TNW Review: A complete guide to Apple’s iOS 5 with iCloud, an OS 14 years in the making

Settings

The Settings app has gotten an absolute ton of new options that allows you to tweak your device and take control of the new iCloud features. Where applicable, I’ve talked about the settings panels related to those items in their sections, but there are a few items that are related to the iPhone’s system services that should be mentioned. Lets take a look at some of the new settings here.

Throughout the Settings app you’ll get a face full of the new toggle switch design that Apple cooked up for iOS 5. The earlier design was a rectangle with rounded corners, but this new look is more round than rect and has a pleasant effect.

Sounds

The Sounds panel has gotten a nice update and now allows you to choose a variety of tones for the alerts: New Voicemail, New Mail, Sent Mail, Calendar Alerts and the new Reminder Alerts and Tweets. In addition to the standard Ringtones section, you now have an Alert Tones section, which allows you to select from a list of shorter sounds that are more appropriate for alerts like incoming emails than a full-on ringtone.

This is an expansion on the old Text Tone section and offers a wide array of choices now, as opposed to the 6 available before.

Vibrations

Buried under the Sounds settings pane is the Vibration controls and a new section called Create New Vibration. This allows you to choose from a series of preset vibrations or, and this is very cool, create a custom vibration of your own by tapping.

These can also be assigned to individual people and incoming alerts, allowing you to create a custom vibration for certain callers and events. This way you will know exactly what is coming in without having to take your device out of your pocket.

Location Services/System Services

In keeping with its concession to Congress that it could make it even more evident when an app is requesting a user’s location and exactly what types of information are gathered and used, Apple has expanded on the Location Services menu by adding a sub-menu at Location Services>System Services.

The System Services menu shows you exactly what parts of the OS are accessing location-based information. These include:

• Cell Network Search
• Compass Calibration
• Diagnostics & Usage
• Location-Based iAds
• Setting Time Zone
• Traffic

Most of these are pretty boring as it is a no-brainer that your device would need access to your device’s location for these features (some may not display on your iPad). But there are a couple of standouts.

For one, if you’re absolutely opposed to getting location-targeted iAds, you can toggle those off here.

The really interesting bit, however, is the the last toggle, the one labeled ‘Traffic’. You may remember that when Apple was discussing its location data collection earlier this year that it said it was working on a ‘traffic service’ although it didn’t elaborate on what that meant. It could be a vehicular traffic service, as many have supposed, or it could instead be a way to measure network traffic to improve the service of iDevices on carrier backbones.

Heck, it could even be Apple gathering data in order to build its own network to run iDevice data service on, it’s impossible to know at this point. Whatever it is, you can toggle it on and off here.

Note that I did some testing and do not believe that this is related to the traffic option you can turn on and off in the Maps app.

The Location Services section of the Settings app really demonstrates how granular the control that Apple gives you over how your location information gets used really is. This is a far cry from the single toggle of iOS 4 and a nice improvement over the per-app control that came after ‘location gate’. If you’re concerned about how your device uses this information, you now have an extensive array of controls to govern it.

Usage

This section, found at General>Usage is where you can check to see how much storage apps are using on your system. You can delete apps right from this list, which is sorted in order of the amount of data used. This is the first time that Apple has offered more than one way to delete apps on the device itself.

The iCloud storage section is a duplicate of the information that you can see in the iCloud menu, a rare duplication of functionality for Apple but one that is not unprecedented as the WiFi settings is similarly doubled.

At General>Usage>Manage Storage, you can see what size your backups are, purchase more iCloud storage and see what amount of storage is still available on iCloud.

The marquee feature here is the ability to toggle certain apps off so that they do not back up in iCloud. This is a very useful way to minimize the size of your iCloud backups if you have apps that aren’t as critical and that you can do without backing up. In general the Camera Roll will top this list but as it’s unwise not to back up your images, I advise that you do not toggle this off.

Restrictions

There are a few new options here that allow you to restrict if changes are made to your Location Settings toggles and whether multiplayer games or adding friends is allowed in Game Center, but the real juice here is a fix to the long-standing complaint about in-app purchases and kids.

See, if you purchase an app and then hand your device off to your child, they then have a 15 minute window in which your ID stays active and they can make as many in-app (or App Store for that matter) purchases as they wish. This has led to extensive complaints from parents whose kids have racked up big bills doing so.

Now, there is a selection that allows you to require your password immediately, rather than only every 15 minutes. This means that you can leave in-app purchases and App Store purchases active, but require you to re-enter your password every time anything will be charged to you. This is a nice improvement over the previous option that allowed you to turn off IAP entirely, which could be inconvenient if you wanted to use your device as well.

My Number/Device Name

You can now change your device’s name under Settings>General>About, something that used to only be possible via iTunes. This is fitting as a component of the PC-free philosophy of iOS 5. You can also change your phone number under Settings>Phone.

Table Of Contents

Notifications | Game Center and iCloud Gaming | Twitter Integration | iCloud | Siri, Dictation & Wireless iTunes Syncing | iMessage | Camera and Photos | Settings | Safari |Mail | Calendar & Contacts | Reminders | Newsstand | Text Editing | iPad Only & Conclusion