When Upgrading

Well, the whole world seems to be going ga-ga with the new release of iOS and iPhones from Apple.  Despite how you feel about the company and its products, you certainly have to give them an A for their marketing.  Watching the news on Friday morning, the news anchors are showing their products on television and an “on the scene” news report shows lineups to get into the Apple Store when it opens to buy a new one.

There are few brands that command this type of attention.  The other one that comes to mind immediately is Coca-Cola.  Seriously, is this really news?  I had fingerprint recognition on a laptop years ago.  It was neat but not really a game changer.  But just think of how much it would cost these companies if they went the traditional route and purchased advertising time.  Instead of a 30 second spot, they’re getting 3-5 minutes every half hour as this “news” is covered.  It’s also interesting to see the design changes – Microsoft got hammered when they tried to change the status quo – when Apple does it, it’s revolutionary!  Even their internal nickname?  What’s next?  A modern UI for OSX?

Along with television time, blog posts abound about “What’s new in iOS”, “iOS Tips and Tricks”, and so on.  David Pogue had a nice post yesterday “Yes, There’s a New iPhone. But That’s Not the Big News“.  That’s probably the first posting that I read in depth.  After reading that, I decided to upgrade my iPad.  It’s not that I needed to enjoy the new interface – it’s that the applications that I use regulary have been upgraded themselves over the past week or so (18 of them just yesterday) and there’s one thing that you should be aware of when operating systems change, often the upgrade breaks old and faithful applications.

In my reading, there some suggestions about how to improve battery life and most of the ideals are good conventional wisdom whatever your device – turn down the brightness, turn off services that you’re not using, etc.

Whenever an upgrade comes along, you should also be aware of things that are “under the hood” and not immediately obvious.  Sometimes, I can tell you from experience, programmers add features just because we can and other times, features add functionality that you might now necessarily want.  In addition to the settings with the operating system itself, it’s just good, solid protocol to check the settings for any of the apps that are updated to see what they’re up to.

Normally, when I do an upgrade, I poke around myself.  I had some help this morning.  This post dug deeply into the new settings “Four privacy settings you should enable in iOS 7 immediately.”  Privacy is a big issue with folks.  I smile at times because as long as I can remember we’ve had telephone books with addresses and we’ve used them to find people.  And who hasn’t watched a television crime show or a movie where the bad guys are tracked by triangulating their location with cell phone towers…  And yet, it’s a good piece of advice to keep an eye on what your electronic devices and the installed applications are doing with your use of them.

I guess it boils down to this.  There are certain elements of your privacy that you cannot control.  But there are some that you can.  When you upgrade, it’s always a good idea to poke around and see what new features have been added.  You may not like what you see.  Or maybe you will.  But at least you’ll know.