I hope your day is going well so far. For the past few weeks I've been running iOS 16 on my iPhone 13 mini, so I wanted to share my experience with you all, and talk about my favourite features, and the features that you should be excited for! Note I was using a public beta, which I do not recommend you do, before I sold my 13 mini it had to have a DFU because of the beta.
The new lockscreens
So of course, I have to talk about the headline feature of this update right? The new lockscreens are so cool, but they look completely different to previous years of iOS updates and I'm here for it. You can finally have multiple photos on your lock screen, so that when you open your phone there's a different photo every time which I really love! You can also change the font of the time on your lock screen which is dope to see, and you can change the colour to fit your chosen wallpaper AND add some small widgets to your lock screen, which is really useful. The music player and notifications all come from the bottom of the screen now and if you tap on the album art while playing music you will see it take up most of the lock screen and it does look pretty clean! You can also make some really cute wallpapers by typing in some emojis and the phone will make them into a wallpaper for you, now how cool is that.
Face ID in landscape
I think this is a long overdue feature! It has been around on iPads since the iPad Pro 2018 launched. I’m not 100% sure why the iPhone had to wait 4 years longer than the iPad to get this feature, but at least it's here now! There's not too much to say about this feature but I had to mention it as I noticed Apple didn't talk about it at all in the presentation back in June which I found odd. Note this feature is limited to iPhone 13 models.
Haptic keyboard
Now this is one of my absolute favourite features they have included, it just feels so much more satisfying, and iPhones have really good haptics, so it makes so much sense! When I got my Pixel 6 a few weeks ago, I instantly noticed how good the haptic keyboard was. I'm the kinda guy that leaves my phone on silent forever, so the haptics are really nice to have while typing!
iMessage updates
This is what you have been waiting for! You can now edit and unsend messages!!! Note this will only work if the other person is also on iOS 16 and you sent the message less than 15 minutes ago. This is a feature that lots of people have wanted for ages!! Bear in mind the receiver will be able to see when you unsend a message or edit it, but still that should make life a lot less complicated, I know it will help me!
Everything else
Although those are my favourites there are a few other cool new features that are worth mentioning! So remember live text? You can do that with a subject in photos now! Live text allows you to pull the text from a photo and you can now pull a subject out of a photo, and from my testing it works pretty well! Another feature worth talking about is the new AirPods menu in settings, they now pop up underneath your name in settings and you can change your settings for them there, rather than going into bluetooth, I know this isn't exactly groundbreaking but it's nice to have for sure. You can also have shared photo libraries now so you don't have to constantly send photos to your friends or family, they will just appear as you take them! There are also a lot of visual changes across the OS, like the home app which looks really clean now, most of these changes are just visual though and you will notice them when you download the update. One thing I will add is that you can now see your battery percentage in the top bar, this was added after I left the beta so I haven’t tried it, I personally don’t think I will use it anyway, but it’s there for those who want it.
So I may not have covered everything in this quick overview but I definitely covered all of the exciting and significant updates! We should see the official release for iOS 16 fairly soon, especially considering Apple’s annual September event has been confirmed for the 7th of September. I hope you're all looking forward to it!
Thank you for reading, see you next time!
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