The iOS 9 public beta came out several weeks ago and I’ve been running it on my iPhone 4S. iOS 9 is really attractive to me (even while using my older phone) because of the under-the-hood refinements. I was hoping those refinements would mean things would be more zippy on this old phone. Many of those improvements don’t really trickle down to me on this hardware that’s three generations behind the current hardware, but it seems features like control center and notification center are more responsive to their gestures.
There are a few things I’ve noticed that have changed in the day to day operations. The keyboard is different. It now has lower case letters on the keyboard. The keys don’t pop up like they used to by default, but that is a simple flick of a switch in settings. Siri looks dramatically different with really cool and has multi colored waves.
There is now an iCloud app, but for that to appear on the home screen it needs to be enabled in settings. I like the app. It lets me see what I’ve got in there and allows me access to everything, just like many other cloud services’ iPhone apps let me do. There is a battery section in settings. While this is really cool, it gave me some information that I’m still processing and reeling in shock and disbelief of. Under the battery section of settings there’s a really cool and useful low power mode. It not as aggressive as just putting the phone in airplane mode. The battery usage section is what has me so worked up. It gives a breakdown of what apps are using battery power and a percentage. In that breakdown there were apps that I hadn’t even launched in 6 months that had been doing stuff in the background and gobbling up battery power and processor cycles. It used to be that installing apps wouldn’t bog down the device, but apparently that’s not true. Another experience that further confirms that to me is how often my phone was freezing up after years of installing apps and downloading many many gigabytes of data into every app. I restored it to factory settings, meaning all data that’s not the OS was removed. I then reinstalled all my critical apps, but nothing else. My phone has been a little more reliable, stable and faster since I removed all that stuff. Another detail that I’ve been working with most regularly is the 6 (that’s SIX, as in 2 more than 4) digit security passcode. A four digit passcode never seemed like enough for me, now I’ve got a little more security, without much inconvenience.
iOS devices are really becoming more and more like full fledged desktops and I’m excited about iOS 9 and wonder how long until the next update to the beta will be released.