For photos, you can just use a USB cable and avoid iTunes. But really, why would you want to transfer photos to the phone, without using the Internet or iTunes? It’s bit like saying, “ah yes, it’s good, but can I use it without using my hands or my voice?”. Well no, you can’t, but I don’t see how it’s really limiting.
For keeping photos safe, there are plenty of free services where you can upload from your device or from your computer. That works as your backup (in addition to any file backups you want to do on your computer). Then you can access all of them from your phone any time you have an internet connection, and choose any that you want to add to the camera roll on the phone for those you want to access when you don’t have an internet connection.
As for using IMAP with big files, sure, but it wasn’t so big that you didn’t download it to your phone in the first place.
And Goodreader isn’t losing the ability to transfer files, using Wifi or iTunes.
Ultimately then your options are Internet, Wifi or USB with iTunes, for everything. And still we don’t need access to the file system or jailbreaking.
Note, some of this stuff is only possible using iOS 8.
You can move a photo or movie directly over wifi from your Macbook to the iPhone, or from iPhone to iPad or from iPhone to the Mac.
I have thousands of photos and documents in rhe Dropbox where i cn always access them via 3G
I have used smartphones since long before the iPhone. Before, a smartphone was a device that had lots of technologies on the device itself. Sort of like a miniature PC, but with camera, radio, 3g, GPS and so on. My old Nokia N900 is one of the ultimate incarnations of that philosophy (an iPhone is a joke in comparison). However, today everything is put on the net, or in the “cloud”, and the phone is simply the mobile everyday interface for your access to it.
In my opinion the “new” way is vastly superior to the old philosophy (which is one reason why I also use a Chromebook), but when the net is gone or slow or insanely expensive the new way looses out. It becomes useless. At the same time I have a hard time imagining that will ever happen in Europe today, or anywhere on the globe. I mean, last year I was way out in the bush (in the jungle/savanna) in Mozambique, one of the poorest countries in the world – with full internet access. I had to pay for it (the company I worked for did), but that cost was miniscule compared with the overall travelling expenses, and I could use phone/PC the same way as at home (The company also issued satellite phones, I never turned it on once). It may not always be possible to be connected every hour of the day, but there is no real need to be either. You can get by just fine without wifi or 3g a couple of days. Even the Chromebook will work for ages offline, and sync everything the moment it becomes online, without me having to do a single thing. This is the way all things work today, and it works extremely well.
It’s a bit ironic. People have become so used to, and relies so much on mobile phones and mobile technology at sea (boating, sailing), that each year the rescue organisations are campaigning people to get VHF radios. They are far superior in getting help fast, when you need it, for several reasons.
What I mean is that assuring you have wifi or fast mobile connection, at least sporadically, is so much simpler than anything else you can think of, so it is not worth bothering with old style solutions.
The problem is that file sizes have surpassed internet speeds, in recent years.
It is certainly possible to organise an internet connection anywhere in Europe these days (especially if you have more than one way of doing it) but it will be way too slow for backing up full size photos. And sometimes it will barely work.
And occassionally some other big stuff is a problem e.g. if you generate a PDF with some images in it (an easy way to present information to a lazy or corporate recipient) then the PDF could end up pretty big (say 50MB) even if you waste a bit of your life messing with the PDF graphics rendering options.
I think “the cloud” is a very good solution for people who get good speeds at home or work, and who travel to places where they either get the same, or they don’t need to transfer much data. And this is probably the case for most people in the 1st World, in large cities. The device manufacturers are well aware of who buys their stuff, where they mostly live, and what their lifestyles are.
Why will British Telecom “never” upgrade my local telephone exchange beyond 440kbits/sec uplink speed, and why will the cellular firms “never” upgrade the local tower(s) to improve the signal beyond GPRS (~30kbits/sec)? Because only a few hundred people live here, and they can claim they provide 4G to 90% of the population, when in reality almost nobody outside big cities can get it. I was one of the original campaigners for ADSL here, and we have not seen any change in 15 years. About 10 years ago a local business got DSL put in, 2mbits/sec both ways, for GBP 10,000/year. They pay a less now but the speed is the same. Yet even that speed is near-useless for backing up say 500 20MP camera pics to “the cloud”… I can get 3G (100kbits/sec UP) if I stand in the garden, or leave the phone lying in the grass, in a plastic bag in case it rains 
And I would guess 90% of the UK’s land surface is just like that.
I accept the arguments about changing one’s way of working but it still ultimately comes down to one’s view of backups and thus the value people attach to their data. IMHO most people would be happy to lose their photos (and that is pretty well guaranteed, eventually) provided they had already uploaded them to facebook…
Information is becoming ever more transient, more and more people live totally hectic lives and don’t bother to read past first five lines of an email, etc. And the big names know this, otherwise who could sell, with a straight face, a camera phone which produces 20MB image files, and bundle “cloud” backup (implicitly 3G/4G) with it? Microsoft’s “usability committee” had got this to a fine art on the Nokia 1020 (WP) phone, which has a 40MP camera, which saves a ~1MB low quality image (and the email app is hard coded to downsize this to ~300k!), and a ~40MB raw (DNG) image only. Probably 99% of users will never find a way of getting a decent quality image out of that phone, so the whole thing is an exercise in cynicism.
The problem is that file sizes have surpassed internet speeds, in recent years.
I see the opposite. Downloading a Full HD movie takes about 8-10 minutes on my 200mbit/s cable internet at home for 39€/month. I cannot remember that downloading a movie in what was considered to be good quality was ever so quick.
Obviously there are not so well connected areas in every country but at least in Germany it’s rare that the options are totally bad. 4G helped a lot, I use it exclusively in the office, feels like fast DSL.
You can move PDFs, or anything, directly via Wifi from/to iPhone, iPad, Mac … not via the Internet.
a totally useless browser from Nokia (works on pure HTML sites like peter2000.co.uk but little else)
a slightly less useless 3rd party browser (Opera Mobile)
a crappy email app from Nokia which doesn’t do attachments (and a lot of other stuff) properly
a slightly less crappy email app which predates touch screens but does kind of work
And a gazillion of menu layers. The menu structure on a Nokia phone is usually hopelessly complicated and an absolute labyrinth of menu page after menu page that makes no sense.
The iOS menu structure is usually one level deep. Mostly because features “just work” without the need to setup a handful of parameters. Awesome.
Android phones I only have experience with an older HTC and found that a lot better than Nokia, but unneccesarily complicated as well.
Nokia rant over… my work phone is a Nokia by the way.
But on other, larger, communities we operate, iOS is still used substantially more than Android, usually at least double and across a wide range of demographics.
This is because iOS users actually use their phone to do work/life as opposed to a lot of “cheap” Android phone users who have a smartphone, but don’t really use it as such.
If you look at this link, you see the actual usage versus ownership, which shows that iOS users at that point were actually using their devices as opposed to Android/Amazon/Microsoft tablet owners. The fact that the figures are expressed in per 100 iPads says enough.
If you look at this link, you see the actual usage versus ownership, which shows that iOS users at that point were actually using their devices as opposed to Android/Amazon/Microsoft tablet owners. The fact that the figures are expressed in per 100 iPads says enough.
Says enough of what? That iStuff users are a better target for advertising because they buy all that crap?
This so called “study” is from 2012, a lot has happened since then. Furthermore, I cannot even access the original data anymore. And it doesn’t seem like you can make the conclusions made from the data.
So if you can’t find any better and more current study to make your case that the iStuff is somehow better, then that’s really sad, for Apple.
That’s only one of many studies & researches that show that iOS smartphones are used 5-7 times as much than other operating systems. I, for myself, do have an idea why that is so. (But there are studies that prove exactly the opposite :-))
