Apple iOS 6 review

ICLOUD TABS

Introduced with OS X Mountain Lion, iCloud Tabs makes its debut on the iPhone. It lets you see what tabs you’ve got open on your other devices, so you can carry on reading where you left off. If you use Safari across all of your devices it’s really useful, although it’s worth pointing out that Google Chrome already has this feature and is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS.

You can see all of the open Safari tabs on other iOS 6 or OS X Mountain Lion computers

The Reading List in Safari is very useful, as it saves entire pages for offline reading, so you can collect everything you’re interested in, in the morning for reading at your leisure.

TWITTER AND FACEBOOK

Facebook and Twitter are more closely integrated into the OS. Once you entered your account details, you can swipe down on the Notification Center and Tap to Tweet or Tap to Post to Facebook. Both are useful shortcuts to have, although they only let you add a location, not a picture from your camera. If you want to Tweet or Facebook a picture, you’ll have to go to the Camera App. Both Facebook and Twitter appear in the Share button on applications. For example, you can quickly share a website using Safari.

It’s neat being able to Tweet or send a Facebook Status from the Notification Center

SIRI

Siri has been updated, too. Now it works with Facebook and Twitter, so you can speak a status update and have it sent automatically. You can launch apps using Siri, too, which saves trying to find ones that are hidden in a folder on a home screen somewhere.

Siri gives you sports updates, but it can be Americanised, picking the wrong team if you’re not careful

Other new features include integrated sports, such as finding out when your team is next playing. It’s a bit Americanised, though, so searching for Spurs, brings up the San Antonio Spurs, rather than the real team, Tottenham Hotspur.

Being able to find out what’s on a the local cinema can be really handy

As Siri is location aware, it can also show you what’s on at the local cinema and available restaurants in the local area. Generally Siri is pretty good and picks up most of the things you’re saying, but it can be frustratingly annoying to use. ‘Launch Sonos’ refused to launch the Sonos app, but kept telling us that that there’s no app called Stephen. Even with these idiosyncrasies, Siri can often be the quickest way of doing something.