Apple announces iOS 9 with Improved Battery Life, More Accurate Siri, and Intelligence

Last year, Apple had announced the iOS 8 as one of the largest update after the announcement of App Store. This year, the iOS 9 gets announced, but that isn’t a huge upgrade but something incremental with one of the improvement being its voice assistant, i.e. Siri, which gets a lot of changes. Apart from this, Apple has announced that iOS 9 will result in better battery life, enhanced security, and added intelligence to the user experience.

Siri now has an API integration for search, and this is said to be 40% more accurate than the assistance last year.

There is a new Cards interface in Spotlight search results, which can directly take actions from the spotlight, instead of opening the result. One of the example, is playing music from the spotlight. Apple is keeping it open for developers from 3rd party apps, to tap in.

Caller ID assistance is something new from Apple. When you receive a call from someone whose number isn’t stored, the OS looks into your mails to see if the number is related to someone you know.

Notes: The Notes application comes in with a lot of new features. Web pages can now be directly shared into their notes, and annotations can be added as well. A lot of formatting options have been included as well.

Maps: Transit directions are finally here, included in the Apple Maps app. This comes very handy in many ways, for example, if you have to find out the train timings at a particular subway station, you get it by just tapping on the station. There is also a walking distance given from the entrance of the station, to the platform.

News: This is the major announcement from Apple, for the iOS 9. Flipboard taken as an inspiration, the news app aggregates the news in a format specific to Apple devices. Rich typography and inclusion of embedded videos and photo galleries that are already present on a website, this surely will be a good one if you want a single source for different news. It brings in news from a particular topic, based on how much you are reading, and learning from the categories you read more.

The early partners for News app include ESPN, New York Times, The Telegraph, and a lot more major publications. United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom are the first ones to get News app.

Split screen functionality in iPad: Apple is finally catching up with some of the major USPs of Android. One of the features they have introduced for the same, is the Multitasking feature for the iPad. Split View is what they call it, and using this, two apps can be run at the same time on the same screen.

A new feature of task switching will let the users watch videos as a picture-in-picture view, alongside some other function on other part of the screen. But, this one is available only for the new iPad Airs, and the previous iPad users won’t be able to take advantage of it.

iOS 9 Availability

The iOS 9 version will be available to all the Apple devices that were able to run iOS 8, and that is a sweet surprise for those with previous iPhones and iPads who were in doubt whether iOS 8 was going to be the last major iOS version they can use.

iOS 9 will be available to everyone this fall. The iOS 9 developer beta is available today, and the public beta will be available in July.

You can update to iOS 9 beta 1 right away, using this guide of ours.