Metropol

By it's nature, iOS7 is not yet a cohesive and consistent Modern UI. Some icons are made of thin lines to match the "7" in the logo, where as others are fully filled shapes. Use of shadows and gradients is not consistent in the new Icon designs, and the use of fonts are not yet enforced in the same way throughout. Taking the old design and freshening it up, was well overdue, and I am pleased to see so many Windows Phone design ideas being carried over to iOS similar to how Google brought them to Android with their Holo UI.

I am quite encouraged by iOS7, and give it a few more updates and perhaps a couple of new versions, and it will start to fall into place.

But I am a Windows Phone user, and because it was a fresh start, it is more mature, and it's nuances have been developed. I wont be switching to iOS, not whilst Apple still behaves as it does, and because I prefer Metro to this new iOS 7 UI.

Well I installed it, and I would have kept it were it not for the fact that my battery went down at about 3x the normal rate.

And no, it wasn't just my imagination - I measured it.
(The rate of battery decrease, that is.)

So it lasted a whole 20 minutes between charges?

I recently read something from a software house calling that three lines icon a "hotdog menu" icon, which I thought was clever at the time, but now I'm wondering if they just made that up.

Googling the term generally just brings up café menus for sausage shaped foodstuffs.

Hamburger menu icon.

That's one more reason I'm glad we didn't award them the work then!

I'd go as far to say they've lost one of their major points of different with this refresh. Apple's software was easy to understand because of the skeuomorphism.

Well that's true to an extent... but it only helps for the very first couple of days of using a new device, surely. I'd guess everyone who wants an iPhone has probably got one (well, in the UK/US, anyway) so they can afford to take things a little further by (e.g.) removing the visible 'slide-to-unlock' slider.

The design grew on me after a couple of hours. I'm not sure if it's my imagination (or just part of the beta), but the new look keyboard felt different to type on which is a big mistake since it switches back to the legacy keyboard on older apps (and given how many apps haven't updated to the new Retina display, I'm guessing there'll be a lot of them).

More importantly, I had always sworn actually that I would get an android device if iOS hadn't improved enough by the time I replace my phone (it's definitely unsatisfactory at present). iOS7 has brought a few things I thought were a deal breaker (i.e. the control center thing and multitasking) but some things are still crap (lack of support for custom keyboards (although maybe the new keyboard implementation is a precursor to that?), no good way to select text, 20th-century lock screen with PIN numbers etc) and ultimately I wish they'd spent more time trying to get feature parity with Android rather than a massive re-branding exercise.