I don't get it, why?

So far it sounds like they did. The main criticisms of iOS 7 are, as usual with new Apple products, from the edges of the digerati. I'll see what my wife says when she gets it on her new 5S.

Because it's very likely that anything that would be seen as a "bug" will be fixed in updates; whereas things that are the result of intentional (bad) design, like lack of information hierarchy, probably won't be fixed, because they won't be seen as incorrect. (Which is, nominally, what this tumblr would be for pointing out.)

The battery notification looks identical to that in iOS6, and probably has the same behaviour.

If you run your phone with the display off, say from 21% battery down to 11%, then it will cross the 20% reporting threshold. The next time that you unlock the phone and activate the display, you will get the notification.

It's not inconsistent; nor is it just being "optimistic" -- it may be poorly worded, but it consistently displays that same message every time you unlock the phone after the battery drains to 20%.

If the person who took that screenshot had waited another ten minutes, then the battery would probably have reached 10%, and the 10% notification would have been shown instead.

This is GM

No, they keyboard and message box are clearly on a layer above the speech bubbles. There is nothing wrong with this behaviour.

Eh. Apple has always been phoning in their accessories. They were never particularly good. I don’t see this as indicative of anything, it's just Apple being sloppy as they always are with these kinds of things.

Where it counts Apple does not typically exhibit this behaviour, as evidenced by both new iPhones.

One word: antennagate.

Didn't that happen, back around 2009? I remember many of my searches failing to find things they had the month or two before because Google was treating my parameters more as suggestions (returning results with 1 or 2 of the 4 or 5 words I'd used, ignoring quotes for grouping, etc).

>Apple is really defined by superior design. Google is defined generally by superior engineering.

Wait what? When did that happen? When did Google get "superior engineering"? For search, web etc, perhaps. But as far as iOS vs Android is concerned that was never the case.

For starters, Apple design and engineered the iPhone first. Google's Android FIRST came out a whole year later. Early Android prototypes, shown by Google just before the iPhone was announced had half-size screens and physical keyboards, just like the rest of the smartphones of the day.

Since then Apple has consistenly beat Google on hardware features, from the retina display (with much better color rendition to boot) to camera innovations, the motion co-processor, a working fingerprint sensor (for a change), and 64 bit ARM (which means far more than "being able to see more memory which isn't even installed") etc. Consistently better battery life.

Well, maybe it's not a fair comparison, because Google is not a hardware engineering company. They had to buy Motorola, which wasn't the best in the business itself, anyway. But the above are still true for Samsung offerings too.

On the industrial engineering side, Apple's designs, machining, fit and polish is unsurpassed on the Android side. Including materials used.

In the software side it's the same story. The iOS Cocoa API is leaps and bounds ahead of the Android API. It was never plagued with issues with scroll lag and display latency (and also audio latency, which is why 90% of Audio/MIDI apps are for iOS). Doesn't have a nightmarish GC experience to tend to for more involved apps. More fit and polish overall. Heck, Android even gets 80%+ of all the mobile malware around.

The major points for Android devices were not better engineering per se, but stuff like bigger screens, different configurations etc. And extra features that got marginal use, like face unlock and near field communication, stuff that Apple could have if that's how they rolled.

Some good stuff Android had first was because Apple went conservative to implement them when battery life better permitted them (like background apps -- Android just unleashed them and the hell with it, Apple trying to get the juice, and hence experience, right first).

There's one genuine thing Android had going for it, and that's the Intents system in my opinion. The "quick settings change panel" was also another good one. I don't think we can go much further.

Seriously where do engineering stops and design starts to make that statement work ?

Looking at Google Map, Google Search. Those "defining" application of Google, in addition of incredible engineering they redefined what a map and search engine should even look like, so design. Similarly, the iPhone, iMac, iPod were as much about engineering and than design.

In reality, Apple is defined by making money on hardware and Google on cloud software. It is a quirk that they got to clash, because they very much complemented each other.

Google get some slack with Android because they do not sell phones and the vast majority of users do not use Android UI anyway. On the hardware side, Android world provides hundreds of models, there is at least 10 flagship model at any single time. Each get its own amount of nitpicking but eventually all get lost in the noise of other Android news (announcements, prototype, announcement of prototype, benchmark war, "megahertz" war of the day).

I've been an Apple fanboy since around 1984, and I have to agree with you.

I very much prefer the UI of my Jelly Bean Nexus 7 to this thing they call iOS 7.

And before anyone says I don't like change -- the new UI does make iOS<=6 look very dated, but the odd icon proportions, color scheme and unbalanced use of fonts (sometimes the font is just too light, sometimes the mix just feels.. weird) don't appeal to me at all.

What I hate is when Apple apologists say "you just have to get used to" the new look. I'm already used to the new look, but I still don't like it.

Android since Gingerbread has had superior design for me, but I'm more of a function over form kind of guy and don't want to mess around with things looking pretty when I need to get stuff done.

design is one thing, and you know what, its pretty good, however i can't understand how google - the WW leader in indexing - is letting people use a phone that takes up to 2-4 seconds to load the contact list... that's crazy.

You keep implying Apple released a phone with legitimate antenna issues. My understanding is this has been pretty much shown to be false. Apple was responding to a media shitstorm and Jobs said the issue was "overblown." In other words, it was probably an extremely rare, if not completely non-existent, issue but was magnified due to the fact that it happened to a well known blogger.

>And why I wouldn't want them? Are you deciding what I want or not?

No, Apple's deciding and the market votes with his wallet (and judging from their actually buying stuff --and at the quite expensive end of the market at that--, it has voted much in favor of those decisions for a decade or so).

There's always some people, call them sui generis, or mavericks, or loonies, that do want a floppy drive in their laptop, and not even because they have a specific business needs. They just love these flexible plastic suckers. Others can't live without physical Blue-Ray disks (just as some people swore by Betamax or quad cassetes).

And in the case of phones, some just got to have a 440 dpi screen (despite not seeing much different from 300), near field communication, wireless charging, 4G support in 2009 when it would burn through batteries of the era in 1 hour, and what have you. It's their choice. Just not a very popular one, or what most people would call sane, especially going forward.

So, feel free to use whatever, just don't complain if it's not what the era you live in deems relevant.

Apparently I don't want to choose my own keyboard, even though I hate the iOS keyboard.

>Tell that to my mother, who used her phone's built in FM radio daily until her retirement.

An older woman close on retirement is not exactly having her finger on the pulse of what's current, does she now?

I mean, I'm giving an example of a similar obsolete feature ("like not having a floppy disk drive an modern PCs") and your counter-argument is what a retiree does?

Might as well have replied "well, my grandfather rocks floppy disks on his 286 just fine".

The colours might make you unwell, but have you seen game centre in iOS 6? Forcing the user to use some sort of command line interface would be less offensive.

Agreed, I had a hard time getting the behavior described. Googling for "orange verse tangerine" finally did it. Other things that don't make as much sense to be compared, such as "giraffe verse tangerine" only produce a suggestion of "Did you mean..." but still it searched for my original query.

Seems Google does this for things that are likely comparisons (e.g. oranges and tangerines), which seems reasonable.

I work on Synonyms at Google. We're constantly tweaking our algorithms. It's possible that at one point one tweak made us more aggressive with replacing "verse" with "vs", but then later another tweak made it less aggressive. :-)

Google likes to suggest alternatives to words, he does mean verse as in verse of a song or poem, but (I never saw this particular one) had some searches where google was trying to turn verse into versus or vs. What I saw, and I've either gotten used to it or it's changed, was around 2009 when my searches stopped working one day. I'd use 3-5 keywords and Google's first page would only display pages using 1-2 of them. Invariably it was not the results I wanted. Quoting sections stopped meaning anything to Google searches so searching for phrases became dicy, as the words in the phrase would get split up. So if I was searching for "phrases became dicy" and new that was a line from the page I wanted, Google would return pages with maybe all three words but they'd be scattered about the page.