Updated my lowly iPhone4 to iOS7 couple hours ago. The overall design looks better, but damn, my phone really took it on the chin performance-wise! And iP4 doesn't even get the parallaxed background or realtime blurry layering effect either (too slow GPU, I would think).
Yeah, the performance hit is rather major. Apple REALLY wants me to buy a new phone, it seems...
Flipping between pages of icons on the home screen is jerkier, and stuff like tabbing beteween numbers or dates when setting calendar events and such is sluggish and decidedly un-fluid-like. Code input on things like the lock screen or SIM unlock screen can also lag behind my finger presses, that's not very good.
Also, having a bunch of apps sitting in the background seems to slow the phone down further, this also seems excarbated of course by iOS's unwillingness to actually quit apps when leaving them. Anecdotal, sure. I admit, I haven't tested this very well, but that's my first impression.
The new control center whatsitscalled thingy you get when swiping up is great. I love the built-in flashlight functionality, and quick access to music controls, airplane mode and wifi and stuff like that, calculator and stopwatch, I use the lattermost in particular a lot, especially when cooking things like my morning oatmeal and so on. This is double-plus good, IMO. I'm a little less enthused that access to the camera now requires an extra swipe instead of just a tap at the lock screen, but...*shrug* Oh well. Hope this screen doesn't make too many sudden, unwanted surprise visits for people playing games, though.
Overall, iOS has gotten the look it should have had all along, IMO. The ugly grey gradients and bevels are gone. So is the insulting, tacky skeumorphism, I wonder how much Steve Jobs would have hated this new iOS. I hope - for his sake - he'd come to understand that this is better than the admittedly functional, but still flawed, visual appearance apple portable devices have had up until now.
Sure, there are still shortcomings, the calculator app lost functionality for example, but does it really matter? Don't think so. The look and functionality will undoubtedly get further refined down the road, at least apple's off to a good start IMO.
