Tuesday, March 29, 2016

iOS 9.3 Review (With an iPhone 6s Review thrown in for Good Measure)


So technology promised to make everything better. There is no greater example of how that all failed than iOS 9.3 well maybe the iPhone 6s but we'll get to that. Everything feels harder to do these days, things as simple as finding all of your music, restoring backups on your phone with YOUR ACTUAL CONTENT STILL ATTACHED!!!!!!!! *Ahem* Finding any option that you want to use, and even using your favourite apps. All of this will be covered and moor.

All I wanted to do was listen to my shared music from my computer. This was always an easy thing to do once you had switched it on, there was just a big fat button you could press to find it. Now you need to touch a part of your phone, on an image that is so wrong, it feels at the least dirty, if not completely rage inducing. In fact it's such a horrible experience that it should never be spoken of again and it won't coz' we'll all be switching to Android, or at least Nokia 3310's because they are now better.

So you're addicted to your smartphone now and like the rest of us you're pretty much fucked, you could switch OS but then you need to learn a new operating system, figure out how to bring over all your content and well actually that is probably going to be easier than upgrading to a new iPhone these days. Why? Because iPhones can't be backed up properly anymore. After backing up my iPhone 5 and then switching to my iPhone 6s using said backup, I found a lot of my content was missing. Whilst there were one or two apps missing that wasn't the main thing that bugged me. The fact that it had only transferred 3 songs from my phone playlist really bugged me. Why? In part because they are the fussiest thing to get back and also because this whole process is handled by iTunes, you know, the music player. Well, the thing that once played music but now has become so bloated even it doesn't know what it does. My phone also started saying this constantly when nothing was plugged in:


When I took it to Apple they told me it was probably due to my backup and that I should wipe everything and start again but since 9.3 it has stopped doing it. 1 point for 9.3!

So how do you find an option in iOS these days? Well there is a search function, because you can no longer keep track of what features there are these days let alone actually know what bizarre name Apple has chosen to call them. So you mash in what you hope is an approximation of an option that exists and then play with a slider that maybe effects whatever you wanted affected, I think it was the GFX option, or was that VFX? Don't try and go looking for the option you want through the menus as it will now be hidden under General>Options_That_Aren't_Really_General>Please_Stop>This_Joke_Has_Run>Too_Long.

There's that mode where night time and day time play a role but really this is a feature to stop you using your phone due to the severe brain damage you are receiving so don't use it. Also it will totally annoy you the minute you are binging on your phone when you probably shouldn't be. The discolouration of Night Shift does not show up in screenshots which is probably handy most of the time but really annoying when you are trying to display it's effects on your blog.


Apps make an appearance via the app store. They are probably the best feature of iOS 9.3 but none of them will work properly under it or they will only work properly under iOS 9.3 causing you to update but wish you hadn't because now 5 of your favourite apps will never work again and they won't be updated because the app developer is dead, rich or developing a feature that Apple will steal in a later update.

What else is there? Oh yeah the battery is smaller in the 6s than the 6 to allow for force touch technology -2 points for iPhone 6s. Force touch is mostly annoying but you can set it to be less sensitive and not go off all the time so there is that -1. So overall I give iOS 9.3 1/10 and the 6s -3/10.