is getting more and more utilized in my household and I truly think Apple can improve on this experience.

 

• Apple Pay – Where do I start here..Apple Pay looks truly amazing and I am really happy about this feature..but the biggest question is..WHEN WILL WE SEE IT IN CANADA? While I appreciate that Canada is now included in iPhone launch days and is not penalized the 30 days like we used to be, but at least give us some sort of target date of when we can expect this feature to be enabled. Or confirm it will never work..Having NFC in a phone and not being able to use it is a real piss off, especially since NFC is locked to only work with Apple Pay..FAIL.

One last thing that is more of an issue with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, but delivered via iOS8 is the voLTE that was discussed as voice over LTE. This is one of the most annoying features of the iPhones especially while on the Rogers network as when a phone call is made, you are directed to the 3G network during the voice call. If you should happen to wander around aimlessly or be in the middle of a commute during this phone call, and encounter a dead spot (there are many on the 3g network), you will be pushed back into GPRS mode which means no data at all during your phone call. voLTE would be great and eliminate a lot of these dropped connections, and would do Rogers a great justice by hiding the fact there are still lots of issues with their depreciating 3G network.

Did we miss anything you want to see with future versions of iOS? Please post your comment here and lets get Apples attention that they need to do more. Oh and Apple if you are listening, and you are so concerned with our privacy concerns, why the hell did you enable previous locations by default in location services. That should be default to disabled. Thats a move right out of Google’s playbook..

For a full list of iOS 8 features make sure you check out MacLife.