Two weeks ago, I wrote about how we live in a world where all our devices are connected to the internet 24/7.  At the time, my devices were not connected 24/7, since I didn’t have an iPhone.  But, as I wrote last week, I have an iPhone now (and I decided to stop turning the WiFi off constantly on my iPad) so my tech habits have changed quite a bit now that I’m always connected.  Here are my thoughts.

First off, for those of you holding your breath from two weeks ago, the Writing Aid widget does work correctly now.  It’s really nice that (for the most part) I no longer have to worry about widgets not updating as they should.  Some widgets still seem to get a little bit outdated, but at least now I know that it’s the widget’s fault instead of a connectivity issue.

Syncing is also working better, but still not quite perfectly.  I had hoped that my iCloud reminders would just sync correctly now, but it still doesn’t seem to refresh often enough.  Lots of times I check off several reminders on my iPad, only to check my iPhone a few hours later and see that they’re still there.  Checking one off on the iPhone seems to trigger a sync, and then the rest of them update, but still, that’s really clunky.  One of the things I’ve always hated about iCloud is it never tells you when it’s done syncing, and there’s no way to manually trigger a sync.  I guess this adds to the whole idea of “it just works” and “I don’t have to do anything,” but it leads to problems like this.  In contrast, Dropbox and Evernote both have nice status bars telling you exactly what has and hasn’t uploaded yet.  I wish iCloud had that.

It’s really nice to be able to send SMS messages from my iPad using Continuity.  I don’t see myself making many calls from my iPad, but I guess it could be useful.  Speaking of messages, I’ve been impressed at how well those sync over iCloud.  I leave my iPad on Do Not Disturb (only when locked) so it doesn’t ring constantly throughout the day.  I was afraid that I would get a text on both my iPhone and iPad, answer it on the iPhone, and then an hour later open up my iPad and see the notification.  I knew that if the iPad was offline, it would never get the notification in the first place, but I didn’t know that the notifications were smart enough to dismiss themselves if I read the message on another device (it does makes sense that Apple thought of this; it’d be a nightmare otherwise).  This seems to work for email and Twitter as well, so that’s great.

Not to be overlooked is the fact that I’m no longer flipping the WiFi on and off on my iPad, which in hindsight was really annoying.  It doesn’t even seem to use that much extra battery when I leave the WiFi on anyway.  Go figure.

In conclusion, I’m really enjoying my new always connected lifestyle.  It’s crazy that we live in a world where we can access almost anything, almost anytime, with almost no effort.  Now if my reception wasn’t so spotty in big buildings on campus, I’d really be happy.  ••