iOS 7.1 review

iOS 7.1 TASK SWITCHER

The old task switcher was a little basic to say the least, with just a small row of icons at the bottom of the screen. The new task switcher is vastly improved, with thumbnail previews of your open applications. Previews are actually live, so you can, for example, see the camera view on the Camera app. Shutting down a misbehaving app is a simple matter of swiping up on the thumbnail to fire it off the screen.

Our one minor complaint is that the task switcher doesn’t move from landscape to portrait view while it’s open, even though it matches the phone’s orientation when you first launch it. In landscape mode on the iPhone, it looks a little strange, as thumbnails can only appear in the orientation that their app supports. For example, Safari and games look correct, but Mail appears to be on its side. It’s better on the iPad by virtue of more apps being written for both portrait and landscape orientations; however, we’d expect the switcher to be a little smarter in its appearance.

The new Task Switcher is more visual, but it can look strange in landscape orientation

Multitasking has also been improved, with intelligent background updating of apps. The OS learns when you do things, such as checking Facebook, then schedules an update so that when you open the app, it’s updated and ready for you to use.

iOS 7 APP STORE

No more messing around updating apps manually, as the new App Store will background update apps for you. It waits until your phone’s not being used for a bit, then it does all of the hard work in the background for you. You’ll get a message in Notification Centre to let you know that apps have been updated, but otherwise it’s refreshingly hassle-free.

Apple has also added a new Near Me mode, which uses your location to suggest relevant apps. For example, if you’re standing outside of museum, it can recommend related apps. We couldn’t find a lot of apps in our tests, but this kind of feature will take a while to populate.

iOS 7 CALENDAR

The Calendar app has had an overhaul, going with Apple’s new flatter design. From an initial inspection it certainly looks a lot nicer, and it’s definitely got a cleaner interface. With iOS 7, it was a little annoying that the month view no longer listed appointments you had for that day. Instead, you just got a grey dot showing you that there were appointments, forcing you to tap the day to go into Day view, in order to see what you had on.

Apple clearly thought the same, and has updated the calendar app. Now there’s a button (shown below) that toggles a list view. When you tap any date on the month view, the list view shows you what’s going on, without having to switch between views. It’s a massive improvement over the original version and gets rid of that little niggle with iOS 7.

iOS 7.1 CAMERA

Apple has added some new modes to its camera app for still photos. First, is Square mode, which takes square photos, rather than the usual rectangular pictures. This is merely a crop of the camera’s sensor and it’s a non-destructive edit: copy photos off the phone using a USB cable and you’ll get the full-size images.

Filters can be used on square and regular still photos and include Instagram-style effects, such as black and white, and a mode to make your pictures look like they’re older. Filters can also be applied to pictures after they’re taken.

All Filters are non-destructive, so you can recover the original photo if you like, by later removing the filter. Copying photos off the phone using a USB cable will only retrieve the original image. There are a few strange results at the moment with iCloud. A photo taken with a filter appears correctly on other iOS devices in the iCloud Photo Stream; however, pictures lose their filters when viewed in iPhoto on the Mac and iCloud Photos on the PC. At the moment, if you want to keep a copy of your photos on your computer and you want to keep the filters that you’ve applied, you’ll need to email yourself a copy of the pictures you want to keep.

iOS 7.1 PHOTOS

The Photos app has been significantly changed, and it’s a big improvement. While you can still view your camera roll as a big list, the new Photos tab gives you a smarter way to view pictures. In this mode pictures are sorted by year, with a sub category that shows you some of the locations of where the photos were taken. Tap the locations heading and you’re taken to a world map, so you can browse photos by location. It’s a great way to quickly pull up some holiday snaps.

Tap a year and you’ll see that photos are grouped automatically into date ranges, also sub categorised by location. You can either tap a date range to view those photos by day, or tap the location heading to have them sorted by the location they were taken at.

It means that your photos are automatically sorted in an easy and useful way, without having to manually add them all to albums. However, there’s still the option to create your own albums if you do want to take the manual route.

We also like the way that video editing is available right there. When you browse to a video, the film strip appears at the top of the screen. You can use this to skip to the point you want in the video, or grab either end of the strip to quickly trim the video.