Clayton Haliburton's List: English Essay

• An Android home screen can include widgets like a weather forecast, calendar highlights, tweets, and an omnipresent search box, as well as quick access to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi settings. Windows Phone dumps the icon approach almost entirely, in favor of tiles that can display far more data than the iOS home screen.
• Organizing apps on iOS is also painful, whether you do it on your device or from iTunes on your Mac. Though Windows Phone uses the familiar "tap and hold" organizing method, the process feels simpler, since it uses one vertically scrolling screen. That screen holds your favorite stuff; to access things you use less often, you dig deeper (via search or an alphabetic list of your apps). I suspect users with multiple screenfuls of apps would welcome such innovations from a touch-based OS.

• Control Center's tricky target: Though I like Control Center, I wish it were easier to summon. Yes, it sounds simple: Just swipe upward from the bottom of the screen. But I find it takes a few swipes before Control Center appears.

  --CHRISTOPHER BREEN

• it still doesn't support sending to email groups. And the iOS Contacts app still doesn't let you create such groups. You can, of course, create contact groups in OS X's Contacts. But those groups don't work the same way in iOS. I can't, for example, send an email to the 'Macworld Editors' group on my iPhone. Also, Mail no longer puts your last-used mailbox at the top of the mailbox list; you must scroll down each time. And though it's great that you can now search all mailboxes from within Mail, iOS 7 no longer lets you search only, say, message subjects or senders.

  --DAN FRAKES

• Less-accessible media controls: In iOS 6, you could bring up the media-control buttons from the lock screen--even if you weren't currently playing media--by double-pressing the Home button. That made it easy to resume listening to your last-played track. In iOS 7, if you disable Control Center on the lock screen (which is a good thing to do for security), you must unlock your phone and open your music-playing app before initiating playback; the controls appear on the lock screen only if you're already listening to something.

  --DAN FRAKES

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• s your iPhone 5, iPhone 5S, or iPhone 5C randomly crashing, rebooting and sending you back to the home screen? Don't fret, a fix is on the way.

  "We have a fix in an upcoming software update for a bug that can occasionally cause a home screen crash," Apple spokesperson Trudy Muller confirmed to Mashable.

  iPhone owners have been complaining about the crash-and-reboot problem since iOS 7 was first rolled out in September:

  Just had one of those iPhone 5s random crashes. Switched to Facebook, blackness with an apple. @carl said if no PIN req, wasn't full reboot.