Yes, absolutely. The few apps that actually do something in the background put an icon at the top to indicate continued activity. So if you’re not streaming music or navigating with a 3rd party GPS app, then nothing is running and you aging nothing ‘quitting’ them. It’s just the same as deleting things from a recent apps list.
Closing apps makes me happy.
If I couldn’t jailbreak my iPhone it would only be half as useful as it is to me. I’m still on iOS 3.2 (I think 4 would be way too taxing on my 3G) and jailbreaking was incredibly easy and safe. If you futz up the process you can just restore the settings.
Many of my essential apps (Intelliscreen, Backgrounder) are only usable on a jailbroken iPhone.
As a longtime Apple user, their devices almost demand that you somehow violate the end-user agreement to get the maximum functionality. Virtually every Mac I have has had something done to it that Apple didn’t want me to do.
Oh, and if you’re on a Mac, Floola is a dream - just drag and drop music on your iPod/iPhone. No iTunes!
At least you get a 10% warning. I think I may have seen the 10% warning once on my 3G way back with OS whatever. Since updating OS’s (way before 3.xx), I’ve never seen it since. It would be nice, rather than just 20% then sometime in the near (but not immediate) future dying…
NB
This sounds great, but I just looked up their website, and it says:
So, do you have it working on an iPhone?
Just one teensy thing I ask: a little ‘new mail’ icon in the top bar. I don’t want a ping or worse a mail preview on the screen when the phone’s locked: just a wee envelope that appears next to the battery indicator and the ‘alarm is set’ or ‘gps on’ icons.
More reasons to want to close out apps more easily:
Sometimes I only want a couple things to be easily accessible so that it’s easier to get back to them on the “task bar,” rather than scrolling a few times to find where I put them after that burst of using a bunch of apps for a short time.
Here’s the annoying one - I also have certain apps (We City, I’m looking at you) which will push notifications to me of certain events I have to attend to - whether the app is currently completely closed, running on screen, or down in the “task bar.” However, when the app is idling down in the “task bar” and I pop it back up on screen again, the events to deal with haven’t actually appeared in the app yet, and I have to close it completely and reopen it to get them to appear. Yes, it’s (probably) an issue with the app, not the iPhone OS, but please give me this workaround in the meantime.
I dunno. The latest set of levels are damn hard. Frustratingly hard. I’ve got three stars on almost all of the previous levels, and these are pissing me off.
I want free tethering, over cord, wifi, and bluetooth. It’s all data, dammit- there’s nothing special about tethered data.
I want to be able to use my iPhone as a VoIP phone when I’m home, to save on minutes and because (surprise!) my phone can barely get a bar (in summer- in winter, when the trees are bare, I get three bars). I want this to be seamless- I want it to automatically switch to whatever band has the best signal, wifi or network, even during a call.
My computer is in the basement, and because I can’t get a signal downstairs much at all (except during the winter), my phone rarely comes downstairs with me. So I want to be able to sync over wifi.
I want a lockscreen that shows my emails and calendar, dammit. I think this is the top requested feature, but Apple seems to think they know better than we do.
Yeah, most of this can be done with jailbreaking. However, I shouldn’t have to do that to get most of these features.
I would like my phone to have a temperature sensor in it. The weather apps are good for seeing what the outside temperature is in my city, but I would like to also see what the temperature is right where I am. It would be good for finding out where to set the thermostat to actually get the temperature you want.
It would also be handy for showing the wife that it is not freezing in here, that in fact the temperature is 76f.
The ability to change the text/sms message tone to an mp3 or similar, this has been possible on practically evey phone made in the last gazillion years but the iPhone forces you to choose from a short list of crappy tones.
Here are another few:
I frequently mess with the settings to preserve battery life and for other reasons. E.g. I would love to be able to create a shortcut on the ‘desktop’ to jump straight to the Network screen rather than having to go Settings => General => Network.
Or one step further, the ability to script a series of setting alterations. I’d like to create a button called “In the middle of nowhere” for example, which turns off 3G. “Driving” which turns off cellular data. “Going to sleep” which turns off email notifications.
Also, fixing the bug in returning from “Cellular Data” off, which always kills connectivity on my phone. That might just be a quirk of my network, mind you.
Finally FM radio. I read somewhere (so take this with a pinch of salt) that iPhones have the capability to receive FM, but it’s never been enabled. That would be nice for when there’s no wifi and a poor data signal.
Almost all of the reasons everyone listed here is why I ditched my iPhone 3G for an Android device.
I can chose anything for a ringtone or sms sound, I can have a lockscreen showing missed calls, emails, etc…, I can make my homescreens look just about any way I want (including making it look just like a iPhone, should I desire,) I can tether (though to be fair, I have to root to do it, though that’s a carrier restriction…so I guess that’s just like the iPhone…)), I can use it just like a USB drive and load any file I want to (onto my removable and expandable microSD card, I might add,) every text has a time/date stamp, I can remove and replace the battery, etc…
That being said, I will admit there were some things the iPhone did better. Even though I would think an Android device would have better wifi management, it doesn’t…I can’t connect to a lot of public networks because of the security certificates they use, and on my iPhone I could connect just fine.
There are still a lot of cool apps on the iPhone that haven’t (and my never) made there way over to Android.
Before I upgraded to the 4.0 OS, the iPhone, even the 3G, was usually faster and “snappier” than my Android (however, after I upgraded, there is no contest…another reason I decided to switch was Apple’s seemingly refusal to give a fuck about anyone that had anything less than the newest iPhone.)
iOS 4.1 supposedly fixed the problems with slowing down the 3G.
I’d like to be able to password protect only certain things.
It’s annoying as hell that I have to put in a 4-digit code just to pause the music, and I really have no problem with someone who happens to pick up my iPod being able to play Angry Birds. But my email’s a damned sight more important than those things, so I have to have a password on the whole system.
We already have really well-designed single-use apps, why not a security policy to match?
Most of the things people are complaining about can be easily handled with jailbreaking.
But a few things can’t be. The one that bothers me the most is that I can’t change the iTunes library I sync against without deleting everything off the phone. I bought a new computer (from Apple, no less), but I still have to use my old computer to buy apps and install them to the iPhone. Why? It’s just stupid.
Once Cydia can restore APT packages the same way Rock could, I’ll do the whole back-up/wipe-out/restore thing (and upgrade the OS while I’m at it), but it’s a pain to have to do that.
You don’t have to: just double-click the home button when the phone is locked to bring up a simple iPod menu. The rest of your post I concur with.