BREAKING NEWS: Everything You Need To Know About iOS 8

Look out Apple users, iOS is undergoing yet another update!

HOMEKIT AND HEALTHKIT

The new iOS 8 has a couple of impressive, stand out features, such as the HomeKit and the HealthKit. These will allow the user to control their household objects, such as lighting and doors, as well as lifestyle tracking apps that will allow you to monitor your fitness in a much more comprehensive way. It also is introducing touch ID, which will use the inbuilt fingerprint scanner in iPhone 5S’s to authorise things such as bank transactions, a first for mobile phone devices.

COPYING ANDROID AND WINDOWS?

However, upon closer inspection, it appears that the new iOS 8 has for the most part copied features that already exist with Android and Windows phones. Let us take a closer look.

The iOS 8 software will allow you to use Spotlight Search to search on the internet as well as your device, the keyboard will have a feature called QuickType which predicts your sentence patterns, and will even let you replace the keyboard with a third party keyboard such as Swype. Androids have been able to do all of these things for quite some time.

iOS 8 will now allow you to activate Siri handsfree when you’re driving by saying “hey, Siri.” All of your iPhone photos will also sync to iCloud, and you will be able to store widgets within your notification centre. Androids mastered these all a long time ago. In fact, with the storage of photos, Apple sets a limit to the amount of room on iCloud. Google gives you unlimited storage.

With the upgrade, the App Store will allow you to watch video demonstrations for apps before you choose to download them, and iMessage will allow you to send audio and video clips along with your messages. The Google Play store has always used video demos and the new iMessage features are simply an extension of what can already be done with WhatsApp and SnapChat.

iCloud Drive will be launched as an online storage service for iPhones, iPads, Macs and even Windows PCs, although this is pretty much identical to the likes of Google Drive and even DropBox.

While all of these features are useful and appreciated, this update has only highlighted how behind Apple was previously. Time to play catch up, iOS.

By Gemma Baldwin – Twitter gemma_baldwin