iPhone 5 + iOS 6 Catch-All

heavyfeul wrote:

Does the new iCloud mean that we will be able to update the OS without connecting to a computer?

I would love, one day, to see full parity across the Apple ecosystem, with cloud based file and application syncing. If Apple can figure that out, I will buy every damn device they make and wave bye-bye to Windows. I guess MS could get there first, but it seems like Apple is closer.

One of the key points in the presentation was the "no PC needed" idea.

With iOS 5, you will be able to buy and instantly use an iPad or iPhone without having to sync it to a computer. There will be wireless and cloud backups, as well as syncing of apps and music across devices (up to 10, I believe).

SommerMatt wrote:

One of the key points in the presentation was the "no PC needed" idea.

Nice! That is exactly the direction I hoped they would go.

SommerMatt wrote:

Just for my information, can people chime in with what kind of battery life they're getting with their iPhone 4? I tend to keep it in EDGE data mode 95% of the time... mostly because 3G service sucks near my house, but also because the battery seems to drain about three times as fast with it turned on. Also, does anyone know if installing "mobile substrate" significantly dings the battery life?

I keep 3G and Wifi on. It seems to drain about 1%/hour in standby. I think I charged it to full last night, and right now it's 65% after a normal day of reading on the Internet on the bus to work, podcast-listening at work, and playing games on the ride home from work. And one 36 second call. I really don't use the phone part a lot.

I usually plug it in every day to sync podcasts or app updates, but probably only need to actually charge enough for the next day maybe once every couple days.

ETA: This iPhone 4 is about two months old.

Axon wrote:

Trying to answer a simple question. Will iCloud have podcast functionality? It seems Apple are going for a standalone platform with their iOS devices so that should mean an updating of their current handling of podcasts.

I know about Podcaster (use it myself) but it would be nice to have something similar to Google Listen for the iPhone.

Downcaster does this pretty well, IMO. It's what I use to replace Google Listen.

I have been using Downcast and it is fantastic. The only problem is the audio starts skipping once in a great while and I have to reboot the iPhone to fix it.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

A year into using an iPhone 4, I don't feel the need to upgrade. It's holding up very well. This wasn't the case with the 3G when I had one of those. That thing got outdated quickly. I don't know if that helps.

Thanks, tuffalo...it does.

We're going to wait a week or two, see if another retailer matches Wal-mart, then we may go for it. Just worried about the jealousy factor when they unveil whatever whiz-bang features the iPhone 5 has.

Oh well, I've dealt with it for almost as long as I've had the 3G (got it a couple of months before the 3GS came out), I can deal with it again.

Downcast? Hmm. I've been using Podcaster and despite some bugs, it's pretty good.

But I am VERY particular about how I want a podcast client to work, and Podcaster is the closest so far but not there yet.

The rumor is that a new iPhone hardware will be revealed at the September event Apple has every year. Since there wasn't any announcement at WWDC this year, I'd be inclined to agree.

*Legion* wrote:

Downcast? Hmm. I've been using Podcaster and despite some bugs, it's pretty good.

But I am VERY particular about how I want a podcast client to work, and Podcaster is the closest so far but not there yet.

The only reason I raise the whole podcasting issue is I would love if iCloud supported podcasts so you could centrally manage them across all your devices. Nothing major, just how Google Reader integrates with Google Listen would be fine. Perhaps Apple are going to maintain that their current method of gathering podcasts on iOS devices is what they are going to employ going forward but you'll forgive me a little flight of fancy.

I stumbled across PODCASTER quite early, so I've been using that pretty much exclusively. I've seen a bunch of others pop up, though, but don't really have the energy needed to try them all out to see which is the best. I'd love to see some kind of comprehensive review.

Axon wrote:
*Legion* wrote:

Downcast? Hmm. I've been using Podcaster and despite some bugs, it's pretty good.

But I am VERY particular about how I want a podcast client to work, and Podcaster is the closest so far but not there yet.

The only reason I raise the whole podcasting issue is I would love if iCloud supported podcasts so you could centrally manage them across all your devices. Nothing major, just how Google Reader integrates with Google Listen would be fine. Perhaps Apple are going to maintain that their current method of gathering podcasts on iOS devices is what they are going to employ going forward but you'll forgive me a little flight of fancy.

I found Google Reader / Google Listen to be quite buggy, honestly. I don't know if they started updating Google Listen again, but about a year ago it was just a throwaway experiment that they maybe bugfixed once or twice.

SommerMatt wrote:

Just for my information, can people chime in with what kind of battery life they're getting with their iPhone 4?

I use my phone for business. I talk on the phone from two to four hours a day. I use apps (games and email) for around 30 minutes per day. I send and receive ~30 texts per day. My phone is typically around 20% battery at the end of the day. I never turn 3G off, and am connected to WiFi for 90% of my day. Phone is eight months old and has 18 days, 23 hours on the odometer.
For me, the battery life is great. I'd think I'm a pretty heavy user, and I have very little battery issues.

ELewis17 wrote:
SommerMatt wrote:

Just for my information, can people chime in with what kind of battery life they're getting with their iPhone 4?

I use my phone for business. I talk on the phone from two to four hours a day. I use apps (games and email) for around 30 minutes per day. I send and receive ~30 texts per day. My phone is typically around 20% battery at the end of the day. I never turn 3G off, and am connected to WiFi for 90% of my day. Phone is eight months old and has 18 days, 23 hours on the odometer.
For me, the battery life is great. I'd think I'm a pretty heavy user, and I have very little battery issues.

Battery life on the iPhone 4 is one of its strong points. I am continually amazed at how good it is. It will get me through a day of "heavy" using easily and 2 days of "light" using. The main thing is, it's good enough to not have to worry about constantly. Worrying about your battery all the time and feeling like you have to plug it in whenever you have a power source is absolutely no fun.

*Legion* wrote:

Downcast? Hmm. I've been using Podcaster and despite some bugs, it's pretty good.

But I am VERY particular about how I want a podcast client to work, and Podcaster is the closest so far but not there yet.

The things I like about Downcast:

1. Can choose to download or mark for streaming
2. 30 second and 2 minute skip to bypass commercials
3. Nice clean, easy to use interface
4. Lots of options on how to manage your podcast subscriptions

The iPad version's interface is excellent as well. All in all it is a very well designed podcatcher. I believe it costs money though. If I remember correctly it is $1.99.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:
ELewis17 wrote:
SommerMatt wrote:

Just for my information, can people chime in with what kind of battery life they're getting with their iPhone 4?

I use my phone for business. I talk on the phone from two to four hours a day. I use apps (games and email) for around 30 minutes per day. I send and receive ~30 texts per day. My phone is typically around 20% battery at the end of the day. I never turn 3G off, and am connected to WiFi for 90% of my day. Phone is eight months old and has 18 days, 23 hours on the odometer.
For me, the battery life is great. I'd think I'm a pretty heavy user, and I have very little battery issues.

Battery life on the iPhone 4 is one of its strong points. I am continually amazed at how good it is. It will get me through a day of "heavy" using easily and 2 days of "light" using. The main thing is, it's good enough to not have to worry about constantly. Worrying about your battery all the time and feeling like you have to plug it in whenever you have a power source is absolutely no fun.

I guess I have different definitions of "great" when it comes to this issue. I'm not sure what it is, exactly-- when I keep my phone on EDGE data, I get more or less the results you describe. As soon as I turn on 3G, it seems to drain about 1% per minute of use. I dunno. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it certainly seems that way.

My phone is jailbroken, but I'm not running any Winterboard stuff or anything else that should be draining battery power. I've seen a lot of debate on the internet about whether jailbreaking in and of itself will reduce battery life or not.

SommerMatt wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:
ELewis17 wrote:
SommerMatt wrote:

Just for my information, can people chime in with what kind of battery life they're getting with their iPhone 4?

I use my phone for business. I talk on the phone from two to four hours a day. I use apps (games and email) for around 30 minutes per day. I send and receive ~30 texts per day. My phone is typically around 20% battery at the end of the day. I never turn 3G off, and am connected to WiFi for 90% of my day. Phone is eight months old and has 18 days, 23 hours on the odometer.
For me, the battery life is great. I'd think I'm a pretty heavy user, and I have very little battery issues.

Battery life on the iPhone 4 is one of its strong points. I am continually amazed at how good it is. It will get me through a day of "heavy" using easily and 2 days of "light" using. The main thing is, it's good enough to not have to worry about constantly. Worrying about your battery all the time and feeling like you have to plug it in whenever you have a power source is absolutely no fun.

I guess I have different definitions of "great" when it comes to this issue. I'm not sure what it is, exactly-- when I keep my phone on EDGE data, I get more or less the results you describe. As soon as I turn on 3G, it seems to drain about 1% per minute of use. I dunno. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it certainly seems that way.

My phone is jailbroken, but I'm not running any Winterboard stuff or anything else that should be draining battery power. I've seen a lot of debate on the internet about whether jailbreaking in and of itself will reduce battery life or not.

That seems really strange as far as the 3G draining it that much. Maybe since the 3G is bad in your area, your phone keeps searching for networks, and that drains the battery.

My experience is that having a wireless network turned on when that network is almost unreachable will definitely drain the battery extra fast. On the other side, when 3G is good quality, it burns less power for me than EDGE. (Presumably because it can spend more time sleeping since the data transfers take less time.)

SommerMatt wrote:

I guess I have different definitions of "great" when it comes to this issue. I'm not sure what it is, exactly-- when I keep my phone on EDGE data, I get more or less the results you describe. As soon as I turn on 3G, it seems to drain about 1% per minute of use. I dunno. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it certainly seems that way.

My phone is jailbroken, but I'm not running any Winterboard stuff or anything else that should be draining battery power. I've seen a lot of debate on the internet about whether jailbreaking in and of itself will reduce battery life or not.

Is this an iPhone 4 or a 3G? My 3G had horrible battery life until I Reset its Settings. Something about the update to iOS 4 bugged it so that it chewed through battery like crazy.

Kurrelgyre wrote:
SommerMatt wrote:

I guess I have different definitions of "great" when it comes to this issue. I'm not sure what it is, exactly-- when I keep my phone on EDGE data, I get more or less the results you describe. As soon as I turn on 3G, it seems to drain about 1% per minute of use. I dunno. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it certainly seems that way.

My phone is jailbroken, but I'm not running any Winterboard stuff or anything else that should be draining battery power. I've seen a lot of debate on the internet about whether jailbreaking in and of itself will reduce battery life or not.

Is this an iPhone 4 or a 3G? My 3G had horrible battery life until I Reset its Settings. Something about the update to iOS 4 bugged it so that it chewed through battery like crazy.

iPhone 4.

SommerMatt wrote:
Kurrelgyre wrote:
SommerMatt wrote:

I guess I have different definitions of "great" when it comes to this issue. I'm not sure what it is, exactly-- when I keep my phone on EDGE data, I get more or less the results you describe. As soon as I turn on 3G, it seems to drain about 1% per minute of use. I dunno. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it certainly seems that way.

My phone is jailbroken, but I'm not running any Winterboard stuff or anything else that should be draining battery power. I've seen a lot of debate on the internet about whether jailbreaking in and of itself will reduce battery life or not.

Is this an iPhone 4 or a 3G? My 3G had horrible battery life until I Reset its Settings. Something about the update to iOS 4 bugged it so that it chewed through battery like crazy.

iPhone 4.

My fiance was having trouble with the battery life of her 4. She updated to the latest software and reset network settings and it drastically improved.

Went to Wal-mart to ask a few questions about going from an AT&T 3G to a Verizon 4. One of the questions was whether or not I'd be able to port my contacts, etc. over to the new device. They sucked air over their teeth and said that's "pretty tough to do" from the AT&T phones. Not sure if that means they can do it or not, but it sounds like it's not a routine procedure, at least for the highly skilled technicians at Wal-mart. Any advice from Goodjerdom on how to do this?

...and for that matter, any thoughts on going from an AT&T 3G to the Verizon 4? Any questions beyond "do I have reception in my area" that I need to be asking?

Mytch wrote:

...

Any advice from Goodjerdom on how to do this?

...and for that matter, any thoughts on going from an AT&T 3G to the Verizon 4? Any questions beyond "do I have reception in my area" that I need to be asking?

Check the previous iOS thread. DSGamer (I think) made the move and ran into some issues, and could surely walk you through what to expect.

Mytch wrote:

Went to Wal-mart to ask a few questions about going from an AT&T 3G to a Verizon 4. One of the questions was whether or not I'd be able to port my contacts, etc. over to the new device. They sucked air over their teeth and said that's "pretty tough to do" from the AT&T phones. Not sure if that means they can do it or not, but it sounds like it's not a routine procedure, at least for the highly skilled technicians at Wal-mart. Any advice from Goodjerdom on how to do this?

The iPhone uses Outlook to sync contacts, doesn't it? And it even syncs with google and yahoo... and iCal? Not sure why it would be difficult to do this.

Sync your contacts with Google or whatever your email provider is. Then sync them back down from the web when you get your new phone.

If you do use gmail and google calendar, you can use the exchange method on the iPhone 4 to set it all up seamlessly. I recently bought an iPad and this brought it all over just fine.

heavyfeul wrote:

The things I like about Downcast:

1. Can choose to download or mark for streaming
2. 30 second and 2 minute skip to bypass commercials
3. Nice clean, easy to use interface
4. Lots of options on how to manage your podcast subscriptions

The iPad version's interface is excellent as well. All in all it is a very well designed podcatcher. I believe it costs money though. If I remember correctly it is $1.99.

So I've used Downcast for a couple of days.

The Pros:
* Podcast renaming! Major "pet peeve" of mine. I hate when multiple podcasts come from the same source but are inconsistently named and thus spread all the frak over my podcast list. Morons. Being able to rename them to something sane is huge.
* Per-podcast volume adjustment. Excellent for normalizing habitually loud or soft podcasts.
* Cleaner playlist page (Podcaster has four unremoveable playlists eating up half of the initial Playlist screen, just crap I have to scroll by to get to my actual playlists)
* Download All button
* Does not have the obnoxious "resume" bug I experience with Podcaster (where, sometimes upon resuming the app, it hangs for a second, jumps into the Unplayed Podcasts playlist all by itself, and automatically starts playing something - WTF!)

The Cons:
* Slow feed parsing! OMG!
* A bit of UI slowness in general

I have one particular podcast with an unusually long feed. Podcaster takes just shy of 30 seconds to parse this feed. Downcast? 3 minutes! And I know this isn't just a quirk of this particular feed. Take any feed's parse time from Podcaster, multiply by about a factor of 5, and you'll get the feed parse time for Downcast. Not a big deal for habitually-trimmed feeds, but kind of a pain for long, unpruned feeds.

Still, the lack of the stupid "resume" bug is enough to make me use Downcast instead of Podcaster for now. For a while I thought the bug might be related to being jailbroken (certainly not everyone is experiencing this crap?), but I'm on 5.0 with no jailbreak now and the bug remains. Podcaster updates come and go and still it remains. So between that and podcast renaming, I think Downcast is my new home for now.

"Apple – Nuance VoiceOver technology coming to iOS 5, setting pages found in hidden menus"

http://www.tipb.com/2011/06/12/apple...

SommerMatt wrote:

"Apple – Nuance VoiceOver technology coming to iOS 5, setting pages found in hidden menus"

Is that like Dragon Dictation, only not in an app, but built into the OS?

ELewis17 wrote:
SommerMatt wrote:

"Apple – Nuance VoiceOver technology coming to iOS 5, setting pages found in hidden menus"

Is that like Dragon Dictation, only not in an app, but built into the OS?

It's supposed to be an integrated "voice command" system, from what I can tell.

Axon wrote:

Trying to answer a simple question. Will iCloud have podcast functionality? It seems Apple are going for a standalone platform with their iOS devices so that should mean an updating of their current handling of podcasts.

I know about Podcaster (use it myself) but it would be nice to have something similar to Google Listen for the iPhone.

I'm not running iOS 5 yet, so I don't know if iTunes is supporting podcasts through the clouds. However, there is nothing as of now to prevent Podcaster from going through iCloud.