The big announcement from Apple’s WWDC keynote on June 10, 2013 was of course iOS 7.
iOS 7, besides a new look, has lots of new features to like. The new design is cleaner and smoother. The new Control Center that is available by swiping up from the bottom of the screen, even when locked, allows you to control most major features of the iOS devices like airplane mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, brightness, music and others all from one screen. One nice new feature in Control Center is the addition of a flashlight that turns on the camera’s LED flash. The new Air Drop feature lets you share photos with friends with iOS devices nearby wirelessly, similar to the “bump” feature in Android devices. Siri gets some new voices, including a male voice plus the ability to search Wikipedia and Twitter.
Notification Center now syncs across all of your devices so once you acknowledge a notification you don’t get annoying popups on every device if you have a Mac, iPad and iPhone. Photos now automatically group themselves by location and date so you don’t end up with one endless Camera Roll and to help make them easier to find. A couple of great new features are keychain in the cloud which syncs all of your saved passwords across all of your Apple devices and a random password generator that automatically puts the password into keychain. An unsung feature is no more little red ball with numbers in the on your App Store icon. App store now downloads apps updates in the background anytime you are connected to a Wi-Fi network.
One of the biggest and worst kept secrets of iOS 7 is the new iTunes Radio, Apple’s answer to Pandora. It is built right into the music app and allows you to tag and buy songs from iTunes directly from the radio. iTunes Radio is free to all iOS 7 users with ads. iTunes Match customers get the ad free version. iOS 7 will be available this fall and runs on iPhone 4, 4s and 5, iPad 2, 3rd Generation, the new iPad, and the latest iPod Touch models.