I'll keep this brief.  I've had iOS 7 since Wednesday afternoon, and carry my iPod with me pretty much everywhere.  It plus a cheap Android phone serve as my poor man's iPhone for now.


  • Music is much improved.  Finally, albums.
  • iOS 7 runs much more slowly than iOS 6 on my iPod touch.
    • The touch has essentially the same innards as the iPhone 4S.  
    • There's often some noticeable glitchiness and jumpiness.
  • The control panel pop-up finally makes brightness reasonably accessible.
    • Siri can also bring up brightness.
  • It's actually quite hard to get the control panel pop-up to come up.  I often have to swipe several times before anything happens.
  • I've noticed some glitchiness playing music with my iOS-aware car receiver.  For example, I lost the ability to pause and seek at one point until I unplugged and replugged the iPod.
  • There are cosmetic improvements.  That's nice, I guess.
  • Radio is fine, but obviously not great without 3G service.  ;^)  I use it more in iTunes.  But like Pandora, it quickly moves too far away from my original station seed, and I'm back to my playlists.
    • Why can't Pandora or iTunes Radio figure out when I want bands with female frontmen [sic]?  Sheesh.
The rest seems to be small improvements.  Mail, for example, seems to keep flagged email from a person at the top of any thread you have with them so you actually see it.  That's smart.

One message is clear: iOS 7 is pitching itself at the iPhone 5+.  I haven't touched an iPhone 5S, but I'm guessing it's intentionally the only place you get the iOS 7 experience as it was designed.  That's the advantage of being Apple; they can design to whatever hardware they want, backwards compat be damned

I wouldn't go back to iOS 6, but it's obvious iOS 7 isn't smooth (yet?) on my current hardware.  That said, it's just good enough I saved my cash and bought an iPhone 4S on Virgin Mobile rather than shelled out the extra dollars for the 5S on AT&T.  

I really can't see getting an iPhone 5C at this point, when the 5 is the same phone and runs $50 less.  I could almost see spending the extra $200 to get a 5 on Virgin, but Sprint, which powers Virgin, doesn't have LTE here yet, and, at $30/month, I figured I'd rather upgrade to an iPhone 6 six months earlier.

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