Well, today Apple finally revealed the upcoming iPhone release, which proved to be just an upgrade of the current iPhone 4.  Ok, maybe just is a little harsh.  Granted, they did announce some cool stuff, but the only thing that I was interested in was the new Siri app that the iPhone 4S has.  It’s basically a built-in personal assistant/concierge to help you in your day-to-day life, whether it’s finding a new restaurant or answering text messages hands-free.  The cool thing is that it seems to be really good at voice recognition and understands what you are saying far better than any other application I’ve seen.  Not only that, it knows more about the meaning of what you’re saying so you can use conversational language like you would with a person.  You don’t have to memorize a list of simple commands that it can understand (like most other similar technology) – just talk and it will understand what you’re asking for.

What I’m looking forward to even more than that is the new iOS 5 and iCloud.  A lot of the updates with those two things make life a whole lot easier and the technology of iPhones, iPods, iPads, and Macs even more seamless.  I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to take a picture quickly and easily with my phone.  I always said that they should make one or more of the external buttons function as the shutter button when running the camera app.  It’s really hard to tap an icon on the screen to get a shot when you only have one hand.  They’re finally allowing that, with the volume up button acting as the shutter clicker.  Additionally, notifications and reminders are key organizational tools that I have other apps for, but will be so much better when it all easily integrates with the rest of the suite of tools in my device.  Now I can set these things and have them added to my calendar or pull from my contacts list.

I know that cloud computing is the new era, so I’m really glad to have iCloud coming soon.  It will be so nice to have all photos, contacts, and calendar updates automatically synced across devices and backed up on the cloud.  As it stands you have to set up syncs manually, which is a bit of a hassle.  I just hope that the introduction of iCloud also means my game progress will be saved across devices.  Right now when I play a game on one, it doesn’t update on the other, so I end up only playing certain games on one device, then having to switch to another device for a different game.  As of yet it doesn’t look like this is possible, but it’s got to be on the horizon.

I definitely would not consider upgrading my iPhone 4 to the 4S, but I’m looking forward to what iPhone 5 will bring.

My greatest pet peeve about technology is that it often doesn’t take change well.  I wish it was easy to put multiple accounts together, and to weed out any duplicates that occur in the process.  Take contact lists, for example.  Why is it that when I try to sync my Google contacts with my phone, I end up getting a whole lot of the same entries, instead of a clean list?  I understand if they need to ask me about the merge if different versions of the contacts contain different information (such as one only has email and the other only has phone number, or the listed contact information doesn’t match).  However, it’s just not that easy and I’ve had to manually go through and sort through the listings to correct them, which is quite tedious.

Another thing that totally baffled me recently is Apple IDs.  They don’t always make it clear when you are making a new one, so I somehow ended up with two even though I meant to change my primary email address for my account.  I did some research and they make it very clear that they do not merge accounts, so I had to figure out which account to keep as my main one.  Why it is that they can’t combine your accounts with a data migration is beyond me.  Perhaps I don’t understand enough of the coding, but nevertheless, this is a common issue that people have and I feel that it’s worth any trouble to create a good system to do so.

I also don’t see why user IDs can’t be easily updated as we wish, so we can change our minds as often as we want.  After all, we go through life changes all the time, sometimes wanting a fun screen name, sometimes wanting a professional one, and sometimes just wanting one other than what we have.  Why create an entire account just because of that?  It would make so much more sense to keep all the information that has been associated with an account and just change the username you log in with or share with others.

It’s amazing that it has been so long and still these improvements that would allow us so much more control over our accounts are not something we can expect from any form of technology we choose to use.  The pains of trying to get around it or fix it almost don’t even make it worth it either.  Whatever happened to technology being able to make your life easier?  It seems to be causing me a whole lot of (time-consuming) problems instead!