iOS 7.1 is out

[Eug]

iOS 7.1 is out. I've highlighted a few things.

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1732

This update contains improvements and bug fixes, including:

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

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

 

[TuxDave]

"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"

Oh that's kind of neat. I know when there's lots of background noise, Siri keeps on listening and listening.

 

[HN]

The Siri thing -- currently don't you just have to press the waveform to let it know when you're done talking?

 

[Eug]

Ars: iOS 7.1 on the iPhone 4: As good as it’s going to get

There's a measurable improvement over iOS 7.0 across all of these apps, some more noticeable than others. In a few instances, iOS 7.1 very nearly catches up with iOS 6.1.3, which is impressive given the gap between the two operating systems in some of these apps. It's not a complete recovery from the original iOS 7.0 release, but it's about as good as Apple can do with hardware this old. The small speed improvements are present throughout the operating system, and this makes the iPhone 4 feel more responsive than it did, if not always as responsive as it once was.

---

If you're sticking with the iPhone 4 for another year, iOS 7.1 makes performance tolerable enough that using the phone isn't unbearable.

The Siri thing -- currently don't you just have to press the waveform to let it know when you're done talking?

Yes... but I didn't know that... until your post.

 

[TuxDave]

Yes... but I didn't know that... until your post.

You're not the only one. Clearly we need a obvious "push here" indicator.

Also I was talking to my wife about this yesterday:
"Country specific holidays automatically added for many countries"

Was trying to remember when St Patty's day was and was wondering why I couldn't auto-populate the darn thing.

 

[HN]

You're not the only one. Clearly we need a obvious "push here" indicator.

you know, with this flat design there have been increasing instances of that. Like in the built in weather app, if you tap the top area (where the city / large temp is shown), you get a few extra bits of info. That wasn't obvious at all.

 

[Eug]

Yeah, it took me a few weeks to discover that.

P.S. A friend already installed 7.1 and he says it feels faster even on his iPhone 5s, perhaps because of the shortened animations and such.

 

[ghost recon88]

Anyone updated an iPad 2 yet? I'm still holding out on IOS 6, but the 7.1 release is tempting.

 

[el-Capitan]

Anyone updated an iPad 2 yet? I'm still holding out on IOS 6, but the 7.1 release is tempting.

7.0 was fine on my iPad2. I dont see a reason to stick with 6.

 

[ghost recon88]

7.0 was fine on my iPad2. I dont see a reason to stick with 6.

My battery life is killer on 6, on 7 I heard it wasn't that great. Any comment on that?

 

[Kroze]

My battery life is killer on 6, on 7 I heard it wasn't that great. Any comment on that?

I updated my iphone 5 from 6.1.4 to 7.0.6 and hated my life. Horrendous everything on top of a noticeable battery drain.

Yes I went youtubed on all the tips and tricks on how to extend the battery life by disabling all of the notifications/background updates & etc...

 

[slashbinslashbash]

Kinda cool animations when you make calls now. The "Call" button turns into a little "end call" circle. I guess it makes it harder to unintentionally hang up.

 

[onlyCOpunk]

My puny iPhone doesn't have enough room to update. I wish there was an app that would delete crappy photos that are taking up so much space.

 

[Eug]

I have 7.1 on the iPhone 5s. Works fine. Don't feel a huge speed up yet but I haven't used it much. Haven't updated our iPad 2 or iPhone 5 yet.

My battery life is killer on 6, on 7 I heard it wasn't that great. Any comment on that?

iOS 7.0 was fine for performance on the iPad 2. Dunno about battery life for sure but I didn't notice any major problem.

 

[HN]

ok, i put 7.1 on an ipad 3.

Two things really stand out:

-the keyboard :
it's different, can't quite put my finger on it. i think it's super contrasty now if that makes sense. but the good part, doesn't seem to have any more input lag. keypresses register right away like it used to prior to 7.0.x

-the Reduce Motion:
previously it was pretty perfect when you had it on. it was a balance of removing all that parallax and weird opening/closing transition animations. it was more of a pleasant smooth fade.

i think they have now gone too far with it and it seems a bit, jerky. If you do a 5-finger pinch to close an app, it will show just the wallpaper first with no icons, and then after a split second the app icons will then appear whereas before they faded in smoothly in one motion. And it worse when an app is within a folder. If you close that app, instead of fading in the app folder, it will snap in (for lack of a better term). so some scenarios fade in and some snap in and makes it all a bit clunky.

 

[Oyeve]

Needs 1.9GB to install. lame.

 

[Aikouka]

-the keyboard :
it's different, can't quite put my finger on it. i think it's super contrasty now if that makes sense. but the good part, doesn't seem to have any more input lag. keypresses register right away like it used to prior to 7.0.x

The keyboard change is really throwing me for a loop today. Since there's no indication of caps status other than the caps button (some keyboards also change the keys from lower to upper and vice-versa), that indicator is fairly vital for normal use. The problem is that they seem to have changed it. I can't put my finger on it, but it seems like they reversed the colors. So, now it's the light gray color when you're typing capital letters, and the darker gray when you're not.

EDIT:

This Ars article shows the difference: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/03/refinements-additions-and-un-breaking-stuff-ios-7-1-reviewed/2/

 

[Eug]

Yesterday when I installed iOS 7.1 on my iPhone 5s, it took 3 hours over WiFi, for 268 MB.

I can't remember, but it may have been about the same size for my iPad 2. When I first tried it today, it said it was going to take over an hour. When I tried it the second time, it was less than 15 minutes.

I guess the servers were being hit hard yesterday and early today.

The keyboard change is really throwing me for a loop today. Since there's no indication of caps status other than the caps button (some keyboards also change the keys from lower to upper and vice-versa), that indicator is fairly vital for normal use. The problem is that they seem to have changed it. I can't put my finger on it, but it seems like they reversed the colors. So, now it's the light gray color when you're typing capital letters, and the darker gray when you're not.

This is one of my biggest annoyances with iOS. The keyboard is always caps, even when you're typing in lower case. And I don't like the grey caps key for lower case either. I think they did that to emphasize these keys are different. The grey keys include the caps, delete, numbers, international.

 

[HomerSapien]

IPad2 - 155 MB - Failed 3 times. I am going to connect it to the computer for the next attempt.

Iphone 4S - 168 MB - Installed on first go. Around 15 minutes.

Both were upgrading from 7.0.6.

 

[HN]

This Ars article shows the difference: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/03/refinements-additions-and-un-breaking-stuff-ios-7-1-reviewed/2/

good article. i swear i didn't read it before using the word 'contrasty' to describe the keyboard earlier

 

[TuxDave]

IPad2 - 155 MB - Failed 3 times. I am going to connect it to the computer for the next attempt.

Iphone 4S - 168 MB - Installed on first go. Around 15 minutes.

Both were upgrading from 7.0.6.

Yeah my phone got upgraded on the first go, the second one timed out but when I tried again it went through. Maybe just too much download demand at once

 

[Tegeril]

The animation speedups alone... so good.

 

[TuxDave]

The animation speedups alone... so good.

Haha, I wasn't sure if it was the Apple distortion field or something, but I'm also generally pleased with the update.

 

[Qbah]

The transition speed is so much faster now. Really liking it on my Retina Mini! The rest, I don't really care.

Though I wonder if iOS will ever get SwiftKey-like typing... It's so much easier to just swipe across the keyboard on my HTC One :-(

 

[Eug]

Dunno why they added such slow and annoying animations in the first place.

Maybe it's because Jonny Ive was new at it and it felt good at the time.

The thicker fonts are definitely easier to read too.