iOS is outdated in terms of functionality and boring in terms of aesthetics.

In the last few weeks I must have seen at least 5 to 6 articles and a lot of tweets that are basically saying that Apple needs to freshen up iOS. Like something Android did when it moved from 2.x to 3.x and then 4.x. Android today is a modern looking, modern behaving, slick and smooth operating system. While iOS remains largely the same. Sure, some controls were changed from rectangular to circular, but the whole OS has remained the same familiar constant. Well, you know what they say, familiarity breeds contempt. For a lot of people, this is exactly what is happening.

Exhibit 1: The title of this linked post is “45 Unique iPhone Home Screens Explained“. If these iPhone home screens are unique in any way, I must get myself some of the weed this guy is smoking.

Especially the international tech press. These people are all eartly adopters and have always bought the latest Apple offerings as soon as they were available. but, to go year after year after year without any change in the feel of the product has finally started getting to them. To be fair, I have been ranting about how boring and childish iOS looks only because I like trying out and using new things, especially on a new shiny gadget. No such luck with Apple products. iOS is the main reason that I have never been compelled to buy a newer iPad. My iPad 2 is just fine. There seems to be nothing that the new iPads offers that compels me to upgrade. Compare that with how I feel right now about getting the Nexus 4. The anticipation is palpable.

To set the record straight, I love Apple hardware. It’s definitely worth the price. Some other devices are catching up on the build quality side of things. The Nexus 4 is a good example. It’s got a glass back and everything. On the software side, iOS has been left way behind. Way, way behind. I measure this as…

The number of things you can do with your smartphone without the need for a third party app.

The best example of this is the Google Ecosystem. Search + Maps + Now = Awesomeness. Third party apps used = 0. Windows phone and iOS are at par for me on this front. The only real integration they have are twitter and facebook. Seeing the demos of how Google now works it is just breathtaking. It works in India too. Unlike iOS features that demand an American accent not to mention they even tend to fail in regions they support. For Apple, all these technologies are a mish mash of different companies but for Google, it is a more integrated, more cohesive “one company”. That is definitely an advantage.

However, I can actually go a step further with this argument.

iOS is outdated in terms of functionality and boring in terms of aesthetics, on the iPhone.

Yes. That actually represents my view more completely. I have two iOS devices at home. My iPad 2 and the wife’s iPhone 4S. Every time I pick up the iPhone to try and use it, the first thought that comes to me is, “Why the hell are these icons and buttons so bloody big?” iOS looks kludgy on the phone. However, on the iPad, it looks fine and more importantly, it feels fine. So what does apple need to do? Differentiate the two use cases for iOS. One for the phone and the other for the tablet and maybe some day for the desktops and laptops as well.

Too much to ask / do? Surely not for the world’s most valuable company! Hmm?

Well, for example;

• You forgot to email those important files from your home laptop to your office laptop.
• You forgot to hit send on that mail that is lying in your drafts folder.
• Your wife wants to use the home computer but can’t figure out where everything is in Windows 8 / Mac OS X
• Your dad / mom call you for troubleshooting their computer but that’s so hard to do on the phone and you end up with a headache.
• You started a scan in the morning but ran off to work so you didn’t know if your home computer was infected or not.
• You are the kind of person who shuts down (WTF?) their home computer every time you leave the house. (and you drive a hybrid)
• You were browsing Moviefone.com and realized that “The Dark Knight Rises” is out on DVD and you must have it! (Don’t pretend that you don’t check Moviefone.com every other day)
• You are just bored and wanted to see what the home computer was up to…

See, plenty of times when you may want to access that computer which you can’t right now. That’s where Splashtop comes in. This is a app for iOS and Android (and BlackBerry too) devices that lets you control up to 5 computers (Windows or Mac or Linux) from your iPad or Android tablet. This review will be focus on the iPad app and its usage.

Splashtop is extremely simple to use. All the computer that you need to access need to have installed the Splashtop Streamer software available from the Splashtop website. This Streamer client is available for Windows, Mac and Linux as well. On the iPad you need to install the Splashtop app. (The Splashtop App for iOS is currently on sale for $2.99 instead of the regular price of $19.99.) Once you have the app installed, you need to create an account with Splashtop and this account will be used to access the computers that have the streamer installed. On the desktop / laptop you need to login to your Splashtop account that you created through the app, and that’s it.

There are two types of access that this app can provide. The standard app which you get allows you to access these computers as long as they are on the same WiFi network. This may be useful to quickly access your computer from your iPad in case you are not in the same room. Not very useful, although it is a convenience. The second option is where all the power of this app lies. The Splashtop Anywhere Access Pack (AAP) allows you to access your computers remotely from anywhere. This is an in app purchase for $0.99 per month or for $9.99 for one year. I strongly recommend that you take the annual pricing so that you won’t be restricted by time. Although, if you just want to try it out, you may want to start with the one month purchase of the AAP.

The most important thing that I like about the app is the simplicity and ease of use. No complicated set ups and no run around for connecting. Just a simple login and you are ready to go. The aim is clearly to not bother the user with the intricacies of remote access. The app even optimizes the display quality depending on your connection.

The smoothness of the app is really what sets this apart from other remote apps that I have used. However, a good internet connection is definitely required. I would assume really bad quality video in case you don’t have a good connection. The does a good job of streaming video and audio from your computer to your iPad. However, I found that, this is heavily dependent on the program that the video is running in on the computer. In short VLC = good stream through Splashtop, Windows Media Center = bad quality. Also, Windows Media Center does not run in full screen view since full screen is not yet supported.

I am currently using this with two of my computers and I have yet to find anything that doesn’t work.

Splashtop is currently on sale on iOS and seems to be free for Android. It is also available for the Blackberry Playbook where it is listed at about $6.99.

Sounds un-thought to me. Apart from that, there are only little annoyances that bother me based on what I have seen so far. The main annoyance is the fact that it looks like Apple will need to update this product pretty soon. For apple, releasing a product without retina display At this time just seems weird. On the other had, it does have 4G LTE. Which came as a surprise to me. But the display will need to be updated pretty soon.

When the iPad Mini will come out in India is anyone’s guess. I am guessing early next year. Not before. I would be willing to sell my iPad 2 and get the Mini. The smaller size is better for my use. Although I have a feeling that the India pricing is not going to be very nice. With the base model Mini being $349 it seems that the India price will be close to 21000 and that is a bit steep. In any case, as I have said before, this smaller form factor is a lot better than lugging around a 10″ device.

The form factor of the Mini doesn’t seem to be 16:9 and this means that there should be some black bands still on the screen when you see movies and videos. By this will be much less of a problem on the Mini than it is on the larger iPad.  I am not a developer but I feel that Apple has sort of restricted itself due to the way apps have to be designed for specific screen resolutions and scaling is not really an option. This means more work for both Apple in case they want to release a new form factor, and for the developers who need to start working on supporting new resolutions if Apple decides to change the resolutions available.

However, with the release of the IPad Mini, Apple has covered all the 3 main sizes of mobile devices that you should be covering. A display update to the iPad Mini should ensure that the resolutions can be frozen for some time to come. The iPhone still needs to get a bigger screen in my opinion. What Apple should now focus on is marketing these shiny new devices to people in countries like India. The iPhone will never be a success story in India, or at least not in the near future mainly because of better phones available in the market at that price point. However the iPad is a different story altogether. This device is unmatched in its looks, performance and use case, not to mention the apps. I see more iPads in India than iPhones. This is the category that Apple should be focusing on to drive their presence and sales in India.

But that 7″ size really excited me in spite of the fact that a lot of people were not happy with the smaller screen. I genuinely felt that their problem wasn’t with the screen size, but with the fact the the Tab wasn’t an iPad. That size was the perfect fit for a lot of things. But there was no device close to the fit and polish of the iPad and since the iPad was cheaper than the Galaxy Tab at the time, I bought the iPad as well.

Last year Amazon released the Kindle Fire. A 7″ tablet with their highly customized version of Android. Apparently it’s done well. Then in July this year Google released the Nexus 7, their flagship 7″ tablet. This too has done well. Mind you, when I say done well doesn’t mean that they have come anywhere close to the numbers that the iPad has sold. However, for devices that a lot of people said would never work, because people would rather buy an iPad, they have done well.

There is no denying that the 7″ size combined with the widescreen layout is the way to go. I for one an tired of the black bands on the iPad while watching movies.

For me, the 7″ still remains the ideal size for a tablet, and now since Apple is finally admitting that they think the same, it’s all good. It’s a given that Apple always planned to have a smaller size of iPad. It would be silly to think that they are releasing a 7″ iPad just because of the Fire and the Nexus 7, but it would also be silly to think that this isn’t one of their data points. The success / lack of apparent failure of the Fire and the Nexus 7 means that the market is ready for a well made 7″ tablet.

People speculate as to the timing of the release and the effect that it might have on the sales original iPad. I believe that the 7″ will sell a lot more than the original iPad ever did. This will in turn give a boost to other manufacturers to make and release high quality 7″ tablets. Maybe even a 7″ Microsoft Surface.

The event on 23rd October should give us the final view of the iPad Mini. I would be happier if it was a 16:9 layout

I think that the time of the 7″ tablets is definitely here and I for one am extremely glad. Reading, carrying and all other issues related to tablets just got easier to deal with.

A quick search for “YouTube” revealed a lot of downloaders. Then I saw Jasmine. Yes that’s a name you wouldn’t readily associate with YouTube. However, it is a YouTube app and a beautifully designed one. Jasmine has a multi-pane design and is very easy to use. due to the use of this pane based design you immediately know what to do and how to navigate. Assuming you are used to the many similarly designed iOS apps.

The Jasmine YouTube app. “Paned” to perfection with all the features that you need

Jasmine provides you with almost all the features that you might want from an app that is for YouTube. Basic things like searching and browsing various categories of videos and more personalized things like your playlists and subscriptions after you log in with your YouTube account. The only thing I couldn’t find was the “My Videos” section that I use in the browser based YouTube to see all my uploaded videos.

There is no video management functionality and that’s fine. But hey, the iPad is not really known for its “Content Creation” capabilities. Jasmine also allows you to share videos directly from the list view and you can also add the videos to your favorites or to a playlist that you created earlier.

Swipe a listing to the right to show the options for Sharing, Favourite and Add to Playlist

There are a lot of extra settings that you can play with. You can choose between a light (default) and dark (too dark, in my opinion) theme and you have some control over the playback controls. There is also a “Parental Controls” option that is present in the PRO version on Jasmine. I have been unable to find out how much the PRO version costs, but if you have kids who are old enough, you might want to upgrade. Otherwise, the free version has no restrictions that I could make out. Not even ads!

All the settings available in the app including the option to sign in to YouTube and the option to change between Light and Dark themes.

That is all about Jasmine. You can get it from the App Store for free.

The traffic data looks accurate for the current time of day

There is also an option to see the traffic patterns for an area for a particular time of day. That’s a definite plus. It is going to be really nice that I can see what I can expect from traffic at a particular time if I am going in to an unknown area for a meeting.

Settings to choose day and time of day for the traffic pattern at that time

Traffic data is currently available for Bengaluru, Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai, Pune and Hyderabad.

Coming to Turn by Turn Navigation. I have used this in the past by side-loading the US app to my phone and it was also present in various ROMs that I had flashed on my phone. All I can say is that it worked. TBT Navigation was not something that I used much since I already knew where I was going and how to get there. I can definitely think of using TBT Navigation in case I am in a new city, but it isn’t something that I would depend upon.

Image courtesy The Official Google India Blog

Especially since there are dedicated navigation apps available on most platforms that work on industry standard navigation maps. These maps are much more detailed and contain validated information and locations. Yes, they are generally not free like Google maps, but they would be the one I would trust over Google Maps Navigation any day.

All in all, I am happy that the traffic data is available to help me make more informed trip decisions.

For this comparison I went through a lot of the articles that are currently available and also the iOS6 announcement. For information regarding Google Maps, trust me, I know! For my comparison, I would be looking at the features being offered by both maps in the context of my use cases.

Finding Places / Locating Addresses

As far I can make out, google maps will win this for India. Mainly due to the face that there is a lot of user generated content on google maps. This will make it easier for people to find the smaller locations more easily. A major issue in India is that most road names have undergone name changes and it gets difficult to find places. The user generated content ensure that local/prevalent names of roads and places are also available and searchable.

Routes / Navigation

Routing on both maps would be comparable for India. I don’t expect any real benefit of one over the other.

Navigation is not essential for me as I can figure out where to go if I have the route. iOS6 maps will be using maps from TomTom, which covers India very well. I expect most places to be searchable however only by their official names. I am not sure if Apple will offer navigation in India, but that would be definitely possible since they will be using TomTom. Google still does not offer turn by turn navigation in India. However, there are a lot of third party apps that are available that use google maps and offer turn by turn navigation on various platforms. I have had a chance to use these on both Android and Windows Phone. So this will be a win for Apple if they enable turn by turn navigation for India.

Satellite Views / 3D Views

Both Apple and Google will not offer this for India since none of them have “fleets of aircraft” flying over the country taking pictures. [only the CIA is doing this and they are not known to share data ] Google currently has a pretty high resolution 45degree view and Apple is going to be bringing very detailed and high resolution 3D views to iOS6. Both these can be rotated and go down pretty close to the ground. Why would anyone want this functionality apart from the wow factor of eye candy? I haven’t used these for much except to explore places from afar. Even for that you can get pretty close to places with Google Street View. More on that later. Coming back to India, there are no 45 degree or 3D views and the satellite images are low resolution. So neither Google nor Apple gets my vote on this. Eye candy is great, but the utility of beautiful 3D maps is very little. (unless you are a terrorist )

Street View

For the places where this is available, Street View is without a doubt, the best tool available for searching and locating places and businesses. Since we are talking about India, this tool is of no relevance to me here. However, I have written in the past about catching the Google Street View car in various cities of India. Unfortunately there is no comment from Google on if and when we would be likely to get Street View in India. From the lucky ones who do have the benefit of Street View, I doubt they would use any other tool for getting up close to the locations that they are looking for.

Basically for my use cases, both Google and Apple’s maps would do fine, with Google having a slight edge when it comes to user generated content. If Apple offers turn by turn navigation in India, then it will be a major point for Apple, in my view. I would personally prefer Google maps since the third party apps on my Windows Phone use that as a base.

A Better Split Keyboard

The keyboard on the iPad splits down the middle to enable you to use it without setting the iPad down on a surface. This was a feature that I was waiting for ever since it was shown in the preview. I had seen a split keyboard implementation before that in a Microsoft event where they were talking about Windows 8 on tablets.

The split keyboard has mostly been a disappointment. The main reason for this is the final size of the keys after the keyboard has been split. They are too small for my fat fingers. I realise that Apple may again be applying the 70% rule but I would really like to see the ability to resize the split board.

On the Subject of Icons on the Home Screens

This is another of my pet peeves. I hate auto arranged icons on any screen, be it my desktop or my phone. Its irritating and it looks bad and it prevents me from accessing the Apps that I want to the way I want to.

Related to this, I would also like the App icons to all not be on the home screens. You end up having too many Apps and too many screens with no default logic of arranging the icons on the screens. If it was at least alphabetical, you could find that elusive App whose name starts with a T. Ideally, I would like an App drawer so that I can keep my home screens free of crappy looking box shaped icons.

Also, I would like App icons to be able to display more data on them or in the form of widgets. I am not a big fan of the red numbers on icons. At the very least, Apple should enable widgets in the notification area for iPad as well. Makes more sense since there is a lot more room to play with.

A Better Maps Application

The Google maps App on the iPad is so bad that I just don’t feel like using it. I need something better. The next iteration of iOS better have a native maps App ideally from Apple.

General UI Tweaks

I have said before that iOS by itself looks dated and kludgy. Some of the things that add to the age are things like the glassy reflective look all over the place, the square icons with rounded corners and the general boring-ness of the entire interface. All this really depresses me until I launch a good looking App. I like the fact that the OS is supposed to get out of the way and keep your focus on the Apps that you use. But it wouldn’t hurt to keep pace with design directions of the present.

In my day job I am a sales person. I spend a lot of time out of office meeting clients and prospects. Every meeting is an opportunity that needs to be documented. This used to happen on notepads and notebooks. I have a stack of notepads that are a testimonial to how much there is that needs to be documented. Using notepads and notebooks is fine, however, finding that one page quickly among the hundreds of pages of notes is some not a nice experience. Noteshelf has now replaced my need to carry, store and worry about notebooks.

Noteshelf provides an easy way for you to take notes on the iPad and maintain multiple notebooks for multiple clients/events/meetings or what ever else. But wait, before you go any further, let me clear one thing up. Noteshelf is not for typed notes, its for handwritten notes. Also, it works best with a stylus. Stylus, you ask? Have we gone back in time where Bill Gates is king and everyone uses stylues/stylii? Didn’t Steve Jobs say that if you need a pen/stylus, you have failed? Well, they were both wrong.

When it comes to taking notes, there is nothing faster than pen on paper. Also, there is nothing more irritating than a person sitting in front of you, furiously typing away on a laptop while you are trying to have a conversation with them. We have already decided that we don’t want to use paper notebooks. Noteshelf addresses all these issues. One, the notes are digital, two, making notes on the iPad does not distract the people around you and 3 its as fast as taking notes with a pen on paper.

The Noteshelf interface is just that, a shelf. A shelf where you can store and display all your notebooks. You can have groups of Notebooks that can be inside a folder. For example, a “Clients” folder in which you can have all your client specific notebooks. But that’s enough about the part that doesn’t really matter as much. You would definitely expect this kind of organizing ability in any application of this sort right? Right. So lets move onto the meat of the application. The note taking.At the end of the day, the ease of note taking is what really sets Noteshelf apart. The note taking screen can be customized with many choices of paper layouts. Quite a few of them come with the application and you can choose what paper to use for any page. You also have the option to import any image of a page layout into the application and use that as your paper. Once you have made your choice on the paper, you can start the writing.

The main issue with trying to write on the iPad with either your finger or a capacitive stylus is that you wont be able to write as finely as you would on a real notebook with a pen. For the writing to be anywhere close to what your real handwriting is like you will have to write bigger than you normally would. Noteshelf addresses this by providing you a “Zoomed-In” view of the area that is currently being written to. Whatever you write in this zoomed-in area will appear the normal size on the page. This really helps a lot.

The writing is smooth and you can replicate your real hand writing after a little bit of practice. Once you start, the speed comes naturally. Apart from the zoomed-in writing area, the other great feature is the wrist protection. The most comfortable way to write on the iPad (or anywhere for that matter) is if you are able to rest a good part of your wrist on the writing media. We all know how handwriting is affected once you reach the last few lines of a page. With the zoomed-in writing area, you are basically writing in only one area of the iPad screen. This area is just below the center of the screen and doesn’t change if you don’t explicitly move it around. Just below that area, Noteshelf provides you with a wrist protection region which prevents the screen from recognizing any inputs in that area. This allows you to comfortably rest your wrist on the iPad while writing.

The third well thought out feature is the auto advance feature. The auto advance area is a designated area that automatically shifts the zoomed-in area forward when you reach it. When you come to the end of the line, the auto advance moves the zoom to the next line as well. This is a very useful feature and allows continuous writing and ensures that you don’t have to manually shift the zoom area every time you reach the borders of it.

Any of the notes in Noteshelf can be exported from the app via email or synced to various service like Dropbox or Evernote. The pages are converted to either PDF or an image to send them. You can also backup the either Noteshelf database from iTunes.

Apart from the features mentioned above there are also a lot of small things to enhance your note taking experience. You can insert images from either your library or take new ones directly from the app. You can use icons from an extensive list to annotate your notes. You can highlight text in various colours. You also have a lot of colours to choose for your note taking. You can also change the size of the pen that you are using. The developers of Noteshelf have also informed me that features such as inserting shapes and actually typing out parts of the note are features that they are working on already.

A note on the stylus and the scratch guard. I use a capacitive stylus with a flat tip. You also get styluses with rubber tips, but these will not be the best for note taking due to the excessive friction. A scratch guard on the iPad screen is a good idea too. Preferably a matte one, since I found that it gives a more papery feel when you are writing.

There are also various in-app purchases that you can do to make your shelf or your notebook look nicer. Noteshelf is available from the App Store for $4.99.

In the past I had been using an app which has now become Pocket Garage HD (PGHD) and has a whole new look and feel. This app was the best that I could find and not cringe every time I launched it. However, at $4.99 this app doesn’t have all the features of the app that I am currently using on my Android phone, aCar. aCar is also $5 for the premium version and features everything that you may expect in an app for mileage tracking. Also, the $5 is a voluntary donation for an awesome app.

I don’t have as much confidence in the apps that are there for the iPad in this category. Due to this I have had to make alternate arrangements. All the features offered by a $4.99 app like Pocket Garage HD are offered for free by the web based mileage tracking tool called Fuelly. If I am on the iPad, Fuelly is where I now make all my entries for any fill ups or service information. A major plus of using Fuelly is that you can easily keep data between Fuelly and aCar updated since aCar accepts data exported from Fuelly in a .csv file.

Fuelly features a really nice and clean interface, offering all UK, US and Metric units to store your data. You can choose your currency by country and also see the basic graphs that are there along with all the statistics on a single page. You can add multiple vehicles and track them separately. Right now, all that I was doing on PGHD, I am doing on Fuelly, for free and in a better looking interface. While the look and feel of the website is the kind I like, you may prefer the overly stylized look of PGHD. I prefer clean interfaces with data and graphs displayed in a nice and clean format. This preference is just mine, of course. Fortunately the look doesn’t change the fact that Fuelly let’s me do everything that the current iPad apps allow me to do, but for free.

I am pretty sure that Fuelly would be a hot seller if they make an app for iOS and specifically for the iPad. As of now there is no app. However, this won’t stop you from using the site and is functions. Apart from the full site, Fuelly also features a really slick and fast mobile site that allows you to enter the fill up data especially on a smaller screen of your iPhone, Android or any other phone. You can access this mobile site by going to a different URL.

Fuelly also allows you to be slightly social with the data that you put in to it. You can post updates of your fill ups to Facebook and twitter. You can also share the link to your Fuelly page so that people can have access to the information that you have there. Others can the use this information to compare the performance of their own vehicles with yours. The latter, direct sharing of your Fuelly page seems to be more useful than the twitter or Facebook status updates. In case you are part of a Facebook Page or group for a particular vehicle, then it might serve a purpose though. If you need to connect Further to vehicle owners and are looking for advice, Fuelly also has a fairly large and active forum community which I am glad would like to help you out. This is something that I haven’t tried yet since I am not in the US.

At the end of the day, however, I feel that it is better to have an app rather than a website for anything that you want to do on your mobile device. Unfortunately, at least for the iPad, I don’t have anything that comes close to aCar and fortunately Fuelly does everything that the current set of iPad apps do and looks better while doing it.