Siri is now savvy in sports stats, restaurant reviews and rotten tomatoes imdb movie ratings. You can make reservations with Siri through the OpenTable app, and check out movie schedules and ratings. Have a lot of apps to sift through, look up and launch? Launch it the new way by asking Siri to launch the app for you. With the iOS6, you can even dictate your posts for release on Facebook and Twitter. Get more from Siri even while you are on the go. Apple is in talks now with car manufacturers, BMW, GM, Mercedes, Toyota, Honda, just to name a few, to get Siri integrated via voice command on the car steering wheel so you can still keep your eyes on the road while getting things done by phone.
Photos will sync in real-time via iPhoto or the Photos app and are also available on the Web. Your regular direction-getting experience should not be affected, however. Additionally, Apple is doing something a little different when it comes to public transit: Instead of storing its own data, Maps will integrate third-party app information, ensuring that you tap into the best database for your queries.
They are. Find My Friends will soon feature location-based alerts, notifying you when your friends arrive or leave a location. Look for two new organization options, VIPs and Flagged messages. Users have been able to flag messages in the past, but now you can see all those messages in a folder; VIP messages are also organized into a smart folder, and you can receive different notifications about messages from those people as opposed to your other mailboxes.
Looks like. Facebook has received the Twitter treatment in iOS 6: Users will be able to post status updates from Notification Center or with Siri; share photos, locations, and high scores; link contacts to their Facebook profiles; and Like apps, songs, albums, and movies from the App Store and iTunes Store apps more or less replacing Ping, which appears destined for the boneyard.
If you have an iCloud account, you can create shared Photo Streams to distribute amongst friends and family. Just select a group of pictures, tell iCloud who to share them with, and your images will be sent to their iOS 6 devices, Mountain Lion-running Macs, and the Web, where friends can download them and leave comments. However, they've still been enhanced with new features that should make the apps even more tempting to use.
For starters, Find my iPhone is now introducing a "Lost Mode," a new option which triggers an alert sound on the device and provides a remotely set phone number for good Samaritans to call and coordinate a place to return it. Does your mother tell you to text her when you get home?
If she has iOS 6, that's no longer necessary -- she can be notified when you get back. What if you're worried about your kids getting to and from school? Find my Friends will likely add precious years back to your life. Staying on the subject of location-based features, the beloved Reminders app received a couple minor but much-needed enhancements. Chief among them is the ability to add locations manually.
When the app debuted last year, we loved the idea of receiving a notification when arriving or leaving a certain location hey, we all forget stuff sometimes , but until now we didn't have the option of putting in any address we wanted unless we happened to be there.
No more. Additionally, reminders now show up on iCloud. Lastly, you'll now be able to rearrange your reminders, add custom lists and have notification badges nag you when an outstanding task still needs to get done. Brace yourselves for the onslaught of new Siri commercials: with iOS 6, the virtual assistant is adding a few more tricks to her repertoire. It's hard to know where to begin: first, the program studied up on several new languages listed below ; it's capable of looking up sports scores from nearly every major US league as well as a heap of international ones you'll find the full list of supported leagues below as well ; you can look up movie reviews and ratings courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes; you can get Yelp reviews, find restaurants and make OpenTable reservations; and you can also launch apps directly from Siri, which can be incredibly beneficial if you have a large collection.
Siri handled our requests without too many misunderstandings. There were a few times we had to rephrase our queries it had a difficult time understanding us when we pronounced Mexican restaurants, for instance , but in general we were able to ask the same question in many different ways without stumping the computer. While we primarily used Siri on an iPhone 4S, iOS 6 is bringing the virtual assistant to the new iPad version as well.
There's still one more enhancement worth mentioning, though we admittedly haven't had the opportunity to test it: Eyes-Free Mode. We've all seen advertisements from car companies that show a driver making a phone call or getting directions just by pressing a button on the steering wheel.
With iOS 6, manufacturers will be able to install Siri into cars in pretty much the same exact manner. Once this happens, all you'll have to do is press the voice command button on the wheel and ask Siri to get directions, make calls, play music and send messages. Interesting stuff, but the success of this feature ultimately depends on how many car makers adopt it. Twitter had its day when iOS 5 came out, complete with deep integration in the OS, but Facebook was curiously absent. That's now been resolved in version six as well as OS X Mountain Lion : the service has been fully integrated into the Notification Center, Siri and core apps.
Also, Apple has released an API for third-party app access, and Facebook contact information in particular, can more easily be integrated into the address book. Just like users did with Twitter last year, you just head to the settings menu and scroll down far enough until the social media options pop out at you. Once you sign in, you'll be able to tell Siri to post a message to Facebook or manually type it in by pressing "Tap to Post" in the Notification Center.
Perhaps you've noticed a theme by now: iOS 6, by and large, addresses the small things. We'd say Do Not Disturb definitely qualifies. The concept of this feature isn't new to the smartphone world, but it's one you'll use on a nightly basis -- think of how many times you've accidentally left the volume up overnight only to be rattled out of sleep because a Facebook friend wanted to invite you to use MyCalendar.
You can tell the iPhone to allow calls from your favorites, your full contacts list shunning numbers that are unknown to you , everybody or nobody at all. But what if it's somebody calling from an unknown number about a legitimate emergency? Enable repeated calls in the settings menu, which will allow calls from anybody who tries a second time within three minutes.
Naysayers may argue that it's easy enough to put the phone into silent mode or go through the process of turning individual notifications off, but what if there's a legitimate emergency and a loved one needs to get in touch with you right away? The option is there, and a lot of people have been asking for something like this for years. The phone app in iOS has been largely untouched over the years, its iconic dialpad seemingly keeping its age rather well.
After being left alone for so long, however, Apple felt it was time to give the application a nip and a tuck. The first thing you'll notice is a completely new look to the dialpad: gone are the dark blue keys, while the white buttons are here to stay. Obviously, that's not much of an enhancement from a functionality standpoint -- it's just such a departure from the iconic look that we've become so accustomed to over the years.
Still, there are some more beneficial improvements. Incoming calls can be rejected with two new options: reply with message and remind me later. Reply with message is exactly what it sounds like -- you can choose from a small selection of canned texts including a customizable one that will be sent to the caller automatically.
Remind me later sets up a reminder for you to make sure you call the person back. While we're on the subject of phoning friends, family or colleagues, let's not skim over another critical feature in iOS 6 provided you didn't jailbreak your iOS 5 device, of course : FaceTime over cellular. Indeed, using Apple's video chat service no longer is restricted to a WiFi-only connection; you can now take advantage of this ability over any 3G or 4G network.
Of course, there are a few catches: just like with tethering a few years ago, the availability of this feature all depends on your carrier and how much data your plan allows. Most operators seem to have no problem letting you get in a face-to-face chat while using their network and to clarify, FaceTime uses data, not minutes -- but that's not always the case. Before you get too upset about this, keep in mind that you can still easily use Skype or any other third-party video chat service without a problem -- the only real concern is making sure all of your chatting buddies are using the same service as well.
Remember iCloud? While most of Apple's recent work involving the year-old cloud storage and backup service has been centered around Mountain Lion, the company isn't about to let an iOS update go by without a few tweaks.
Worried about the limited space to work with? The iPad now offers support for up to 24 tabs, so feel free to go crazy with your wild web-surfing habits. Additionally, there's a new sharing menu in Safari. This menu, which is designed to look more like an iOS folder with icons rather than a vertical list of buttons, can actually be found in multiple places in the operating system.
One of the options in Safari's menu is to add a page to an offline reading list. Yes, you could already make reading lists in iOS 5, but they were essentially nothing more than glorified bookmarks; the new functionality is more Instapaper-like in design because it will now save the web pages as well as the links. Safari is also faster now, thanks to iOS 6 utilizing a zippier JavaScript engine.
We ran some basic browser benchmark tests and the results were pleasant: we were able to crank out SunSpider tests faster 1,ms, versus 2, on iOS 5 and we also saw significant increases in HTML5test and Browsermark scores vs and , vs 86, respectively.
Not only is Safari speedier, it also finds a way to add precious pixels to the webpage you're viewing by offering a fullscreen view whilst in landscape. Just click on the icon on the bottom right and you're set. Finally, Safari now has what's referred to as smart app banners. These are notifications that slide down from the top of your screen and give you an option to download or launch an app that corresponds with the website you're visiting.
As an example, visiting engadget. If the idea sounds humdrum, look at it from a different angle: have you ever attempted to go to a website, only to find yourself forced to look at a full-page advertisement for that site's native app?
Smart app banners could help developers get their ad across in a less invasive way. Both Twitter and Facebook will automatically add information into your contacts, but Apple hasn't quite plugged in as many management features as I'd like. You can toggle both Contact and Calendar integration on and off, though both are on by default.
If you want to hide all those extra contacts but not lose Facebook information for the contacts you already have, one solution is to go into the "Groups" area of the Contacts app and toggle off the "Facebook" group. This will hide your "friends" but still keep the synced Facebook info for the rest of your contacts you actually care about. A perennial problem with Facebook integration is duplicate contacts, and I found that iOS 6 does a passably good job of preventing that — though roughly 10 percent of my Facebook friends needed to be linked manually from within the Contacts app.
Facebook events also now appear in your calendar, but it's easy to switch that off if you prefer. Both Twitter and Facebook also now enjoy a top-level status within the Settings app.
Applications that plug into either for authentication can request permission directly from iOS instead of being set up on their own, which might make life easier for some users. Although these apps are deeply integrated, that doesn't mean that Facebook or Twitter won't be updating their apps on a more regular basis — the integration isn't tied to those specific apps. Good enough, in fact, that it mostly serves to remind us how annoying it is that it has taken this long for it to be an option.
For Mountain Lion users that have updated to I tried multiple points of entry for both iMessage and Facetime and the verdict is that It works so well, in fact, that in one case I associated a phone number with a contact on an iPad in the middle of an iMessage conversation and within seconds the name had been updated on both and iPhone and Mac running Mountain Lion.
Whenever you add a new email address on one device, your other devices receive a push notification alerting you of that fact, a feature that isn't strictly necessary but could ease potential security concerns.
The calling experience in iOS 6 is largely the same as it was in earlier versions of iOS, but Apple's added the ability to reject calls with a text message or set a reminder to call that person back at a later time. There are a number of preset text message responses, but you can create your own replies if you wish. The reminders feature lets you tell the phone to buzz you in an hour or when you leave your current location to call the person back.
Along with the new call rejection features, iOS 6 gives users granular control over when notifications and incoming calls will make sound an alert or ringtone. Called Do Not Disturb, this new feature lets you set a specific time period to automatically silence all incoming calls and notifications — like when you might be sleeping.
You can opt to allow calls from favorite contacts, and Do Not Disturb has a mode to allow the second consecutive call within three minutes from the same caller to come through. All of these features are smart and well-implemented, and it's nice to be able to disconnect without worrying that you'll miss an emergency call.
Apple's also expanding the VoiceOver text-to-speech accessibility system into maps and working to create a Made for iPhone hearing aid certification. Another feature buried in the accessibility settings is something called Guided Access, which Apple says will help "students with disabilities such as autism remain on task and focused on content" by allowing you to disable the home button, block multitasking gestures, turn off motion controls, and block off certain areas of the screen from receiving touch input.
It turns the iPad into a single-use touchscreen computer that, as Apple says, would be good for certain educational settings. We imagine it will gain also wider usage as a bespoke iPad kiosk creation tool in retail environments — just set it and forget it. And iOS 6 might be the most iterative version of iOS yet.
Apple claims that there are over new features in the platform, but the ones that stand out can be easily counted on one hand.
Whether it's because Apple is just afraid of rocking the boat or because it had to spend an inordinate amount of engineering time on Maps and iCloud features, iOS 6 just isn't that different from iOS 5. Different or not, iOS 6 is a very complete, powerful, fast, intuitive, easy to use operating system. The only troubling thing about that achievement is that the changes in iOS 6 don't feel particularly forward-looking. Apple's achieved an industry-leading level of polish and sophistication — now it's time for the company to push forward once again.
Dieter Bohn contributed to this review. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.
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Maps Maps. Siri Siri. Siri in iOS 6 is faster, more responsive, and has more personality than ever before.
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