iphone 5 and ios6 seem buggy

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Level 1

4 points

iphone 5 and ios6 seem buggy

Some months ago I decided to merge all my apple products into one by upgrading my phone and ipods into a single iphone 5 which would fit more comfortably in my pocket (and comes with a brand new 3 year contract). I'm starting to regret it.

I find the stability and reliability of the iphone 5/ios 6.1.3 conbination to be so poor I'm afraid what might happen if I had to use it to dial 9-1-1 and spent 10 minutes trying to get the phone to work.

Here's a short list of issues I encounter far too often (even once seems too often, but some of these happen at least weekly).

- the phone takes too long to switch between talk and listen I have to be very careful with my conversation because I'm forever cutting off or being cut off in conversations. (happens all the time... I have never been happy with the talk capability of the phone compared to 3gs)

- According to the phone, a usb personal hotspot was active once, but I had to reboot the phone to be able to actually tether

- When I went to my parents who live out in the middle of nowhere for a day and finally came back home, I had "no service", no data, smack in the middle of town unless I rebooted the phone

- a sync with itunes 10.7 this morning failed halfway through (I've been down this path before... I will have to do a full wipe/restore to ensure the music library database on the phone isn't pooched) and I had to reboot both phone and computer to be able to "complete" the sync, but I'm not at all confident it worked properly

- The ios6 music player app will sometimes show one song when it's clearly playing a different song

- The wi-fi range on my phone seems to be horribly limited to 30 feet or so (I got nearly 200 with my 3gs)

I'm here to ask others if they have been encountering blatant stupid problems (and if so, to compile a list of them) or if most of these problems are to to my specific possessed piece of iphone 5 junk.

iPhone 5, iOS 6.1.3

Posted on Jun 19, 2013 5:10 AM

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Answer 1

Jun 19, 2013 5:21 AM in response to pegaudet

What troubleshooting have you done?

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Answer 2

Jun 19, 2013 5:23 AM in response to pegaudet

Honestly, no I have not experienced any of those issue with my iPhone 5. I am with AT&T in the USA, in an area with very thorough LTE coverage.

Some of the things you mention sound more like carrier network issues then device issues.

I have not had an iTunes sync fail (I normally sync my iPhone and iPad with iTunes over wifi at least once a week), but every now and then, a backup takes much longer than average, for reasons unclear to me (it seems somewhat random, just every now and then a backup gets very, very slow, but never actually fails for me).

Admittedly, I do not listen to music much on my iPhone at all, so my limited use of music player has not been a problem (I use it much more on my iPad, but even then, mostly to listen to audiobooks, not music). I have never had to restore any iOS device (since iPhone 2) because of a failed sync (always using iTunes in OS X though - I have no experience with iTunes in Windows).

And, my wifi on both my iOS devices has been great. At home they connect at 5Ghz to an 802.11n Netgear WNDR4500 router, but I've also had no issues in hotels, conference centers and other public wifi spots around the country.

If you want some help, I would suggest posting specific questions with details - like your wifi issues, what type of gear are you connecting to at home? Is the problem everywhere or only sometimes?

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Answer 3

Jun 19, 2013 5:37 AM in response to pegaudet

We have two iPhone 5s in the house since November. No issues whatsoever.

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Answer 4

pegaudet Author

Level 1

4 points

Jul 20, 2013 7:14 AM in response to pegaudet

Most of the problems I noted above now appear to be transient issues or were temporary (still not sold on the talking issue. It seems there are still times when I cut people off or I am cut off in a conversation, but it does not always happen, so it might be my cellphone carrier). I don't use phones much, land or cell so it will take a while to figure out if this is really an ongoing thing.

I did figure out that the range at 5Ghz is extremely poor. I had switched to 5Ghz to improve the airplay capability (my airport expresses are connected to my airport extreme on 5Ghz) from the phone.

I'm now running again on 802.11g and the range is about the same as the 3gs.

Overall the phone appears to be behaving, though I think it suffers from periodic episodes of schizophrenia, quite possibly from ios6.

The music player app especially is really buggy and unreliable... What the UI says the settings are, do not reflect what they actually are. I don't use the loop function and it should have stopped playing my playlist the other day but it decided to loop from the beginning again. When I do use the shuffle, it says the shuffle feature is on and when I reboot it still says it's on, but the order of plays match the original order defined in itunes.

Overall, I consider this question resolved. Thanks for the replies.

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