iOS4 and iPod Touch

iOS4 is a mixed bag of annoying flaws and long delayed upgrades.

I am becoming a nag when it comes to battery life. It really sucks now and the thing is almost constantly tethered to the charger when I forget to turn wifi off. No Jobism please, turning off the wifi means all the online goodies are useless.

iBook is useful, and readable, but runs slow on the 2nd generation machine. Loading is slow, and I only have 3 books so far. Free ones. I have not figured out how to lock the screen or it just won't lock on the 2nd generation device, reading in bed means twisting and turning when the pages rotate, which is slow.

There was a problem with Mail and Safari, although not on my machine. The Mail app hung on trying to send a mail, going through a loop of sorts. Solving the problem involved reseting, reinstalling, and manually setting up all the mail accounts. Not a pleasant waste of time. Safari will simply shut down when its not happy, apparently more grouchy than Oscar.

What is amazing is not the flaws rather that it should be happening to one but not another. Both are not jail broken or hacked in any form. So why is it that 2 machines from the same company with the same operating system should behave so differently? Are they so complex now that they are actually behaving in a Darwinian fashion, random mutations in each device? Are they going to evolve? With Apple's monopoly of their devices, one would assume they would subscribe to a more Creationist creed.

Probably that's the reason for the mess about the new antenna design in iPhone 4. The problem is not uniform for all users, those affected are obviously irked, those spared are enthusiastic denial-ists for Mr Jobs. So what is to be pronounced at the press conference on the 16th of July? One can only guess, but without a doubt the Reality Distortion Field would be set to maximum. It just works.