“Thanks to a few small UI tweaks, and the overhaul of the system-wide search, navigating from place to place, and finding the right thing in the first instance, is made a heck of a lot easier,” Chris Mills writes for Gizmodo.
“There’s also unmistakeable improvements to Apple services that compete with major rivals—transit directions on Apple Maps make it a viable competitor to Google Maps for just about the first time, whilst iCloud Drive rounds out the company’s cloud storage in an unmistakeable Dropbox-esque way,” Mills writes. “And then, of course, there’s Apple Music.”
“iOS 9 isn’t going to change your life; but it might just get you navigating from one Apple service to the next faster than ever,” Mills writes. “Whether you think that’s a good thing is a trickier decision; but with a new Siri, better search and navigation, and that improved battery life, it’s clear that the 2015 edition of Apple’s mobile operating system can still play with the best of them.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As soon as the iOS 9 beta gets Apple Music, we’ll be going back to iOS 9. Even in the original beta, iOS 9 was an noticeable improvement over iOS 8.
“… it’s clear that the 2015 edition of Apple’s mobile operating system can still play with the best of them.”
When was Apple not the best of them?
As far as features and UI design – over the last 2 years Apple hasn’t been. Objectively, Apple and Android started in two different ends of the spectrum and are converging in the middle. Apple started from a very high regard for consistency, great and intuitive UI design, and user experience control – this at the detriment of features i.e.. it took almost 7 whole years before apps could even talk to each other or share data without making copies of each and every file smattered about your device in silos that made no sense whatsoever. Android started from the opposite end of the spectrum with a “every feature that could ever be found useful to anyone no matter how minority those users who used that feature were – consistency and UI be damned!” attitude. Over time they’ve paired this down, hired some very intelligent UI folks and really put a higher emphasis on usability and intuitiveness as well as focused on performance.
That being said Google started converging in the middle with their focus on design, reliability, performance, and usability before Apple start converging in the middle toward features that allowed flexibility and greater functionality (really just last year with iOS 8 – iOS 7 was a disaster). Google got about a 1.5 year to 2 year jump on them in this regard. The latest version of Android, is polished, performs very well, has a lot of useful features that are just useful by a large number of people and has a jump on Apple in terms of the data driven intelligence arena with Google Now – Apple Proactive has some good ideas and will hopefully get there in 1 to 2 (maybe 3?) years but Google just has more experience in this arena. In terms of that stuff this will be a bit like the Apple maps transition. Pretty rocky, missing a lot of useful features, not completely thought or fleshed out yet and the inexperience in this area will show but Apple has to start somewhere just like Google did when Google Now first came out. This is why many tech outlets have a general tone and feeling that ‘with iOS 9 Apple has finally caught up’. It’s a matter of perspective sure – by and large though objectively there are some real world, features that allow you to get work done type of examples that lead many to buy in to this sentiment.
Since last august Apple has forgiven Gizmodo as none of the nasty crew (Chen, Lam and Diaz) are in there any more.
Plus, I think Timmy boy really likes their name.
Not sure what you mean; who is “Timmy boy”?
If you mean Cook, then it does not seem so since he has waited for years before allowing Gizmodo to Apple presentations.
It’s still a sleazy outfit, and I hope Hulk Hogan puts the entire Gawker organization out of business.
-jcr
Gizmodo… HACK journalism at it’s best.
They were and are tabloidish, this much stays about them. However, they should have never went to be criminal as they did back in 2010.
But tabloids always go this route; (Murdock’s spying scandals in UK is more recent example).
The only review I’ll read on Gizmodo is the one on their obituary
Looking forward to iOS 9 – The BEST keeps getting better!
If OS 9 is “long-overdue” then Android is . . .
Missed that “i” on the keyboard.
Common MDN, where’s that edit your own post button?