iOS 7 and What To Expect

Good news for iPhone & iPad lovers, which I know a lot of you are — iOS7 has finally been released today. Here’s some of the stuff you’ll be able to do once you’ve got iOS7 on your phone.
So here’s what you can expect out of the upgrade:
Control center
The closest thing the iPhone had to a control center in the past was the little thing that appeared when you hit the home button twice and swiped left, which allowed you to pause what you were listening to without going into the iTunes or podcast screen. Now that’s been revamped to allow you easy access to Airplane mode, wireless settings, Bluetooth settings, and an LED dimmer, as well as an easy button for your flashlight, calculator, and camera. You can also still play and pause the music from there too, of course.
This isn’t exactly an innovation or anything, as Android has something similar (and better, apparently). But it’s much, much better than what was there before.
Multitasking menu
Remember that thing we just said about hitting the home button twice? That function looks so much better now now. It doesn’t just show you the apps that are open but also what the screens look like before you click on ‘em.
New pull-down notification center
The notification center is good idea, but was poorly executed in the last iOS iterations. Now it’s sleeker and better-designed, with a separate tab for notifications that it thinks you might have missed the first time. For some reason it still wants to tell us about stocks, though. Are there really that many people using their phones for stock updates that every iPhone comes with it?
A better Weather app
I don’t know about you guys, but my iPhone’s built-in weather app has straight-up not been working since Sunday or so. I’m guessing that the folks over at Apple just gave up on it, seeing as this new one’s supposed to be the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel.
It sure does look pretty, with an animated display and new hour-by-hour forecast. The actual information will still be coming from Yahoo!, of course, so if you prefer a different source for your meteorological news then you might want to go elsewhere.
iTunes Radio
Probably the biggest change other than the control center, this new app gives you a selection of streaming stations that you can access through your phone, iPad, on iTunes, or on Apple TV. The stations are not as customizable as programs like Spotify or Pandora, but there is a “genius shuffle” function on iTunes 11.1 that claims to be similar.
Camera
While we won’t be getting the fanciest of cameras unless we all bite the bullet and buy that 5S, we will get some of the awesome software features that Cook brought out at the keynote, including slow-motion, filters, and easier-to-access panoramic setting. They’ve also brought out a “square” function, which is presumably supposed to translate better to apps like Instagram.
Photos is also getting a revamp, too, which will include “moments,” which organizes your images by the days in which they were taken, and “collections,” which also factors in the locations where they were taken. It just looks nicer, too. Seriously, everything on iOS7 looks real sleek and fancy.
Siri Improvements
While iPhone 4 users don’t get to hang out with Siri at all, iPhone 4S and 5 users will find that she’s just a bit better at listening to you — specifically, a sound wave shows up at the bottom of the screen when she’s ready to hear what you’re saying. She’s also much more attuned to common Internet search locations like Wikipedia and social media. And she has a new voice that’s less mechanical. You can even switch the voice to “male,” if you so prefer. He doesn’t sound as much like Paul Bettany’s Jarvis from Iron Man as we would like, but it’s a start.
All in all there aren’t that many ridiculous changes that are coming with iOS7, which is good — we are human and thus we fear change. It might be confusing teaching yourself to navigate your touchscreen a different way, but ultimately these are improvements to the way that your iPhone works.
Article Credit: Geekosystem