After a painless download and installation, everything worked quite well. Animations were smooth, and I changed the background to one with stars and having a subtle parallax effect - I really like it. (No I didn’t get any nausea as reported by many people….). The one with the moving bubbles, I put on my lock screen as it was just too distracting.
The flat icon style is really too colourful and almost childish, but overall, it some brings a much required change and freshness to the OS. Still no widgets, but that’s Apple I guess…
Speed-wise, it may be a tad slower than iOS 6 and some apps look too plain, especially notes, which looks quite boring and white/ yellow. Other apps like Safari look cohesive with the system and changes seem to be for the better.
iTunes Radio is my favourite new feature. I listen to it all the time. It’s similar to Pandora, but hey it’s Apple and there are only a few ads. While listening to it on my macbook, it actually syncs with Lastfm, just like the songs in my library. Plus, you get to listen to latest releases (just listened to Justin Timberlake’s new album). With extra features like this, I think it will definitely give it an edge over other services.
I also like the fact that apps auto-update by themselves...Yeah! No more irritating small red icon telling you that you need to update your apps...
Why is there no weather app for iPad like the iPhone? I don’t know why it is present only on the iPhone. Apple needs to rectify this. And, they should also update the weather icon, like they do on the clock icon and date. Also, some apps don't work too well and I've had a few crash on me. However, for an OS upgrade that supports 32bit and 64bit, I think it's reasonable to expect a few bugs and crashes..
Overall, I’m pretty happy with iOS 7. And I'm glad that it still runs on the iPad 2. Apple has added a lot of useful features and apps, and it’s a great start. Some Apple made widgets would really spice up the system….Maybe that's coming in iOS 8.
