Dont forget to wipe!!

If you have an iPhone and are one of my friends and family, I apologize ahead of time for this post.  I love you all so dearly!

  So i figured there had to be something wrong with my phone so today I decided to take it to the genius bar.  The genius bar is located in all apple stores and is for the purpose of troubleshooting and repairing phones.  This is truly a great idea!  If you have a problem with your phone, they might be able to fix it.  If you broke your screen, i'm sure they can fix it there too!

  This is the holy grail of tech support!  One on one, face to face tech support.  EVERYBODY SHOULD LOVE THIS!

  Sprint, Verizon and AT&T also have local repair shops in SOME stores, but I dont think they are as numerous as the genius bars.

Here is my problem.   Something is drinking my battery and using tons of data.  I went to the apple store at Washington square.  I got checked in and helped immediately and had a great customer service experience.  From a technical experience though, it was awful.

I told my genius that something was using my battery at 10% per hour and about 800 megs of extra data.    I told him it started about a week ago.

There are two options for for what I was told.   My genius was either an iDiot or iOS is a PiOS.  I dont really know which one, but i have guessed below....

Here is what he told me.

1) "You have your GPS on, and all these apps are using it all the time."   I have about 6 apps that have access to the GPS, but i dont ever USE those apps or the GPS.   Facebook asked for it for check ins, Maps asks for it for locations.  I never check in anywhere on facebook, and I never use the "maps" app.
  I asked my genius why doesn't an app only use the GPS when being used.  He said that is not the case.  He told me that the GPS is running all the time if a single app has access to it and that app is open
 On android, you can leave your GPS on ALL the time, and it is only used if you use an app that wants your location.  When you leave that app (you dont have to close it) the GPS stops  I suspect this is the same with iOS, but i really dont know.  RESULT: iDiot and PiOS

2) "You have all these apps open, you should close them all at least once per day"  Why doesn't the phone close them for me?   Why do i have to perform maintenance on my phone?   Android phones will close apps for you, unless you tell the phone to leave it open. RESULT:  PiOS

3) "let me take this phone to the back and run some diagnostic for you" I initially happy they could do this!   He took it to the back, and 3 minutes later came back and said "Yea, something is running in the background, but I can't tell you what it is"  Really?   No shit sherlock, what am I supposed to do!  I came to the store to TELL YOU something was running in the background, and I wanted to know WHAT THE heck IT WAS!!!!  RESULT: PiOS


4) "You should probably do a backup and restore of the device" WOW!!  Apple marketing, technical articles and my friends have all told me that iOS is the most stable, low maintenance OS available.   All I want to know is what is using my CPU and data, why do I have to wipe my device?    This sounds more like a Windows PC than an APPLE PRODUCT. RESULT : PiOS


5) "the phone is currently syncing your gmail calendar, email and notes every 15 minutes, you should do it manually"    I actually argued with him on this one.  iOS 5 is supposed to bring cloud syncing to my calendar, but the phone is doing it now with iOS 4?   I asked him a question he said he didn't know the answer to, and told him I didn't believe my calendar was cloud syncing.    When I got back to my car I added an appointment on my android tablet... low and behind 15 minutes later it showed up on my iPhone.   My jaw hit the floor, if iOS 4 already does this, why the heck is it a big part of iOS 5? RESULT AWSOME!  However, why do I have to do it manually to save the battery?   Android phones have an app that allows you to only sync when connected to wifi (and/or only when plugged in). RESULT PiOS

In conclusion this was a huge letdown.   I truly believed that iOS was a more stable, easier to use, less buggy operating system, but its turning out to be far worse than android.   At least on android I would be able to tell what was going on....