iPhones Will Feature A Kill Switch to Stop Apple Picking

Looks like Apple remains a first at something. Three days before a scheduled meeting between authorities and smartphone companies over the issue of mobile-devices robberies, Apple announced its iPhones will feature a kill switch, allowing the user to turn it off and track it using a GPS.

Whereas most people have been debating whether or not the iOS 7 design of icons and overall colorful theme are cool enough or not, some new useful features the new firmware is set to implement were put aside. For instance, iOS 7 will implement a kill switch in your iPhone to help you keep tabs on it when it gets lost or is picked by a robber. This makes Apple the first smartphone company to take action following recent law enforcement attempts to limit smartphone robberies.

“We think this is going to be a really powerful theft deterrent” said Craig Federighi, senior vice president at Apple, during the iOS 7 debut at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Based on the details released during the conference, the kill switch can remotely erase all content via a website and prevents the robber from turning off “Find My iPhone” by requesting an Apple ID and password.

“Apple picking is a huge epidemic in the United States” reads a joint statement by San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón and New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman following Apple’s announcement which was released just ahead of a meeting that aimed to find ways of limiting or preventing mobile-device robberies. “We are appreciative of the gesture made by Apple to address smart-phone theft”.

Apple picking has been so thriving lately that New York has a special police unit dealing particularly with mobile-device robberies. According to a statement by Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne, “if you subtracted just the increase in Apple product thefts, we would have had an overall decrease in crime in New York”.

Colorful New iOS 7 Design Sparks Debates

They’ve been calling it “black and white and flat all over”, the next best thing since the original iPhone or plain ugly, although considerably more practical. The colorful new iOS 7 design has been sparking debates following its debut, earlier this week, at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

If you ask designers and graphic artists, Apple’s iOS 7 lacks a nuance of finesse, but the new features show there’s promise for improvement. If you ask users, you’ll get a straightforward answer that the looks aren’t all that great, yet it could be something they’d live with, in exchange for the added functionality designer Jony Ive implemented. All in all, it looks like nobody agrees with Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, when he says the new iOS 7 design is “the most significant iOS update since the original iPhone”.

Cap Watkins, ETSY design lead, feels iOS 7 is “unpolished by design”, whereas Phill Ryu, iOS app designer, takes a more practical stand and signaled a frustrating and confusing visual feature in the new iOS 7 lock screen. The legend says “slide to unlock” whereas the arrow below the text suggests you could unlock it by sliding up.

The truth is that there’s something about the new iOS 7 design that put a lot of people off and it is mainly because of the icons’ new look. “The singularly biggest issue – apart from the color – is that so many of the icons are clearly intended to be round, but are crammed inside rounded rectangles” notes Ben Moss of Webdesigner Depot. “Apple set out with good intentions, but their fear of profit margins kept them from designing something truly exciting” he adds.

Yet, at the same time, despite the overall criticism the colorful new iOS 7 design has been getting, Forbes’ Anthony King believes the new look is “subtly dimensional and exquisitely modern”. Jony Ive’s design for iOS 7 “aims to be an unobtrusive interface that elevates content” with hallmarks such as “translucency, levity, expansiveness, fluidity and surprising depth”.

But, enough with designers and media’s points of views! What do you think of the new colorful iOS 7 design?