1. Photo Stream Sharing. It’s a cool feature, allowing us to share photos in the cloud with some basic features to like or to comment on a photo. While this seems a small thing, I find this actually useful, especially in helping with long distance work coordination.
2. Do Not Disturb Mode. A really nice and handy feature which allow us to enjoy more peaceful time at night. Helpful when we forget to silent our phones at night, but still allow important calls (from fav numbers) and emergency calls (multiple calls from same number within 3 minutes) to go through.
3. Reply With Messages. Allows us to reject a call while sending the caller a message. Might be handy for some people, but I never actually use this. Not very useful for me.
4. Apple Maps. With iOS 6, Apple replaced Google Maps with its own map. The reason? Because Google Maps is no longer free. Recently Google started to charge companies who make products using Google Maps. It is free up to certain number of hits, but once it reaches beyond 25,000 map loads per day, the service becomes expensive (originally costs $4 per 1,000 map loads when it made Apple decided to build their own map, then later on, Google lowered the price to 50c but at that time, Apple already made their move purchasing mapping companies and started their development).
Naturally, individual users who access Google Maps from their computers will never reach that threshold, thus they can still use it freely. But for Apple, considering how many iPhones they have sold, it will cost them a fortune (one person using one iPhone can generate hundreds of map loads per day, not one); and will put Apple under Google’s terms and conditions, limiting their ability to use maps as they need.
A lot of people said the new map is horrible. Well, it is worse than Google Maps, yes, but I would not call it horrible. It provides me with reasonably good map for my city. Street names and address searching are good. But it does mark some businesses names and locations incorrectly. To be fair, I found some other wrong marks with Google Maps as well. There are some locations in the world where Apple Maps go terribly wrong. And those Android fanboys are sure love to dig those locations and blow it up in the media as if everything’s wrong. The new map is not as good as Google Maps, true. And it’s normal considering Google had few years in advance. In my case, I couldn’t care less since I use a local mapping app (third party map) for my city. So I rarely use either Apple Maps or Google Maps anyway.
5. Siri Improvements. A big welcome. Finally Siri is useful for something in Australia other than asking weather.
6. Subtle Color Scheme Changes. Nice to have, not a big deal.
7. VIP emails. Showing emails from VIP contacts in a special mailbox. Might be useful for some people, but as I prefer to use my own categorisations of emails, I simply ignored this feature.
8. Few re-arrangements of items in Settings. Nice to have, especially when they (finally) put Bluetooth setting at the front page.
9. Panorama Shot. Should be nice. I haven’t tested it yet.
10. App Store tweaks. I love it when I no longer have to type my password every time I need to download a free update ! Nice little touch !
11. Facebook Integration. This might be more useful once there are more apps making use of it.
12. Better privacy setting. Allows us to see which app has access to our contact list, calendars, locations, etc. A necessary feature which should have been included since long ago.
13. New interface in Find My Friends app. Cosmetic improvement only.
14. Reminder list can now share to other people without using iCould’s web interface. This is a good feature. I have been using reminder sharing with my wife for a while now, using iCloud’s web interface. It’s a very handy feature and we’ve been wondering why can’t we do the sharing directly from our iPhones. Now we can.
15. Battery Life. The new update does not improve or reduce battery life. It remains stable.
16. The lack of “major” overhaul. For some people, this is considered as a deal breaker. For me, why do major change on something that already works fine? Revolutionary changes simply could not (or rather should not) happen every year. Otherwise it will put all previous model owner suddenly have their investment turns to dust. With this progress, even iPhone 3GS owners can still get the latest update after 3 years. Considering some Android phones never receive any upgrade (their phones become obsolete after 2-3 months by the release of new models or new OS they will never get); and some of them need to wait for months to get upgraded to the latest version, one must really re-calculate the value of “investment returns” between the two brands.
Leave A Comment