iOS 5: The Software Steve Jobs Always Thought You Deserved [Review]

Mail

There are few real alternatives to Mail for handling your email in iOS, and that can be frustrating. We all deal with email differently. Some of us receive and send hundreds of emails a day, some only get a few. Some people need their emails to be encrypted, some people just want to dash an occasional note off with little fuss. Mail for iOS has always aimed itself more at the casual emailer than the power user, and while that’s fine for most people, it’s frustrating for people who would like to be able to handle most of their email on the go with their iPhone or iPads. Sadly, Mail for iOS 5 doesn’t really change much in that regard, but what additions it does add makes emailing from your iOS device more palatable than ever no matter what.

One of the big changes you’ll notice right off the bat is that Mail now comes with a unified inbox, merging all of your different mailboxes into one. Navigating between Mail inboxes has always been a bit of a chore — it’s just too easy to forget which mailbox you’re in and miss an important communique — so the unified inbox is a godsend for those of us managing multiple email accounts on our iOS devices. It’s optional, though, so if you’d rather switch manually between a personal and work mailbox, that’s still totally doable… and you’ll even get some sexy new mailbox icons to help tell them apart.

Another addition that will surely be appreciated by enterprise users is that Mail for iOS 5 now supports S/MIME encryption. If you’re using an Exchange server, you can now send and receive encrypted messages, and you can tell when you’re doing so because a little lock icon will appear in the message box. Personally, this isn’t something I have needed to use much, but it’s been a feature much clamored for in enterprise, and makes the iPhone and iPad even more compelling for IT departments to roll out in big businesses.

Otherwise, much of what is new in iOS 5 are small little flourishes rather than robust new features or radical overhauls.

Tap on a word in Mail, for example, and you can now format it in rich-text using bold, underline or italic options by pressing the ‘more’ arrow on the pop-up contextual menu. Frankly, it’s a little clunky, and not likely to be used much… we’d much rather see Apple incorporate rich text into iOS 5’s keyboard somehow. Still, it’s there if you need it.

Taking a cue from iBooks, you can also now define words in email. Again, just tap on the word and press ‘Define’ to have iOS 5 call up a dictionary definition for that word. Again, hardly essential — most of us do not get emails filled with words we don’t know — but certainly nice to have in a pinch.

While not a Mail exclusive feature, this is probably a good time to talk about iOS 5’s new split keyboard option in iOS 5, since Mail is by and large the app most people do the majority of their on-the-go typing in. Typing emails on the iPad has always been a bit wonky: either you need to treat your iPad like a laptop keyboard, or you need to hunt and peck. The split keyboard makes typing in an email on the iPad as easy as sending a text on a BlackBerry: all you do is slide the “hide keyboard” button up until the letters split into two panes, each one perfect for thumb entry. It’s a wonderful addition that makes entering text on the iPad infinitely easier for those of us who don’t want to treat our tablets like a full sized keyboard or oversized iPhone, and it makes Mail for iOS 5 more enjoyable to compose emails in than ever.

In all honesty, we have as much of a love-hate relationship with Mail for iOS 5 as we ever did. If you receive any tangible volume of email, you’ll still grumble at all the things Mail can’t do, like message filtering, canned responses, multiple signatures, etc. Mail still isn’t a replacement for a desktop email client for a lot of users, particularly enterprise, which is particularly frustrating in light of Apple’s PC Free push with iOS 5. Even so, though, Apple’s added a few nice new features that help make emailing on-the-run for both casual and power users just that little bit more painless and pleasurable.

And if Mail for iOS 5 still doesn’t do it for you? Well, it’s not like you have much of a choice. The inability of other iOS email apps to work in the background is such a serious handicap that Mail is still pretty much the only game in town.

Calendar

Amongst the default iOS programs, Calendar is the big poweruser app: you either never use it, or you live in it. Over the course of the last couple of years, though, more and more powerusers have been seduced away from Calendar’s embrace to the land of third-party day planners.

iOS 5 does a lot right to stop this migration. It effortlessly ties into iCloud to make sharing calendars easier than ever, while giving users just as much control over their calendars as they do under OS X for the first time, all the while polishing away some rough edges that take the pain out of managing your day.

On the iPad, Apple has tweaked the faux leather styling to more closely match that of the Lion version of Calendar. It’s not a big change — the patina on the leather’s just a tad lighter, a squidge yellower — but along with iCloud synchronization and some other usability tweaks, it does make the desktop and tablet versions of Calendar feel like just different methods of interacting with the same app. And that’s the way it should be: your “calendar” shouldn’t be a program, it should be an abstraction, a series of data points for your life, to be manipulated in any way you please.

Another carryover from the desktop version of Calendar is the heat map view of your schedule, which you can see in the iPad’s new yearly view. Look at your calendar by year and days are now color coded according to how busy you are on those days, with a free day represented by white, busy days coded yellow and orange, and jam-packed days flaring up red.

iPhone users get a new landscape view. Just turn your device on its side and your iPhone’s accelerometer will recognize the perspective change, presenting a segmented week view that makes checking out what you have on in the coming week as easy as a flick of a wrist.

From a functional perspective, one big change in Calendar with iOS 5 is the ability to rename, add or delete calendars directly from your iPhone or iPad. Previously, to accomplish these tasks, you needed to do it by tethering your iPhone or iPad to your Mac or PC through the USB cable and edit your Calendar in the desktop app. This might seem like a small tweak, an extra “nice to have feature,” but it’s indicative of Apple’s deep commitment to going “PC Free” with iOS 5: there shouldn’t be anything you’re forced to use a PC for in a post-PC age.

Another major new feature is the ability to set default alert times in the “Mail, Contacts and Calendars” settings panel. You can now set default alert times for Birthdays, Events and All-Day Events. For example, you could tell iOS 5 to default to reminding you of an upcoming meeting an hour ahead of time, but to always give you two days notice before a friends’ birthday so you have enough time to get them a card. A very smooth usability addition.

With iOS 5, Apple’s also made it easier to add and adjust calendar entries. On any view, tapping and holding on a date will open up a new calendar event. Once the event is created, you can easily adjust the duration and tap-and-drag it to a new location. The end result is that it’s a lot less fiddly to add and adjust events.

One of the best new features of Calendar, though, is easy to miss: now that iCloud is free, users can now easily sync their calendars to the cloud and share them with friends without ponying up for a MobileMe subscription, or syncing with the sometimes fiddly Google Calendars website.

In almost every respect, Calendar is an impressive update over the version that shipped with iOS 4. In many ways, it’s a showcase app for Apple’s determination to finally cut the cord between iOS devices and the PC.

Sadly, though, there is one glaring oversight when it comes to truly taking iOS 5’s Calendar PC free: calendar sharing can’t be done either in-app or in iOS 5’s settings. Instead, you need to log in to iCloud to share a calendar with a colleague… and that can only be done on a Mac or PC. It’s hard to believe that this slipped Apple by, considering what a premium they’ve placed on separating the umbilical between the PC and iOS this generation, and we have no idea how to explain it.

Sharing issues aside, though, iOS 5’s Calendar update is in its own right reason enough to upgrade your iPhone or iPad for professionals and power users. The only criticisms we can level at the app are conceptual: this is Calendar at its finest.

Photos and Camera

iOS 5 packed in a lot of new features for Apple’s revamped Camera app. Users now have quicker access to the camera, better photo composition tools, and the ability to edit photos on the fly before sharing them with friends. While all the features Apple has added are great, some of them are more important than others, so let’s review what goodies Apple has packed into the new iOS 5 Camera app.

Lockscreen Camera Button – This feature is a heaven-send from Apple. Getting into the camera app in iOS 4 use to be a pain. If you didn’t use your iPhone’s camera that often, but found yourself in a moment where you needed to quickly snap a picture, you might have struggled for 30seconds trying to remember which folder you put your Camera app in. The Lockscreen Camera Button changes all that. Loading up the Camera app on the fly has never been easier or faster, meaning you’re less likely to miss those moments you want to capture.

Shutter Button/Volume Button – The ability to use the iPhone’s volume button as a shutter button is a new feature for iOS 5, despite Apple’s previous banning of other apps with similar functionality. This is one of the best new features for the camera app as it essentially gets rid of the awkwardness of trying to tap to focus before quickly hitting the shutterbutton on the screen.

Auto Exposure/Auto Focus – Controlling the exposure of the iPhone’s camera has always been a bit tricky in previous versions of iOS. Sometimes picture would have to be taken off center to get the lighting adjusted properly for the exposure. Thankfully, iOS 5 brings the ability to set exposure and focus automatically. A single tap and hold on the area you want to auto-expose/auto-focus locks in place leaving users the ability to change the angle or composition of their photos without losing exposure and focus. Some of the better camera apps have had this feature baked in for a while now. While iOS 5’s AE/AF lock is an improvement, I still enjoy using apps like Camera+ more when I’m attempting to take a higher quality picture. Apple’s Camera app only lets the user lock the exposure and focus on the same point, whereas with other apps users can set the auto-exposure on one point in the frame while selecting a different point as the focus. Hopefully we’ll see some upgrades to these features in the future.

Phot0 Editing – Apple’s new version of the Camera app comes with a few basic editing tools. Users can now reduce red-eye, auto-enhance, rotate, and crop their images after they’ve taken them. Auto-Enhance does a serviceable job at bringing out more richness in colors, but you can’t select the level of intensity of the filter like you can in iPhoto. The Red-Eye removal tool works pretty well, but because the iPhone’s camera still doesn’t perform that well in low-light conditions I haven’t had much need for it. Crop provides 9 different constraints so you can adjust your photos to be printed as a 4×3, 16×9, or 3×3 square. Users looking for advanced filters, and artsy editing options made popular via Instagram will have to use a secondary app though as there’s not much depth in the editing capabilities of the Camera app. These new editing features are very basic and aren’t meant to supplement desktop processing, but if users are wanting to edit a picture quickly without having to fuss with advanced features, then the Camera app provides a quick way to get your pictures edited before you share them with friends.

Grid lines & HDR – Under the “Options” menu in the camera screen, users will find the ability to turn on the grid view, as well as shoot in HDR. Grid lines seem like they should have been in the app years ago, but have only recently been added. Maybe Apple noticed a lot of terrible photo composition on Flickr and decided to help users understand the Rule of Thirds. HDR, High Dynamic Range, is used to bring out more definition and color to photos by taking three pictures at the same time (one over exposed, one under exposed, and one normal) and stacking them on top of one another. A lot of times HDR can make pictures look great. However, there are times when this setting will make pictures look unrealistic. Users can choose to save a regular picture as well as the HDR version to their camera roll, but HDR pictures take longer for the iPhone to process. I’d love to see the ability to add an HDR filter to regular pictures in the editing process in order to save time (a feature that can be found in quite a few other apps).

The new iOS 5 Camera app brings with it some much needed improvements. Quickly editing photos before sending them to Twitter, along with the inclusions of the Lockscreen Camera button, and Volume Shutterbuttons, will quickly catch on with users and we’ll be wondering why we suffered along for so many years without them. However, all these basic improvements are just that; basic. There are a lot of great camera apps out there that have had these features and more for a while now, which make using Apple’s built in camera app a bit old school.

Safari, Reading List and Safari Reader

There’s three major new changes to Mobile Safari in iOS 5: Reading List, Safari Reader and tabbed browsing on the iPad. The only one worth really getting excited about though is Safari Reader.

John Brownlee

John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.