Apple releases iOS 7.1

Apple today released iOS 7.1.

iOS 7.1 includes:

CarPlay
– iOS experience designed for the car
– Simply connect your iPhone to a CarPlay enabled vehicle
– Supports Phone, Music, Maps, Messages, and 3rd-party audio apps
– Control with Siri and the car’s touchscreen, knobs, and buttons

Siri
– Manually control when Siri listens by holding down the home button while you speak and releasing it when you’re done as an alternative to letting Siri automatically notice when you stop talking
– New, more natural sounding male and female voices for Mandarin Chinese, UK English, Australian English, and Japanese

iTunes Radio
– Search field above Featured Stations to easily create stations based on your favorite artist or song
– Buy albums with the tap of a button from Now Playing
– Subscribe to iTunes Match on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to enjoy iTunes Radio ad-free

Calendar
– Option to display events in month view
– Country specific holidays automatically added for many countries

Accessibility
– Bold font option now includes the keyboard, calculator, and many icon glyphs
– Reduce Motion option now includes Weather, Messages, and multitasking UI animations
– New options to display button shapes, darken app colors, and reduce white point

Other
– New Camera setting to automatically enable HDR for iPhone 5s
– iCloud Keychain support in additional countries
– FaceTime call notifications are automatically cleared when you answer a call on another device
– Fixes a bug that could occasionally cause a home screen crash
– Improves Touch ID fingerprint recognition
– Improved performance for iPhone 4
– Fixes display of Mail unread badge for numbers greater than 10,000
– Continued user interface refinements

For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222

Available via iTunes or OTA.

Related article:
iOS 7.1 imminent – March 5, 2014

93 Comments

      1. I think MDN is on to it. Rumor has it her best friend’s sister was protecting women online who were being approached by undesirables offering to suck their titties.

        I guess they were making less than $81 per hour.

        Nice seeing you around.

      1. About the only thing I found on a jailbroken iPod touch I tried it on a while back was a keyboard hack that made the keys show lower case when the shift was off, and upper case when the shift was on. It probably caused Jony Ive to get hives by messing up his feng shui, but it was really handy for me. Wish Apple had programmers that could figure out how to do it.

        BTW, iOS7 stinks. 🙂

        1. That’s actually an interesting point.

          The iOS looks like a standard keyboard with capital letter keys no matter what. But why not show small letters for small letters! There’s no reason not to innovate the software keyboard into something more representative and functional that he hardware keyboard. Thanks for sharing!

        2. It’s a rare instance of a skeuomorph being left alone by Ive’s design team. The virtual keyboard resembles a typical physical keyboard. (Not mine, though…I have the Das Keyboard Model S Ultimate (no key inscriptions).)

    1. 1.9 GB free space required? SERIOUSLY?! <–This is OPPOSITE of what Apple promised last year, when they promised to break updates down into smaller, component update pieces rather than forcing WHOLE, MASSIVE, OS updates.

      WTF Apple?! Not good! 😯

        1. Good but not one of my favorites. Does bring back memories of my junior year in high school. That’s not all bad. GM (not GMAIL). I’m not sure how GMAIL pops up all the time as I don’t use it. Google is evil. Damn predictive text. Sometimes I just don’t look before I post. Perhaps it’s my alter ego and I just don’t know it?

  1. We have 7 iOS devices. Each one downloads iOS7 ANEW. So that’s 1.44GB times 7. Why does it not just download it once? Espeacially when we have a MAX limit to our monthly broadband usage.

    Why APPLE? WHY?

    1. Because a combo updater wouldn’t be in the best interest of iOS users. Differences in cameras, cellular radios (both current and legacy), processors, displays, etc., etc., would make a combo updater bigger than what you’re working with today.

    2. Having lived in Central Asia last summer, where my total monthly download allotment was 1GB, I can sympathize. I waited to return to the US before updating to iOS 7. Americans are used to all-you-can-eat, but in other parts of the world, internet service is metered, bandwidth is limited, and 1 GB is a very hefty download.

  2. Still FUGLY interface. New bold keyboard is overkill, is jarring with the rest of the UI, and the caps key is now highlighted when it’s NOT active, and vice versa.
    And I just checked, the hideous green bar at the top of the screen when you make a call and go to another app is just as bad.
    All in all iOS 7 is still a mess.
    One star this comment if you agree.

        1. “Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly. But after that, the product people aren’t the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It’s the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what’s the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself? So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy.
          Look at Microsoft, who’s running Microsoft? (interviewer: Steve Ballmer.) Right, the sales guy. Case closed.”
          Steve Jobs 2004
          Guess who is in charge of Apple right now?

    1. iOS 7 has been a UI disaster since day one. The flat icons, hard to read text, buttonless back buttons, all white background, and myriad other regressive steps make it as bad UI-wise as Android or WP8.

    2. And by the way, the UI transition (app switching to the home screen) is just as revoltingly stomach churning as ever, and totally unnecessary. iOS 7, where the kindergarten kids were let loose at designing the UI.

      1. Right on!

        Yeah, every time I look at a sunset, a rose, a puppy, a thick steak or a nice set of boobies, sad but true, they all look antiquated.

        And my family and friends … whoa there. This has been going on for decades …

        /s

  3. Funny, it only took around 250MB to download for me on my iPad and my iPhone.

    So far, my only complaint is that the screen freezes for a second when I input my passcode to unlock the device. Not a huge problem, but obnoxious. Of course, someone with a 5s will have to tell us if TouchID causes a similar pause when unlocking.

    Other than that, the only change I don’t like is the unintuitive colorless Shift key: white arrow on gray and black arrow on white don’t scream capital/lowercase to me.

    Otherwise, as someone who liked iOS 7 to begin with, nothing much to complain about with the changes. Just more of the same, and more refinement of unfinished ideas.

  4. OMG! EVERYTHING is just so… SNAPPY! Blessed relief the spidery icons got bolded up so I can see them better, no more squinting.
    Boy those ipsw files are whoppers! 1.44 GB for the phone, 1.54 GB for the iPad.
    I LOVE the new bold keyboard! When I press and hold I can now make out the diacritics. I can see the difference between an umlaut, a macron or an inverted circumflex. The other was to now see the apostrophe versus the glottal stop.
    Life is good.

  5. This was worth the hour it took to download and install just to have a useable calendar again. Why on earth they got rid of month/event view in the first place I will never know.

    1. Oh Frackity Frack! Apple’s web documentation team just REMOVED the two security documents. OMFG, what is their PROBLEM?!?!?!

      I hereby renew my assertion that Apple’s web documentation team is CRAP. It has been so for FAR too long.

    1. Yes I had the problem till I turned off Background App Refresh on Moves app. I wasn’t using the app but the icon was showing. You can go to Background App Refresh and try turning off one by one to see which app is doing this.

  6. Wow! Much faster and Touch ID is doing its thing right on the first touch. Usually for me two or three times before it finally becomes annoying. Can’t wait to load this on a iPhone 4S and see how it performs.

  7. This is interesting:

    Apple adds support for new, previously-unknown iPad models in iOS 7.1

    In addition to updates for the company’s latest iPhones and iPads, Apple’s download server plays host to iOS 7.1 bundles targeted at iPads with model identifiers iPad4,3 and iPad4,6. As first noted by iClarified, those identifiers have not been seen before in the wild.
    . . .
    The intermediate nature of the iPad4,3 moniker suggests that these new models could simply be evolutionary hardware updates rather than totally new devices. They may be reserved, for instance, for tablets destined for China Mobile’s unique TD-LTE network which have not yet received certification.

    Or maybe not so interesting.

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