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Hands On: iOS 9
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NewsPoster
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Sep 16, 2015, 11:56 AM
 
Should you wait a day or two before you upgrade to iOS 9? We advise it, but only because that's sensible whenever something big rolls out to so many people at once. Sometimes, it's hard to wait for the greatest from Cupertino, and that's partly why your first reaction to iOS 9 is going to be quizzical. You'll go through what is hopefully a quick upgrade process and, picking up the iPhone or iPad, may even turn it around looking for any signs of something different.

Despite surface similarities, there is plenty that's different. For something that honestly looks the same after upgrading than it did before, iOS 9 brings many new features, so many new apps and greatly-improved ones, and adds myriad little touches that are gems. Twenty minutes with this, and you will never go back to iOS 8. Never.

The first things you'll see

We're not kidding about how this looks just like iOS 8, but there are differences even when you first glance at it -- especially if you have Apple apps on your home screen. The icons for some of those, like Podcasts, have been subtly changed. Not enough to leap out, but enough that you know something is different, and you spend a while trying to figure it out.

Deliciously, you've got more time to ponder than you're used to: iOS 9 promises to get you one whole hour more out of your battery charge. We can only give you anecotal evidence so far, but we're very happy with that ancedotal evidence. We're still not leaving home without our external battery pack, and that is not just because we spent good money on one. What this claimed extra hour gives you, though, is a bit of reassurance -- and we find we're less constantly checking our battery level, and less frequently attaching the battery bank to weigh down the phone.



You don't have to do anything to get this extra hour; iOS 9 simply manages to get it for you out of some power management alchemy that we can't imagine. Alongside the power management, Apple has also introduced a Low Power Mode that is reminiscent of the Apple Watch. When your battery goes below 20 percent, and then again below 10 percent, the phone will offer to switch into this mode. Say yes, and your iPhone carries on working, but with a dimmer screen, slower checking emails, and other tiny changes that we can only pretend to comprehend, but which add up. They add up a lot. Apple claims that they add up to three hours more battery life. We can't confirm that quite yet, but we're continuing to look at it.

We're pretty much infinitely more likely to use and appreciate Low Power Mode on our iPhones than we do on our Apple Watches. That's partly because we've so rarely needed it on the iPhone, but also because the Apple Watch version goes further and stops everything but a basic time display from working. We avoid using the Watch's low power mode because we'd rather eke out every minute of its other functions that we can. Plus, it is a surprising pain getting the Apple Watch out of low power mode.

There has been a bigger pain, though, and iOS 9 has removed it. Apple hasn't mentioned this, but stealthily, it has fixed an issue with the Apple Watch and Airplane Mode. One of the exquisite touches of the Apple Watch, right from the start, is how if you switch your iPhone to Airplane Mode, then the Watch switches to it too -- it's very nice. Except, under iOS 8, if you then switch off Airplane Mode on your iPhone, the Watch stayed in it. You had to separately go to Apple Watch settings and find the Airplane Mode switch. Now, in iOS 9, it just works the way it should. On both devices.

This is about iOS 9 rather than watchOS, but we are hoping that the new Watch software and apps like Workflow will get to control Low Power Mode on the iPhone. Being able to switch in and out of it when you know you don't need all the features of your phone would be good.

Hey, hey, Siri

For all the valid criticisms levelled against Siri, we have really liked it, and use it countless times a day. We had been hoping that Siri would be added to OS X El Capitan -- it hasn't yet -- and to be honest we hadn't thought about it on iOS 9, but the differences are many and important. Some of them are also just gorgeous.

Call up Siri on your iPhone with iOS 9, and the old black screen with the white wavy line are gone, replaced by a pulsating rainbow of colors: it is the Apple Watch Siri, if that were blown up huge. It is honestly a treat watching that work as you talk. We've had an unsettling problem with the last days of the iOS 9 beta, where the usual Siri sound when you press down the Home button hasn't happened. The end one, where Siri is saying it's off to do your bidding still appears, but many times we missed that Siri was ready and waiting for us.



If you get an iPhone 6s, then Siri will be waiting for you all the time, and that's how it should be. Even without that always-on feature, we are even more keen on Siri than we were before. Without question, the best new element is how you can ask Siri to remind you "about this." If you're reading an email, and need to do something about it tonight, say "Hey, Siri, remind me about this at 8pm" and that is exactly what it will do, because it understands what you mean. It's the same with websites: it will remind you about the website you were looking at, and in neither case do you have to anything more than say "about this."

One disappointment is that Siri remains limited in which apps it works in. We briefly hoped this would be the answer to the age-old Facebook irritation where you get event notifications and know that if you don't respond now, you'll never find it again. We so very often get this, and usually when we can't take the time to look up our calendars, or call our partners to compare diaries and tastes. We had hoped we could say "Hey, Siri, remind me about this" and have it make a note of the Facebook event, but no. It doesn't work with Facebook. Nor Reeder. Doubtlessly nor many other third-party apps, but we cross fingers that universality, or easier developer integration, is coming soon.

While we wait, you'll find us in New York City, where we're thinking of going, just so that we can later say "hey, Siri, show us photos from New York last month." We'll do it, too. You just watch. While we're doing that, we will also continue to use Siri as a quick app switcher -- just not as often as we used to.

App switching

It's routine, absolute unthinking routine now for us to pull up at a parking lot and say "hey, Siri, open Parkmobile." It's a local parking app for the UK, and means we don't need to carry money. Additionally, if we're longer than we expect, we can tap a button or two and extend our parking time. We use this nearly exactly as often as we do "hey, Siri, take us home."

Now with iOS 9, though, we find we're leaving apps open a lot, and just sliding between them. Double-press the home button just as you ever did, but now apps arrange themselves in layers so you can thumb left and right through them, instead of them being shown in a slightly miniaturised row. It is far better now: faster, easier, just more pleasurable. We do miss seeing the photos of our recent and favorite contacts in circles at the top of the app switching screen, though -- that's moved to the search screen.



If you do this on your iPhone while having the same app open on your iPad nearby, you get an extra horizontal tab across the bottom of the screen with that app's name on it. Tap that, and you do open the app on your iPhone, plus it uses Handoff to open the same document. Attractive, quick, and convenient. It shouldn't be so nice: it's different from the swiping, and it's a design on the screen that we don't see anywhere else. So, it should be a little bit jarring and ugly, and yet somehow it isn't. Your mileage and taste may vary, but it's not ghastly, so we're very pleased with both how it looks and feels.

If you've spent a lot of time getting photos for all your contacts, you can still see them in the right place. From the front home screen, swipe to the left and you bring up a new search facility. It's actually nearly identical to the search screen you get from swiping down on the home screen.

Swipe down on the home, or any other regular screen of app icons, and you get a search bar for entering text, plus icons for four recently-used apps (more on the iPad, of course; it's bigger). It's not a literal list of your most-recently used ones; it's intelligently chosen to be the apps you are likely to want next based on what you're doing. Under iOS 9, iPhones learn more about when you like to do what, and that influences this list.

If you swipe left to before the front home screen, you get the same search bar as before, and the same app icons. However, you also get a row of contacts. We're not yet overwhelmed by iOS 9's interpretation of what we want or who we need to call: it's just too soon to know whether we should be burning Apple at the stake for witchcraft. Currently, we look at it and can see the benefit, but not fathom out iOS 9's reasons for what it's picked. Reportedly, this will improve over time as the iPhone learns what you use at what times of day.

The new iOS 9 wants to bring you the right tool for what you're doing, so that you can concentrate on that, and not on picking apps. Along this line, there is also a new way that all apps are connected: if any app sends you off to another one -- such as Mail including a website link -- then the new app has an extra tool. At the top of the screen where your signal strength is usually shown, you get a button such as "Back to Mail," and tapping it takes you just where you expect.

There's been thought put into security, too. We found that when, say, we had a Word document in Dropbox, we had the option to open it in Microsoft's application -- but first both apps wanted to be sure. "Dropbox wants to open Word" warned Dropbox, and then when we got into Word we had another warning "Word wants to open Dropbox." That wasn't the most clear exchange of warnings, as it sounded as if Word was throwing the document back in Dropbox's face, but it meant the first app couldn't send you to the second without your positive choice, and the second app couldn't accept the move without your approval.

This exchange of warnings didn't seem to stop when we'd done it once, but we haven't had it in quite a while -- so we're presuming the apps remember that you said yes after a fashion. This would be a system feature, an overall iOS 9 one, rather than down to each different app to implement, and we like that. This happens across every single app you have, not just the ones that appear on the search screen. Speaking of which, there is one more thing on that page: if you've set it up, then you also get around three articles from the News app, which is one of two new apps.

New and gigantically improved Apple apps

News is a quick way to read what's going on, and it aggregates articles from a wide range of online publications which have chosen to contribute. MacNN is one of them, and was available from launch. You can specify that you want MacNN or any other particular website, but otherwise, it shows you articles from a range based on your tastes.



As with Apple Music, you are prompted to say what types of news you're most interested in. You can specify certain publications from a selected list, and you can tap on broad topics like Politics. Initially, we found quite a lot of overlapping or somehow too-specific options, such as news to do with very particular New York subjects. You do find yourself going "yeah, yeah" after a while, and dismissively tapping on just enough things to get through to the next bit. Once it's all set up, though, you get a nicely-presented list of current and new articles that you can dip into. We found that we quite quickly started deleting sources, just to trim back how many news articles we saw.

That said, we're all lifelong dedicated RSS users, and in a Venn Diagram of apps, Apple's News would only just cross over into the RSS territory. News is clearly aimed at casual news readers, and squarely aimed at the Flipboard audience. It aims well, it does the job well, we're just not likely to adopt it. That may be because it's focused on articles more than it is sources: if you have certain sites that you like to read, then you can do it this way, and you can mark out favorite sources, yet we find that RSS is easier. If you prefer dipping in to topics as they interest you, News will work better.

New iCloud Drive app

Apple's other new app is iCloud Drive, which in a similar way to Dropbox and OneDrive just shows you the folders and files you're storing in iCloud. The advantage is that you no longer have to remember that this invoice is in Pages, and that invoice is in Numbers before you can open them. Instead, you can open iCloud Drive, find the document, and open it from there in its correct application.

This philosophy and execution is more in keeping with Apple of old than the iPhone has been before: Apple has previously focused on your work, rather than the application you need to do that job -- it's why, right from the start, double-clicking on a document on your Mac will generally open it up in the right application. It's good to see that coming to the iPhone: it'll be interesting to see who uses it and how much. We'll be surprised if it ends up in many people's docks, but we keep it around for the odd time we need it.

Improved App: Maps

Maps is underrated, and Google Maps is overrated: we can't and don't want to argue that Apple's data is as good as Google's, but we have often stared and stared at Google Maps trying to fathom out how to get it to start directions. We've never had the slightest issue about controls on Apple Maps; we've just had issues with where it takes us. That's a big deal, but ultimately both mapping services have their supremely irritating moments, and both have their glories.

Apple Maps in iOS 9 is adding some glory: it now has transit maps that show you public transport -- and show you far more accurately than most rivals. For as well as directions to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City, Apple Maps can tell you which of that station's myriad entries is the best for where you're going. Or at least apparently it does. Transit is a button in Apple Maps wherever you are, but the actual service is non-existent in any but a very few cities around the world (except in China). Doubtlessly it will come to more, but right now we just have to nod and say it sounds great.

Improved App: Wallet (formerly Passbook)

Wallet is a better name for a broader app: as well as the various tickets you've always been able to hold in the old Passbook, and as well as the credit cards you've recently been able to add, now you can also have store loyalty cards.

There are some Apple apps that you create a folder for somewhere, and just lob in there looking forward to the day Tim Cook says you can delete them. Apple's Wallet, though, is different: you'll probably tuck it away somewhere, you'll probably not use the app very much itself, but you will use its functions a lot.

The more you get used to Apple Pay, the less you're going to use anything else.

Improved App: Mail

At the opposite end of the scale for how often you'll use something, there is Mail. You must be thinking that so far all these iOS 9 features are small, and you're right: what we most like about it is how these little touches combine to make one excellent, fast, and pleasurable email consuming system. Yet there are certain features that, while not exactly gigantic, are nonetheless particularly notable -- they're the features that you know will soon be on every smartphone. One of them is in Mail, and in your iPhone with iOS 9.

When someone calls you, and they're not in your Contacts, iOS 9 seemingly scans your email looking for the same phone number. If it finds it, it works out who that is: maybe it's in an email from a particular individual, so iOS 9 tells you that name. In practice, surely iOS 9 or maybe Mail across this, and the forthcoming El Capitan parse your emails as they arrive. It just can't be searching when the phone rings, because it returns its results too fast.

We haven't seen this feature a great deal yet, because clearly no strangers want to talk to us. Yet when it does work, it's fantastic. We've been intending to email ourselves a list of phone numbers that are known to be spam -- we're being infested by these, and there are various lists on Google -- so that iOS 9 can detect them and give us a break.

This is a Phone function, but because it uses Mail, we think of it as part of the overall improvements to Mail in this generation of software. There are others that sit across Mail and other apps too, such as Calendar. When you create a regular meeting that you always add Bert and Susan to, iOS 9 should prompt you with their names. Similarly, if every time you email Susan you also email Bert, and you haven't put them in a group together already, iOS 9 will prompt you to add Bert.

There's a tiny visual change to how people's names are displayed when you're searching for them: it's small, but it means you're always just a little bit more clear that you're looking for a person, and so emails sent to or from them. You're not, for instance, just searching for references to them in the text.

Improved App: Notes

File this one under not improved, but replaced by something with the same name. Notes on iOS 9 is unrecognizable from any previous incarnation, and it's not like there have been all that many incarnations since the original iPhone's version. From something yellow that you write in Comic Sans, Notes has become geometrically closer to a word processor. You can add text, images, notes, documents and anything else you like by tapping, drawing and dragging.



It is very impressive, and once OS X El Capitan is here, it will be useful too. As it stands, it's a much more pleasant way to make notes on your iPhone, but we were hitting various errors prompting and then reprompting us to upgrade our iPad and Mac to new OS versions in order to get them synchronized and without the ability to do that, Notes sometimes huffed and puffed a bit.

When it's working properly across the Mac as well, there is an argument that Notes is a replacement for Evernote. There's a lot to be said for that, and as a writing implement Notes is a better experience than Evernote. Yet we'll have to see how it scales up a bit later: currently we have over 5,000 notes in Evernote, and two in Notes. A more in-depth evaluation will have to wait.

Keyboard

We were fine with iOS's on-screen keyboard until the day someone asked us how we could tell whether caps or caps lock was on. We just knew. It was obvious. Until they asked and ever since we looked, we've stumbled trying to remember it. Not any more: iOS 9's regular Apple keyboard shows the letters in capitals or uppercase only when you've pressed shift or caps lock. It is yet again a small thing, but also yet again something that means you will never go back to iOS 8.

Similarly, there's a small change to the font on the keys and in the various system dialog boxes: it feels thinner and more elegant, more stylish but more readable.

There is also, at very long last, an improvement to the Loupe. Many iPhone users don't even know that you can press and run your finger along text to move the cursor along, but even those who do know also have a problem -- the line that appears is small, and you can readily find your own finger covering up where you want to go. Again, not any more: now the Loupe that appears is much bigger and clearer –– it's just also not the only way to move the cursor any more. Not if you have an iPad.

iPad specials

If you have an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, then turning it sideways to landscape gets you new keys on the wider keyboard, which include some cursor ones; but iPads now have something much better. Type the text you want, and then run two fingers, closed up together, across either the keyboard or even the rest of the screen. As you do it, the cursor in your document flies. It just flies to wherever you're pushing it.

Our one complaint about this is that it doesn't work on the iPhone, and at some point in the beta testing it did, so we'd like that back, please. We didn't tend to use the Loupe all that much before, and yet now, having this more powerful tool, we use it.



The iPad also gets multitasking to various degrees. Assuming you've got the original iPad Air and faster, you get Slide Over. While you work away in any app on your iPad, any app at all, you can swipe from the right. Depending on what you're doing and in what app, you either get another app sliding over, or you get a little handlebar as you sometimes do trying to reach the Control Center at the foot of your screen.

Slide Over keeps your current app open, and occupying about two-thirds to three-quarters of the screen, while initially giving you a menu of other apps. Right now, they are solely Apple apps, but you can tap on any and start using it in the small space left on your screen. We have worked through websites in Safari while following instructions sent to us in Mail. We've been in Mail reading an invitation, and Slide Across lets us bring up our Calendars. It is the feature we most use in the whole of iOS 9.

It is ridiculous that we've been fine without multi-tasking for five years, and yet as soon as it's available, we want more. On an original iPad Air, we specifically want Slide Over to let us use more than just Apple apps. That will come, and the smart money says it will come very, very soon, but it isn't here today.

Similarly, we'd like to see a way to say that we want to move to this slid-over app: we've often found that we're using it to quickly read an email, but then we want to respond. You can, and we've sent many an email written in that narrow strip of the screen but you do some and then you realize you're not even looking at your main app anymore, so you'd like to move to Mail. Right now, you have to come out of both and separately choose to go into Mail.

So we'd like some action or gesture that would let us say "this is the one we want now, please." Probably what we're really saying we'd like, though, is an iPad Air 2. That has Slide Over, but it also has real multitasking, in that you can two apps taking up half the screen each. On the forthcoming iPad Pro, that means you'll be seeing the apps at the same full size you do on their own on an iPad Air screen in portrait now.

Last, the iPad Pro and iPad Air 2 also let you have picture-in-picture viewing. Call up the baseball game, and drag the window to a corner while you work. Promise you'll only do this with sports. For drama, you're watching the show, or you're not. Okay?

So where's iOS 10?

Kidding! We're very happy with iOS 9. True, we were pretty happy with iOS 8, but this is the one that has seen us walking up to people and showing them elements of it. Let's stop now before we get into the increased security -- passcodes are now encouraged to be six digits, though we've not been nagged to increase ours from four digits. Instead, let us focus on what you need to know before you upgrade.

Almost nothing. You're backing up your iPhone before you do this, right? Yes, neither did we. It's nice to be in the same boat as you, but let's not bond over our local data recovery experts: plug your iPhone into your computer, and let it do a full backup before you install iOS 9. If you have health data to back up, then be sure to pick the encrypted backup; otherwise, it won't get saved.

If your iPhone or iPad is running iOS 8, then you can install iOS 9. Don't be concerned about the issue of space: last year's problems with iOS 8 being big are solved by this year's iOS 9 being small. It packs a punch into its small footprint, too.

Who is iOS 9 for:
You, us and everyone passing by -- most especially including Android users who should now join us. Join us.

Who is iOS 9 not for:
We're not convinced that we want to run this on an older phone than the 5, or an iPad slower than the first-generation Air. We'll let you know.

-- William Gallagher (@WGallagher)

Readers: do you have an app that you'd like to see us review? Developers: do you want us to take a look at your app? Send your suggestions to our Tips email.
( Last edited by NewsPoster; Sep 16, 2015 at 12:02 PM. )
     
pottymouth
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Sep 16, 2015, 12:12 PM
 
Is it available already? Mine still says 8.4.1 is up to date.
     
DiabloConQueso
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Sep 16, 2015, 12:33 PM
 
Mine too, perhaps they're doing a staggered rollout (geographically?) or something.
     
Charles Martin
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Sep 16, 2015, 12:54 PM
 
It is due out later today, but was not yet released at the time of publication.
Charles Martin
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pottymouth
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Sep 16, 2015, 01:09 PM
 
Ah, there it is.
     
Flying Meat
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Sep 16, 2015, 01:28 PM
 
"Software Update Failed - An error occurred downloading iOS 9."
     
Flying Meat
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Sep 16, 2015, 01:31 PM
 
"Software Update Failed - An error occurred downloading iOS 9."


It's not available to download yet? Odd. Same message on iPhone as iPad.
Guess I'll try later...
     
pottymouth
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Sep 16, 2015, 02:24 PM
 
I got that error when I tried it via settings, but it was already plugged in so I just ran the update through iTunes and it worked fine. Can't seem to play any of my iTunes music on the computer, tho. Running the newest iTunes update now to see if that fixes it. [Edit: nope, that didn't fix it :/ ]
( Last edited by pottymouth; Sep 16, 2015 at 03:04 PM. )
     
Flying Meat
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Sep 16, 2015, 03:32 PM
 
Coming down the pipe now.
     
slapppy
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Sep 17, 2015, 02:07 AM
 
iOS 9, It's delicious and snappy!
     
mindwaves
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Sep 17, 2015, 07:26 AM
 
One of the best features is the back button. Seriously. I've been an iOS user since the iPhone 3G and upon having my iPhone 4S stolen, I had to use a friend's Android 3 phone (whatever version that is), and loved the back button there. Have been missing it ever since.
     
   
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