THE BRITISH TECH NETWORK

iOS 7.1

13 Mar 14

iOS updates have been a lot like buses recently, you wait ages for one and then two come along at once. The recent 7.0.6 to primarily fix the ‘goto fail’ bug and this weeks release of iOS 7.1 which after early impressions is the operating system I was waiting for in the first place.

After updating you’re probably thinking well not much has changed but as you start to use it you start to notice the little things and as time goes on it all becomes apparent.

The first thing are slight tweaks with the look. The first thing I noticed is that some of the brightness in the colours has been toned down especially in some of the icons which makes it a little easier on the eyes. Other tweaks include a redesigned phone dialler, caller ID screen and shutdown screen and refined keyboard. I also think there is a nice new little animation that zooms in on your wallpaper when you access folders, but it may have been there in the first place. Maybe you could set me straight.

iOS 7,1

But let’s get down to it, what we want out of our updates is functionality and even though it doesn't come in spades with 7.1 what is there is noticeable. Right off the bat my iPhone 5 seems much faster. Some reviews say there’s some under the hood stuff to speed things up (especially in terms of the iPhone 4) but what I’ve observed is that actually the speed of the flying in/out animations have been significantly accelerated which gives the impression of improved performance but is very much welcomed especially by some of the feedback I received on Twitter.

@paulums @BritishTech ios7 pretty much bricked my 4, thankfully 7.1 is running slick - no app crashed at all in 2 days so far

— Chris Campion (@campionuk) March 12, 2014

One of the things I hated about the original release of iOS 7 was the new calendar. As far as I’m concerned it was basically unusable. 7.1 makes it a lot easier to see what you have on but it’s not been improved enough to make me want to use it so third party apps it is.

Another thing I do like though is a lady Siri. In the UK all we ever had before was the bloke off the Weakest Link telling me he couldn’t help but now we get the what our American cousins have been used to the dulcet tones of a posh bird. I switched immediately. The other issue I hated about Siri has also been improved. Previously Siri decided when I’d stopped speaking, mainly based on background noise or just pig ignorance but now you can hold the home button for as long as you need to speak and only at the point you let go will it try and interpret your instructions.

Accessibility options have been greatly improved too although some of the new options I would have liked to have seen moved to the forefront of the OS such as buttons instead of text but there is plenty of customisation there so you can set things up just the way you like.

7.1 also introduces the recently reported CarPlay feature that gives improved access to your phone features when driving but no one can really comment about it at the moment as there aren’t any cars that support it.

I have found that the platform feels much more stable overall. I haven’t suffered any springboard crashes since the update and everything just feels snappy and tight. Battery life also seems improved but that might be more to do with the removing a load of apps to make room for the 7.1 download.

All in all you’re a mug if you don’t download it. iOS 7.1 is the OS that the original iOS 7 should have been and is a much welcomed update. Things are looking good for the future.

Review Subscribe

iOS 7.1

Author

Comments

Sharing