The IT Nerd

Yesterday I went though the exercise of being one of the early adopters to install iOS 8 on my 16GB iPhone 5S. If you want to see what “fun” I had, you can look at this post that I did. But let me get right to the point. You’ll likely want to upgrade to iOS 8 if your iDevice supports it…. With one exception I’ll get to later. In my case, iOS 8 on my iPhone 5S feels faster than iOS 7 or 7.1. Things happen more quickly and animations which would sometimes stutter feel way more fluid. So it appears that Apple tried to optimize iOS 8 for the hardware it runs on.

Here’s some things that caught my eye:

• The user interface is basically the same as iOS 7.1.
• If an iMessage comes in as you’re surfing in Safari, the notification will appear at the top of the screen and you can pull down the notification and reply right there and instantly return to surfing. That works for calendar invites and e-mails as well. That’s a huge time saver.
• Double clicking the home button not only allows you to switch applications, but recent contacts appear there and you can phone, Facetime or whatever straight from there.
• Application that have been optimized for iOS 8 now have the ability to have more granular control of location services. You can set them to only have location service access only when running, always, or never. That’s an addition that will save battery life and ensure some additional privacy.
• Up to 5 members of the same household can share calendars, movies and music more easily. The right to approve any purchases exists as well.
• Mail is so much better. It now scans messages for contact information to quickly add to the address book which is handy. Also, I can triage my inbox by swiping on a message to delete, archive or flag it or more. Again, this is handy.
• iMessage has taken a page from WhatsApp and the like. You can share your location, easily leave and mute a group iMessage chain and send quick audio and video messages, which expire two minutes after they’re played.
• The QuickType keyboard is easily the best feature in iOS 8.  It suggests the next word you might type based on the context of your conversation, the person you are messaging and what app you are in. And it works exceptionally well. I’m very impressed by that. Plus you can now add on your own keyboard.
• Siri’s “Hey Siri” feature which allows you to invoke Siri by voice is handy. But what isn’t handy is the fact that your iDevice has to be plugged in for it to work. That’s fine when I’m at my desk or in my car as my iPhone is typically plugged in. But it’s not fine when I am on the street. Apple needs to fix that.
• You can identify what apps are draining your battery easily by going to Settings –> General –> Usage –> Battery Usage.
• The only real issue post upgrade is that the Twitter app seems to crash a lot. Seeing as it was basically a fresh install, it shouldn’t do that. Hopefully that gets fixed quickly.

Now, I didn’t have a chance to test HealthKit, Home Kit, or any feature that would require OS X Yosemite. But thus far, I like what I see. And it’s my experience is likely to get better as more apps support it. My advice is to take the plunge if your hardware supports iOS 8. Though if you have an iPhone 4S, you may want to stay away. Other than that, I see no reason not to upgrade.

What are the things that you’ve noticed in iOS 8? Please post a comment and share your observations.

This entry was posted on September 18, 2014 at 10:40 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.