iOS 9: Should you upgrade?

The keyboard when the iPhone is in landscape view

Better battery life!

One point Apple were keen to highlight during the unveiling of iOS 9 at this June’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) was the software’s new battery optimisation technology, designed to eke out around an extra hour’s worth of juice on average.

The new Low Power Mode can be activated through the Battery menu under Settings, and reduces or turns off power-hungry apps and actions including fetching new emails, Siri, automatic downloads and background app refresh to preserve power until you can fully charge your phone.

Keep tabs on your battery life and help preserve it through new Low Power Mode

It also presents a list of the apps in the past 24 hours and past week which have used the highest percentage of your battery, helping you to keep a closer eye on the culprits most likely to leave you short.

Improved security

iOS 9 gives you the chance to upgrade the security of your iPhone by making the leap from a four-digit passcode to the default six-digit. Apple says this will greatly reduce the likelihood of somebody cracking your code, as the number of possible combinations has been raised from 10,000 to one million.

Notes

Notes has always been a relatively poor piece of jotting software, allowing you to type out the most basic of observations and access them across your devices thanks to the iCloud. Within iOS 9 Notes has thankfully been upgraded to become a much more functional, capable app.

You can now sketch directly into Notes using your finger as a pencil, fineliner or brush pen complete with a range of colours, inserting your artwork inbetween banks of text. You can edit the image by tapping once, or alternatively return to text by hitting Done in the upper left corner. You can choose to share your masterpiece by hitting the Share button in the upper right corner, where you can also save the image or assign it to a contact.

Notes now allows you to make quick sketches among your text

The extended menu is summoned at the top of the keyboard by pressing the Plus icon, and contains a button for creating check-off to-do lists, and a menu for formatting text, including title, emboldened header and numbered lists. You can also insert photos directly into a note for the first time, either from your photo library or taken especially.

These updates shift Notes from an overlooked app to one that’s genuinely useful, though you could question how often you’ll use the sketch function. Either way, it’s a vast improvement.

Siri

Siri takes centre stage in iOS 9 as a more convenient search method for locating the contact, app or function you want as quickly and conveniently as possible.

Siri has been designed to atune itself to your voice, meaning you can wake it from across the room by calling “Hey Siri” – a cool party trick if nothing else. Typing queries into the Spotlight search bar (housed within a pane triggered by swiping to the right while on the home screen) now returns more comprehensive results from a variety of categories, including Netflix films, sports results, your pictures and videos and in-app information.

Siri effectively learns what information is most useful to you at any one time from your past usage behaviour, meaning if you listen to music on your way to work it’s likely to suggest your music app of choice at the time you start your commute, or the contacts you’ve been in most recent contact with.

Searching for photos taken in specific locations using Siri

Like the new and improved Spotlight search within OS X’s El Capitan, Siri has benefited from colloquial text recognition, meaning you can ask it to show you pictures taken in specific locations such as San Francisco, or emails from Mum with attachments.

If you ask Siri to show you a text from a particular contact, it can read out the most recent message you received, including a vocal explanation for any emoji characters, such as “raised hand with light skin tone” or “smiling pile of poo” – hours of entertainment.

Maps

Maps in iOS 9 now comes with transit directions to help you map your route via available public transport, and suggest multiple routes for you to take. A particularly handy feature is the inclusion of underground stations’ entrances and exits, which is useful for making a swift escape from multi-exited stations such as London Bridge or Leicester Square. As you may have guessed, this is restricted to London within the UK.

You can now save Home, Work and favourite locations to find quick routes, and recent address such as those included in email signatures are listed under Recent places.

Navigate easily between points using Maps’ Transport option

News and Wallet

Apple News is yet to launch in the UK at the time of writing, so there’s not too much I can say about that at the moment. Wallet is a revamped version of Passbook, where your aeroplane boarding passes and event invitations lived in iOS 8. Now, double-clicking the physical home button will open Wallet and any saved debit or credit cards for making purchases within Apple Pay.

Dpuble-clicking the home button opens up the Wallet app for Apple Pay access

iPad functionality

A key focus of the WWDC presentation was the new productivity features iOS 9 held for the iPad. These are a welcome addition, as anyone who’s tried to write any document of length on an iPad can attest, past reliance on having to constantly switch between apps proved tricky.

Apple has also introduced a new multi-touch cursor gesture; by double-tapping with two fingers on the keyboard, the current word within the cursor selection is highlighted, while tapping three times will select the entire paragraph.

Slide Over

You can now open two apps simultaneously through the Slide Over function. Dragging from the right-hand side of the screen opens up the ‘second app’ window, meaning you can scroll through the list of apps to find your preferred one. You can select a different app by pulling down from the top of the screen, and can adjust the size of the secondary window by dragging the border between the two.

Split View

Once you’ve dragged the border to halfway between the two apps, you’ve now entered Split View. As you’d expect, this runs both apps in harmony on the single screen. If you decide youd rather focus on the single app, you can pull the border to the left or right depending of which app you’d like to dominate the screen.

Picture in Picture

Picture in Picture is a clever function which minimises your YouTube or FaceTime video into the lower right hand corner as you hit the Home button to open another app, allowing it to continue playing uninterrupted. It’s a similar function to the existing video minimisation feature allowing you to continue watching a miniature YouTube video within the iOS app while you search for others, but extends for use across other apps.

Verdict – should you upgrade?

The iOS download process will be smoother than ever before thanks to Apple’s savvy decision to offer temporary deletion of apps while the software updates. The apps are reinstalled following completion, putting an end to the days of deleting vast swathes of pictures to free up space.

iOS 9 is, in my opinion, a significant upgrade on its predecessor due to its speed alone – it’s incredibly zippy. This is particularly noticeable switching between apps, launching the camera and scrolling through emails.

The iPad multitasking is a godsend for anyone who’s ever tried to compose anything of length on one, and notifications being automatically sorted chronologically instead of by app is another wholly welcome addition.

When using my iPhone 6 Plus an average amount while in Low Power Mode (taking photos, sending emails and texts), the battery life decreased by around 5 per cent per hour, a decent enough trade off for losing background app refresh.

There’s no major aesthetic overhaul like the one iOS 7 heralded, and Maps is still slightly clunky compared to its slick Citymapper and ever-detailed Google Maps rivals, but credit where credit’s due – it is an improvement.

There will be those who are still annoyed by the fact they can’t delete apps they may never open, such as Apple Watch or Stocks, but for this speed and ease of use, it’s a brilliant upgrade which addresses past niggles with aplomb.

Source : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/iphone/11866164/iOS-9-Should-you-upgrade.html