Okay, so you’ve recently upgraded to the new iOS8. Aside from the brand new Continuity feature, HealthKit, HomeKit, Apple fixing all the bug, and allowing you to finally use Apple Pay, here are some of iOS8’s cool, pretty nifty hidden features that you should definitely know about.
Bring back deleted photos
Check out iOS8’s new album called Recently Deleted, allowing you to bring back photos you may have accidentally deleted in the past 30 days. And since we’re talking about photos, you should also definitely check your camera’s new timer feature!
Find my iPhone
Let’s say you lost your iPhone somewhere and can’t contact it because your battery has died. With this new feature, you can now determine your phone’s last location; activating this feature automatically makes your phone send its last known location to Apple before your battery levels run dangerously low. This also locks and erases your iPhone and prevents anyone else from reactivating and erasing it without your password.
New & improved Siri
No need for third party apps like Shazam or Soundhound. Simply ask Siri what song is playing and that song will be found for you. This means you can now get rid of those music recognition apps and save more space on your phone. Activating Siri has now become hands-free. By just stating “Hey, Siri” you can prompt to activate, which is great for when you’re driving or in a hurry.
Easier access to notifications
Upon receiving an e-mail or a message, which pops up on the upper portion of your home screen, you can instantly reply without having to leave the active interface that’s currently open.
A smarter keyboard
Apple has finally give users an option to have a more customizable keyboard. You can download options which give you more control. You can check out apps like Swype, which allow you to choose characters easily by doing a swiping option on your screen or SwiftKey, which give you advanced autocorrect and next word prediction features.
As much as I appreciate Find My iPhone and improvements to Siri, I really dislike the “deleted photos” feature. I feel that it can lead to serious breaches of privacy. Losing a photo is a smaller price to pay compared to having them stolen by someone who might use them for devious means like blackmail or identity theft. Deletion should be permanent, plain and simple.
At first I think that bringing up the deleted photos was a good thing, until I saw your comment. You do have a valid reason for concern. The thing now is, can one change the settings to disable this feature or change how many days it can revive the picture?
This tool is helpful for photographers, but there are just some pictures people want to delete.
I don’t see why there can’t just be a recycle bin mechanic just like any file on a computer. Once you delete it from the gallery view, it’ll remain in the recycle bin for X amount of days by default, or until you manually empty the bin.
This seems like an intuitive and straightforward solution that wouldn’t really require learning a new mechanic on your phone and is still easily managed by the user.
Yes, the recycle bin is a good idea. Every other operating system has one, except for phones. :/ Quite odd how we can have a feature in one system for twenty years and never transfer it over to others. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next. There really is no telling.
I completely agree, the feature seems really unnecessary. Confirmation for the deletion of photos should be enough, as it gives a warning when you want to delete a photo. I mean if you were warned and you still messed up by deleting a wanted photo, you should probably be more careful. Overall, yes the feature helps a overwhelming minority, but the potential for threat is too high for it to be a good feature.
I don’t use apple products but these are great features to have. Some of these features are already on Android. Such as the lookout app, it does everything that find my iphone can do and more. In Android you can change the keyboard since its earlier versions. I think deleted photos should only stay a week after they have been deleted because 30 days is too much and what if people want to delete photos to save space.
Oh, wow, sweet!!! I really like the “Find my iPhone” feature. I’m always losing my cell phone under cushions, in my car, and under my bed. This would really help me out.
I also like the “Easier access to notifications”. Nothing worse than wanting to reply to an important message while not wanting to lose the page you are on. Many funny debates have occurred in my head for this reason.
The most impressive new feature on that list has to be the ability that the iOS 8 has in recovering photos that have been deleted by accident. That is a wonderful aspect of the new version of the operating system, especially because I’m sure this is a situation that befalls several people. I’m sure that’s going to put smiles on the faces of many iPhone users. The Find My Phone and Improved Siri features are also a nice add-on.
I really love the Find my iPhone and notification features, it’ll definitely benefit me.
Especially since it:
Allows for great and easy multi-tasking without completely closing things
Allows me to find my phone without having to call myself with another phone, saving all that hassle
Allows me to not have to worry about a lost phone without a battery.
Overall I love this update, Apple’s been doing good with these so far!
I surely hope that Apple has done something to improve it’s cloud security. Anyone can remember it’s issues with cloud storage that it had to deal with not to long ago. If I delete photo’s I would like to be sure that they are totally gone and not stored in Apple’s cloud storage somewhere just waiting to be hacked again and spread all over the internet. We’ll have to wait and see if this latest feature backfires or not.
Find My iPhone was there for quite awhile now, I believe since the release of the iPhone 4. And in iOS 7, they introduced the “lock” feature where you couldn’t activate the phone without signing into the last user’s Apple account, unless they unpaired the phone from their account. The improvements to Siri however is one thing I have been waiting on. Google Now had the functionality quite awhile back, and I was pretty jealous then. The recently deleted I see as a security concern though, because if somebody deletes private pictures, it will linger on the servers for another 30 days before it’s actually deleted…
Wow – I am so happy to have come across this post! I have hesitated for months now on updating my Iphone 5c to IOS 8. I finally did last night as I know one day I will not be able to download certain apps etc until I update it. I have not searched around on it much yet because I have only heard so many negative things about it so it was finally nice to come across a post of someone who had some positive things to say about it too! Thanks for pointing out these things!
I’m interested in a smarter keyboard and what it can do to help people write and make new things daily. In other words, productivity. I’m just puzzled by the speech-to-text and text-to-speech features. I’ve been getting Siri to help me out with stuffs like browsing and others, but I could never make Siri say things for me.
I think providing the customizable keyboard is a fantastic feature among all.
Gone are the days when you used to tap or type! Its the era of Swype! It is indeed very welcoming change from Apple and I think they will get an advantage of it in the market.
Moreover, improved Siri will help user recognize music is another plus. This will indeed affect Shazam!
I mostly like the new features but the one I don’t really care for is the recently deleted photo thing. Is there a way to turn that off? Having to delete photos twice seems like a hassle. Nothing on my iphone camera roll is very “precious.”
The new keyboard functions are so helpful. Swiftkey finally allows much, much more efficient typing similar to keyboards on Android platforms. Additionally, it has a credit card scanning mechanism so that you don’t have to manually enter credit card numbers. Also, you can find out which apps are using the most battery life, and the Talk-To-Type is much improved.
This is very cool on Apple’s part. I never new some of these features even though I’ve been using iOS 8 since it has came out.
It’s awesome that iOS 8 already came out. I wasn’t so aware of that until I read this article. I think it does contain really nice features, but for me, I will stick with android more because I’m the traditional person. Not to say that I will never change my mind. I bet there will be a mind blowing update that will convince me to aim for one!