iOS 7.1 review

iOS 7.1 MUSIC

Music has had a minor update. We like the way that the Artist view now shows an image of the artist, if available, rather than just picking a random album cover. It’s a neat little touch, although it didn’t manage to fill in our entire album collection. We also like the way that it shows you how many albums and songs you have for each artist.

We’re not such fans of what happens when you tap an artist, though. This gives you a list of all songs by that artist, sorted by album. This means if you’ve got an lot of albums by one artist, you have to scroll through a massive list to find the one you want. With previous versions of iOS, you just got a list of albums and tapping one gave you its list of tracks.

Coverflow has gone, replaced by a grid of albums that does the same thing. It’s a little easier to use, as you get more on screen at once.

iOS 7.1 AIR DROP

Air Drop is Apple’s new way of sharing files and links with other iOS users and it’s brilliant. It uses a combination of Bluetooth to discover other Air Drop users and Wi-Fi for fast transfers, but is completely seamless in use. All you do is tap the share icon in an app to share a file or link, tap the user or users in range that you want to share with and you’re off. Transfers are incredibly quick and it is much easier than using NFC and awkwardly tapping your phone against someone else’s handset.

For security you can turn Air Drop off or make it so that only your contacts can see you, or everyone can see you. With these options you can make sure that you don’t get spammed by incoming links and pictures from nearby people.

iOS 7.1 SAFARI

Safari has had a complete overview, with new gestures to make it swifter to navigate, although the old back and forwards buttons are still accessible. It also has better synchronisation across desktop and mobile. With iOS 6 we saw iCloud tabs, so you can see what tabs are open on your other devices; this time you get iCloud Keychain, so any account names, passwords and credit cards saved on one iOS 7 are synched to the others. It’s a feature that’s coming to the Mac, too, with OS X Mavericks, due out later in the year.

The tab switcher is now a carousel, which makes it a bit quicker to switch between tabs. More importantly, this view also lets you tap a button to go into the Private browsing mode, where your browsing is temporarily not tracked. With iOS 6 and before, entering Private mode meant going into Settings, Safari and turning it on there. It’s just another way that important settings are up-front, saving time delving through menus.

Shared links is a new addition, which pulls in links from people you follow on Twitter, along with the messages. There’s no filtering, so it’s just a raw dump of tweets with links in them, so we don’t think it’s particularly easier or more convenient than using the full Twitter app.

Finally, the search box is gone, replaced by a single unified box that can take addresses or searches. While Siri has opted to use Bing for its search engine, you can override Safari and pick Google instead.