I’ve been in Uganda for almost six weeks, and my trusty companions in technology have been the iPad (kindly lent my Susan Harman) and my Nexus 5 (which might not make it home, not becuase its dying, but becuse so many people here want to buy it!) I talkes about one of the fustrations in using the iPad as my main device in a previous post, and I wanted to finish that off with two final frustrations.
2. No central file system
This is such a big issue, you don’t even realise. Each app is independent of the other apps. This is one of the causes of the problem I mentioned above. When I have finished a word document in Microsoft Word, and I want to email it using my Mail client (not Apples), you can’t. I use Mailbox and Gmail for email, rather than the built in Mail client, and there is no simple way to attach a file from another app. You can’t even do this in the default mail client, without first going through the Word, and using the email function.
This cannot be practical from a business sense, if people are using these devices in place of a laptop. It’s just sloppy, time consuming and inconvenient. Maybe we haven’t noticed it as much in the west because of the good internet connection we have, but here, it stands out like a saw thumb. Windows has a common file system, Linux has a common file system, Android has a common file system, OSX (Macs) have a common files system, why not iOS?
Solution: The best work around I have come across is using an app called Documents (free). You can add this as a cloud storage location in Word (but the shortcuts break whenever you close the app), and from inside Documents you can then share it with Gmail (to email), or Zapya to send to another device.
3. Contacts aren’t available in every app
This frustrates me, in Android, contacts are available centrally to the applications, so whichever mail client I choose to use, or SMS client, they both have the same set of contact. If they make additions to the contacts, they are made centrally, so accessible from every app. iOS is not the same. Each app is independent of each other, so the contact on my gmail are accessible within the gmail app, but in Apple’s Mail app, they are not. I think this stems from the fact that in Android accounts are central. If your logged in Gmail or Outlook and another app wants to use that account, they can jump on board the central one, which your already logged in.
Solution: By adding your Gmail account to Apples Mail, Contacts, Calendar area of the settings, that should give you access to most of your contacts in most apps.
Now Android might not be as polished (but its hard to say that now), and it is a little more complex than iOS to use (but again, with functionality comes complexity). The apps used to be worse on Android than their iOS counter parts, but I am finding with some apps, the opposite is now true. iOS is too limited to be used in place of a laptop. Until Apple open up the file system and allow apps to interact with each other, I don’t think I can move to iOS. I’m a big Mac fan (not the McDonalds type), but for now, Android will continue to be my stress free home.
What have you struggled to do on your tablet what is simple on a desktop or laptop computer? Share in the comments below.
