[jackowayed]

> Settings->General->Location Services

This is one of the reasons I was so glad to ditch my iPhone. They bury shit that you want to access frequently in Settings.

Want to turn your WiFi on/off? It's 2 or 3 menus deep in settings. Same with brightness. I change both of those several times a day.

And there's nothing you can do about it unless you jailbreak your phone.

On my HTC Droid Incredible, I have a power control widget that lets me turn on and off wifi, GPS, and bluetooth, and lets me toggle between 3 brightness settings. It only takes up 1/4 of a home screen. It's wonderful.

[mitjak]

Wifi has always been accessible from the very first menu of Settings.app.

[sjs]

So true. I still like my iPhone (jailbroken, sbsettings ftw) but I complained about this exact same thing long ago around 2003 when I had one of those badass HTC phone-PDAs[1] with Windows CE. Quick 1-2 tap access to that stuff is a must for me, and some of my less geeky friends. It's a pretty glaring omission to an otherwise excellent OS.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Blue_Angel

I don't have good ideas about where that UI might be though. Sliding across the status bar like sbsettings? Another pane like the new music controls? On the search page? There's got to be an elegant way to do it.

[mickdj]

I'm curious about this - I've seen that behavior with Android users as well.

Why specifically do you want to turn WiFi, GPS, and bluetooth on or off? I can think of several potential reasons, but would like a user's perspective.

[sjs]

Sometimes WiFi is flaky and turn it off in favour of 3G (maybe the router needs a reset, or cable internet is out).

For some unknown reason Scrabble recommends that you turn WiFi off and BlueTooth on to play multiplayer w/ an iPad as the board. It's an odd request but I do it anyway.

When I leave the office my iPhone can see the office base station even when I'm kitty-corner waiting for the bus, but the signal isn't strong enough to work so I have to turn WiFi off.

In order to check my wireless usage w/ Rogers' iPhone app they require me to be on 3G. It's lame but that's how they roll so I have to go along with it.

Sometimes once it's off I forget about it because I have a 6G data plan which I haven't been able to burn up even using Grooveshark for a couple of hours a day. Then if I want to do something on a LAN at home or work I need to turn WiFi on.

I leave 3G and BlueTooth on all the time. Some of my friends turn BT off when they're not using it and I try not to hassle them about it. It doesn't wear your battery down unless you're using, in my experience anyway. So less savvy users want to do this kind of thing too, not just us nerds. :)

[mickdj]

Thanks for the insight!