ios5

Apple has given developers a new version of iOS 5 to test that promises to squash bugs that affect battery life.

This afternoon the company seeded a beta of iOS 5.0.1, which represents the first revision to the software since its public release on October 12.

According to BGR, which spotted the update on Apple's developer site, the new software fixes a handful of bugs, and even brings new features to the iPad.

The new beta coincides with Apple's acknowledgement that some users are, in fact, having battery life issues with iOS 5. In a statement … Read more

Apple has finally broken radio silence over criticisms of lackluster battery life affecting iPhones old and new since releasing iOS 5 last month.

In a statement provided to AllThingsD, the company said it's aware of the problem and plans on offering a fix in the form of a software update.

"A small number of customers have reported lower-than-expected battery life on iOS 5 devices," Apple told the outlet. "We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks."

As noted … Read more

Though much of the troubleshooting attention for the iPhone 4S and iOS 5 has been focused on battery draining issues, another problem has surfaced: users who have activated the Personal Hotspot feature are finding that it is disappearing suddenly.

TiPb is reporting that several people have been complaining that the Hotspot feature, an extra $20 per month on AT&T that allows users to tether other devices to their iPhone for Internet usage, is no longer showing up in the settings of iOS.

The report then offers a couple of solutions, which users are reporting work in varying degrees. … Read more

Apple promised superior battery life on the iPhone 4S and iOS 5, but hundreds of complaints in Apple's forums prove otherwise. iPhone owners are angry about constantly having to plug in their phones, even with light usage.

Apparently Apple is investigating the issue, which one user says is as bad as 12 percent battery drops every 30 minutes, in which case the phone is little better than a brick. Such unacceptable battery performance just begs for the question, "Siri, what the heck is wrong with my iPhone's battery life?"

Luckily, there is an answer. To help … Read more

After upgrading to iOS 5 on my iPhone 4, I noticed that my Twitter app was not behaving up to snuff. My troubleshooting investigation led to some interesting realizations about how Twitter is integrated in iOS 5.

Twitter's role in Apple's latest mobile operating system is a bit different from other apps. The issue I was having was that the Mentions tab in my Twitter app was not updating. I knew from reading my account feed that some of my Twitter followers were sending me tweets, but I was not getting notified and they were not appearing in … Read more

Even with all the competition it faces across the tablet space, and the fact that iPad owners recently updated their software to iOS 5, Research In Motion said yesterday that it's holding off on launching the second generation of its tablet software until next year.

"As much as we'd love to have it in your hands today, we've made the difficult decision to wait to launch BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 until we are confident we have fully met the expectations of our developers, enterprise customers and end-users," RIM senior vice president for the BlackBerry … Read more

iCloud and iOS 5 brought with it a slew of new features with them when Apple launched the software duo earlier this month. One of the advertised features was the ability to sync iWork documents (Pages, Keynote, Numbers) using iCloud with the iWork apps on iOS. … Read more

Siri is a by-the-book type of app; if a word is spelled a certain way, but is pronounced completely different, Siri doesn't care. Similar to how it handles punctuation, Siri will read or write using the exact information available to it.

… Read more

What I'm about to attempt--comparing Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich with Apple iOS 5--is a little like tiptoeing through a minefield. Most of you won't be happy and somebody could get hurt. (Read: me.)

Yet, this comparison must be done. For one thing, Google and Apple have both recently unveiled huge changes that respectively make their mobile operating systems far more powerful, and in some ways more similar to each other. For another thing, weighing the pros and cons of each platform against the other is a scenario that's played out daily among many people who are deciding which phone to buy.

Just a few parameters before diving in. First, I'm overwhelmingly looking at software, not hardware, but I'll point out where hardware does factor in. iOS 5 runs on multiple devices, but is the most powerful right now on the iPhone 4S. Ditto Ice Cream Sandwich. The unreleased Samsung Galaxy Nexus is the one phone that can currently show off the OS update's full spectrum of features, since it was purpose-built to be compatible with them all. That will change for both operating systems as additional future devices are built with the hardware to support the new software.

Second, I'm not just talking about new additions, but trying to look at the OS in its entirety.

Third, I'm looking at what each OS can do natively. Yes, there are scores of third-party apps you can download to do just about anything to satisfy something that one OS lacks that another has, but what we're looking at here is what Apple and Google have decided to bestow, not clever external developers. And I'm not talking about anything you can achieve only by jailbreaking or rooting. Official, but optional apps created by Apple and Google are OK--like Find My Friends and Google Voice.

Third, I'm throwing in two "fun" features for each (these will be the last two). I wouldn't recommend buying an iOS 5 or Ice Cream Sandwich device solely because of them, but they're pleasantly show-offy conversation pieces unique to each platform.

Got all that? Let's go.… Read more