Apple, sliced up: iOS 5 irregularities in iPad and iPhone

A friend told me about the iOS 5 Reminders app’s ability to set alerts based on your location, such as reminding you to pick up the kid when you leave the office, and I was puzzled. I hadn’t seen that on my iPad, but sure enough it’s mentioned on Apple’s website. Not so clearly mentioned is that this feature runs only on the iPhone, even though both the iPhone and 3G-enabled iPad have location detection. This is not the only example of iOS capabilities that you get on some devices, but not all. A few make sense, but most of these limited-availability functions don’t need to be so restricted.

If you use multiple iOS devices, here are the capabilities that work differently across your devices. Don’t worry — it’s not your mind playing tricks when that feature you thought you saw doesn’t appear on the device you currently have in hand.

Location-based alerts in Reminders. This feature works on the iPhone but not the iPod Touch or iPad. That’s annoying on two fronts. The iPad supports location detection, especially the 3G model. So why can’t its task alerts be location-savvy as well? Then there’s the issue of syncing: One of the advantages of iOS is that settings, apps, and more sync across all the ones you own via iCloud.

It makes perfect sense to want to set a location-aware reminder on an iPad or iPod Touch, as you know it’ll get to your iPhone in due course and function there. But Apple lets you set location alerts only from the iPhone. Plus, you can’t view or modify a location alert set on your iPhone on your iPad or iPod Touch — the synced copy doesn’t contain that information.

Image editing in Photos. This feature works only on the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and iPad 2. With it, you can crop, straighten, remove red eye, and apply image enhancement to photos and images stored in the Photos app. It doesn’t work on the original iPad or iPod Touch, presumably because these devices don’t have cameras. But with the ease of syncing via iTunes or iCloud, these devices could easily have photos on them that you’d want to retouch. The original iPad and 2010- and 2011-era iPod Touches have as much processing ability as the iPhone 4, so they could in fact apply these effects.

UPDATED 10/10/11: Multitasking gestures. iOS 5 introduced four-finger app-switching gestures to make it easier to navigate what’s running on your device, a feature also available in Mac OS X Lion via a recent MacBook’s touchpad or through the wireless Magic Trackpad for pretty much any Mac. But you can’t get these gestures on an original iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. I can see the argument that the small screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch would be a poor fit for four-finger gestures. But why not on the original iPad? In fact, the beta version of iOS 5 provided this capability to that device. And, thankfully, the iOS 5.01 update brings these gestures to the original iPad.

Custom vibrations. The custom vibrations capability, available for iPhones only in the Accessibility settings of the Settings app’s General pane, is a nifty innovation that lets you create your own vibration patterns — you tap them out on the screen, then save them — that you can then associate to specific people in the Contacts app. Based on the vibration in your pocket, you’ll know who’s calling, but you can’t create, edit, or assign these custom vibrations on other iOS devices.

I get why you can’t use them — they don’t vibrate — but because these settings are attached to your contacts, which are synced across your devices, you’d think that the ability to set and assign custom vibrations would also be universal, akin to assigning text tones. I also wish I could assign ringtones to my synced contacts on the iPod Touch for the same reason, but iOS doesn’t let me because the iPod Touch isn’t a technically phone. Never mind it can run Skype and other such apps.

Downloading podcasts from the Music app. This difference among devices makes no sense. On the iPhone and iPod Touch, you can tap the Get More Episodes action when viewing your podcast library to download additional episodes — very handy when you haven’t synced to iTunes for a while and want to get the latest episodes. But you can’t do this on the iPad. Instead, in its spare new Music app, you can only listen to the podcasts you already have. You have to go to the iTunes Store and search for the podcasts you want, then download them — a multistep process that shouldn’t be needed.

Calendar views. If you have an iPad, you can peruse your calendar as a list or in day, week, month, or year view. On an iPhone or iPod Touch, there is no year view, likely due to the small screen of these devices. There is a week view, but it’s hidden: rotate your iPhone or iPod Touch to horizontal orientation to have iOS automatically display it. I’d rather have an explicit way to view my schedule by the week and be able to keep my list, day, or month view when I rotate my iPhone or iPod Touch.

Calculator, weather, and stocks widgets. iPhones and iPod Touches come with these, but iPads don’t. That’s been true from the very first iPad, but it’s more noticeable in iOS 5. The new Notification Center capability, which lets you swipe down a tray of recent alerts, displays an iconic summary of the weather, as well as any active stocks, at the top — a very handy way to quickly check these items. But because they’re not on the iPad, the Notification Center tray doesn’t have them. As I tend to switch between my iPad and iPhone throughout the day, it bugs me that sometimes I can see these at a glance (on the most constrained display, ironically) and sometimes I cannot. I have third-party apps for these purproses, but the inconsistency still bugs me.

Differences that make sense. Some iOS differences are understandable across devices, due the their dependency on specific device capabilities and their lack of applicability to other apps:

• Available only for the iPhone 4 and 4S, via the Settings app’s Accessibility settings in the General pane, the LED Flash for Alerts settings does what it says: flashes the rear camera’s LED when a phone call or other alert comes in. It’s handy if you put your iPhone face down on a desk during a meeting, for example, rather than in your pocket. The iPhone 3G S, iPad, and iPod Touch have no LED flash, so it makes sense they don’t have this feature.
• Double-tapping the Home button when your iOS device is locked now adds a camera button to take pictures while the device is locked — but, as is logical, only on the iPad 2, fourth-generation iPod Touch, and iPhones, which all have cameras.
• SMS messaging is available only from an iPhone, as that service comes from your cellular carrier as part of the cell phone service. iOS 5 has put the SMS app, Messaging, onto the other devices. But on those devices it uses Apple’s own free iMessage service, which works only with other iOS 5 devices, much as the popular BlackBerry Messenger service works only among BlackBerrys. On an iPhone, you can choose to use SMS or iMessage for iPhone recipients, whereas Messages on the other devices gives you no such choice (it’s all via iMessage).
• The Camera app provides an HDR (high dynamic range) option for photos only on the iPhone 4 and 4S; the cameras and video processors in iPhone 3G S, fourth-generation iPod Touch, and iPad 2 just aren’t good enough to take such images, so they don’t have that option.

Apple, don’t be so narrow in the utility you see for your features. It makes sense to deploy more of them across all your devices. How about taking care of that in iOS 5.1?

This article, “Apple, sliced up: iOS 5 irregularities in iPad and iPhone,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.