The IT Nerd

If you have an iDevice, you’re likely wondering if you should upgrade to iOS 9 which was released yesterday. You may also be wanting to hold off because iOS 8 was so buggy. Well, based on my early look at at iOS 9, it is worth upgrading to because of the following reasons:

• Battery Life: Apple claims that you can get more battery life out of iOS 9. So far that seems to be the case. My iPhone 6 seems to be sucking less power than it did under iOS 8. And if I get the battery down to 20 percent or less, Low Power Mode offers to start up. It will stretch your battery life while you still get to use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, location services, and all the other stuff found in iOS.
• In almost every aspect, your iDevice will feel more responsive when you use Apple’s built in apps. Almost like it had a new processor popped in. You can thank a number of under the hood changes for that which when developers start using those changes, you’ll feel those benefits in their apps as well.
• It will work on pretty much any iDevice going back to the iPhone 4S. Though I’d love to know from anyone with a 4S how well it runs.
• Sirl has improved dramatically. For starters, the “Hey Siri” function can now be tied to your voice via a wizard that has you say a few phrases so that it (she?) knows what your voice sounds like. Once you do that, you can use Siri in ways that you weren’t able to previously. Example, Siri now understands context. As in you can have a reminder open and you can ask Siri to remind you about “this” with “this” being the reminder and it (she?) will understand the context. You can also ask Siri to do things like “show you photos taken yesterday” or “call mom when I get in the car” as it (she?) understands location and time better than before. Finally, Siri looks at what you do and tries to be more predictive. For example, if you have a appointment in your appointment book that has an address on it, Siri will assess the traffic conditions and give you suggestions proactively on when you should leave to arrive on time as well as a route to take.
• Another Siri tweak can be found if you swipe left. That gesture brings up a new Spotlight search interface that includes “Siri Suggestions.” Siri Suggestions includes a list of people you speak with often, apps you might want to use depending on the time of day, nearby venues like restaurants and gas stations, and relevant news.
• Just moving around the user interface is way better, and I’d like to highlight one particular tweak that Apple made. When you are taken out of one app to another, for example clicking on a Web link from a text message, a small strip of “Back to…” text appears in top left corner. Tap it and you’re in the previous app. That is a huge timesaver.
• Apple Maps has taken another step forward in being useful by including transit directions that are accurate. I can leverage that because I live in Toronto where this feature is supported, but you may have to wait for a bit until Apple gets around to your corner of the universe. The rest of the mapping experience has improved as well, and I can say that this is the first release of iOS that has prompted me to dump Google Maps as Apple Maps no longer sucks is finally usable.
• Apple also overhauled the Notes app making it a lot more robust. You can insert photos, draw with your finger, add maps, create lists and it supports rich-text features.

Now is this perfect? Not quite:

• One thing that Apple made a big deal of when iOS 9 was announced is that it would take less space when installing or updating and you would have more space on your iDevice afterwards thanks to “app thinning” which only downloads the bits of the app that your iDevice needs. That’s of interest to me as I have a 16GB iPhone 6 because I am cheap. Now the over the air update that I did was just over a 1.3GB in size so it was smaller than previous iOS updates. But I did not have any more space free than I did under iOS 8 when I was done installing iOS 9. Strange.
• Apple did revamp the multitasking menu in iOS 9 to look like a stack of fanned cards. It’s prettier, but since it now fans to the left of the homescreen rather than to the right, my wife found the change of direction frustratingly hard to get used to. This is something that I am hearing about from others who have made the jump to iOS 9 as well.
• Apple has taken a page from Yelp with a new feature called Nearby, which shows you shops, restaurants, places to drink, and other types of businesses around you or near the destination you enter in the Maps search bar. But it doesn’t highlight local spots and is more likely to highlight chain stores such as Starbucks. Perhaps that will improve over time?
• Bluetooth in my car still seems to be flaky. But it’s early days on that front.

Having said all of that, if you feel the least bit nervous about making the jump to iOS 9, you shouldn’t. This release seems to make major improvements and hasn’t seemed (at least so far) to have made any major mistakes. That’s a win for Apple given how bad iOS 8 was last year. I say dive in and pop it onto your iDevice as I think you’ll like what you get at the end of the update.