High Dynamic Range. It brightens up the picture and adds saturation to it, much like HDR functions when you shoot in RAW mode on a digital SLR and post-produce in Photoshop or Lightroom.
Listen, if you're going to gripe about the camera and you don't even know what functions are on it, then you probably need to read up before you say it isn't that good. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but it's hard to slam on something when you haven't really studied it and explored all the possibilities and understand the limitations.
When you open up your camera, you'll see some options up top. Click on "Options" and flip the HDR switch to "on". Set your flash to OFF unless you WANT red-eye in all your pictures and you want a blued-out look on all your pics. Like I said, if you need to use the flash, then it's too dark! If you can't adjust ISO (which you can't with the iP), then it's gonna be grainy. End of story. The camera will save a regular image file and an HDR file, so you can look at both and determine which is the best for you. The HDR might be too bright in some situations, but it makes the colors really pop in others.