After spending several months in beta, I spent a couple of weeks with the full polished version of Apple’s newest mobile OS. And there is plenty to try here, including massive improvements, to the messaging app and new AI tricks and customizable lock screens. Just importantly, it’s not all that buggy crucial for any iOS users that aren’t planning on buying a new iPhone. And if you’re wondering whether to download it now or later, I suggest download it now.
This is the addition of iOS works with the iPhone 8 and later models, although some update features do demand the A12 bionic chip.
YOUR OWN LOCK SCREEN
Make iPhone your own with all-new ways to personalise your Lock Screen. Showcase favourite photos, customise font styles and display a set of widgets to get information at a glance.
Because this year in iOS 16, You will notice, Apple has tackled the lock screen. For a decade now, the iPhone used to feature a Clock notification and not much else. Things are different now, but let’s start with that clock.
There’s a new font. You might not like how the new default font looks. But the good news is that it is customizable with several different styles and colours. You can choose photos for the lock screen, but you can now apply filter styles to them and even choose a shuffled selection of photos for your wallpapers and lock screens to cycle through, but the big change is that there is now space for widgets. There are two different widget areas to customise, a slim box above the clock that’s best suited to one line text, like weather notifications, the date, chances of rain, your next calendar event etcetera.
WIDGETS
Below the clock, there is a bigger space that can houses up to four different widgets, a mix of two by one and one by one icons from the lock screen you can tap on these to launch into the apps and cells, but I don’t expect to clean any information by long pressing on the icons. It’s a shame, I think that would be a very Apple way to expand the information offered by those widgets.
Like when Apple debuted home screen widgets, it will also take time for third party app developers to get widgets of their own into their updates and onto your phone. At the moment, everything is very much Apple made widgets for Apple made apps. But I’m sure productivity or fitness tracking services and others will jump at the chance to get a little space on your lock screen. Google in particular, seems ready to get on board. They’ve already teased some of their widgets, including a forthcoming Gmail widget that will almost definitely join my lock screen when it launches. Don’t worry, though, the new lock screen still keeps the classic features. You’ll still see signal strength and battery icons now with a percentage readout. And both flashlight and camera shortcuts are still available to tap away. Oddly, the battery indicator only really visually shows how charged it is when the phone is either 100% or under 20%, which can be a bit counterintuitive at one glance when you’re at 50%, but the battery icon appears full.
FOCUS MODE
This lock Screen refresh also functions as a renewed way of showcasing an iOS 15 feature, one that can be pretty laborious to set up focus modes. You can now assign a focus mode on the personalisation, say, one for work, one for sleep, two individual lock screens with their own custom widget layouts and photos. If you really change your wallpaper during the weekdays, you could say, set up a fun weekend image of your family and assigned it to your personal focus, scheduled for Saturday and Sunday.
The ability to now swipe between focus modes from your lock screen just make some easy to use in everyday life. Sure, I could have pulled from the drop-down menu and change my focus modes there, but I didn’t.
With iOS 16, I’m already using these focus modes more. Once again, it’s Apple’s messages app that gets a lot of the beefed up updates this year. The messaging app also gets some unique tricks thanks to visual lookup. It now handles image copy and pasting, pulling subjects from your photos, screenshots and more, and making them into easy to share stickers. Not only can you put Messages. You can put them into notes and several other apps. Long press on the object, animal or person on your iPhone, if it’s an iOS XS or newer, and the phone will endeavour to clip it away from the background, ready to paste.
It’s uncannily accurate for a method that’s so well lazy, and I love it.
LIVE TEXT FROM VIDEO
The visual lookup skills in IOS 16 have been upgraded elsewhere as well with a new ability to lift a text from video doesn’t always work, but it’s still kind of amazing that it works at all.
NEW MESSAGING EXPERIENCE
Apple is making up for lost time elsewhere as well within the messages app. Finally, you can now edit and unsend messages that you send to other iPhone users, if you’re quick enough. You’ll have up to 15 minutes to edit after you first send the message with the chance to change your message up to five times. You can see any edited messages from other folks, also using IOS 16, which will be greyed out. Well, blue doubt underneath the correct message. Unsend features are only for iPhone-to-iPhone messages for now. Similarly, you can now undo send and schedule emails from the native mail app as well.
DICTATION
Finally, apples also upgraded its dictation features. Now, when you’re talking to the iPhone, the keyboard will stay on screen, meaning you can edit and adjust your dictation on the fly. You can also type in the middle of dictation, which is great for names or specific places. You can tap on a word and dictate over it even to correct any mistakes. Apple has also added more rigorous auto punctuation to dictation, which generally helps insert commas, periods and the rest without you having to say question mark at the end of any text-based request to friends and family. It’ll also even clean emoji as you say them, inserting them into your typing. It even works on microscope emoji. Now this is sadly another feature that will require that a 12 bionic chip found in the iPhone XR and newer devices.
HEALTH AND FITNESS
Apple’s health and fitness apps are relative newcomers to the company’s own stable of native apps, and they continue to evolve the health app in particular now has new medications feature that helps you log what you take and when. You can set up multiple meds for different time of day reminders and frequencies. And your iPhone will now ping you when it’s time. Apple has also expanded the fitness app to everyone. You no longer need an apple watch to track your steps when you stand and other fitness activities. Your iPhone’s motion sensors will estimate your steps, distance and even offer a rough calorie burn figure for your workouts.
LIFE SAVING UPGRADE
IOS16 also brings some potentially lifesaving personal safety updates. Emergency SOS, which sounds an alarm on the phone before automatically calling emergency services can now be activated by pressing the side button on your phone five times.
Then there’s crash detection enabled in settings, which will take data from the motion sensor gyroscope, accelerometer, microphone and more, combine it with a series of algorithm to detect whether you’ve been in a car crash. When detected a warning, will flag up on your iPhone or Apple watch. And if you’re still responsive, you can swipe on the screen to call emergency services, or close the alert, if it was a false Alarm. Like the SOS called the iPhone will automatically dial emergency services after 10 seconds have passed.
PRIVACY AND SECURITY
Now it wouldn’t be an Apple update without a few security updates, perhaps the most noticeable addition is safety check. From here, you can decouple your iPhone from specific contacts, services and gadgets inside safety check, you can uncheck permissions and even next the connection completely with emergency reset, or select all and stop sharing. You will need to use your passcode or face ID to use these more extreme measures.
EVERYTHING ELSE
One of the best updates is one I pretty much missed until I started reading IOS 16, very lengthy release notes. Haptic typing is here on an iPhone several. Several years later, until now, if you want to type in vibrations on your iOS device, you’d actually have to install Gboard, which is, yes, Google’s third-party keyboard. Now me a days later, it’s hard to imagine going back to a life without haptic typing on glass.
As I said, there’s lots to check out in over 16, Lots of small things, but some other things worth noting in my review.
Take Apple maps, for example, that now includes support for multi stop routing, which can be synced with your mac. Travel fares are also now displayed if you’re riding public transport. Apple also finally lets you hang up on calls with Siri hands free. Sure, it can sound incredibly abrupt, almost rude, but hang ups until now required a physical tap on the device. You can also adjust series wait time before it responds to your voice commands.
IOS16 marks, another notable evolution of Apple’s often slow to change mobile operating system. This time with a focus on enriching your lock screen experience. I focused a lot on the lock screen in this review because it’s such a major part of how you interact with your iPhone. Changes elsewhere are small, but there are an awful lot of them, and they add up sure some are less important. For example, Apple has added no fewer than seven more nose options for Emoji.
There are some features that I haven’t been able to test, including accessibility upgrades for Lidar capable phones and pass key support, that latter uses your iPhone’s security features for securely logging into websites and devices like your Smart TV.
As with many IOS updates, you might not notice a lot of these changes. Many will find the medications reminder feature useful and simple, while others won’t even know it’s there.
Sports funds might love a new dedicated news app tab for their favourite team, but on the other hand, you might just not care about sports. You can and you should test out the new Lock screen widgets.
Set up some focus modes, but also you don’t have to, but please turn on haptic typing and never let your iPhone make those typing noises ever again.