The arrival of the iPhone 5 isn't the only big news for phone fans this week. Wednesday, Apple is also making iOS 6 available to anyone with a recent iPhone (3GS, 4, or 4S), iPod Touch (fourth generation) or iPad (2 or 3). It comes installed on the iPhone 5 and the new fifth-generation iPod Touch.
(Caution: Not all features are available on the older models. I've noted the biggest such exceptions below, but you should check here for full details.)
The challenge in creating a new operating system is always this: How do you add features without adding complexity?
On a tiny phone screen, that challenge becomes even more difficult. The answer, of course, is, you can't - but few companies try harder to minimize the complexity than Apple. In iOS 6, for example, Apple counts more than 200 new features, but you'd know it with a quick glance.
Here's the best of what's new:
Maps. Apple, as you may have noticed, has been quietly dismantling its relationship with Google. In iOS 6, for example, there's no longer a built-in YouTube app (Google owns YouTube); fortunately, YouTube offers a new app of its own.
And now Apple has replaced the iPhone's longstanding Google Maps app. Apple says that Google had been steadily improving its Maps app - but only for Android phones, leaving the iPhone in the dust. For example, the iPhone app didn't have spoken turn-by-turn directions. And on Android, the maps are composed of vector art-smooth lines generated by the computer - rather than the square tiles of pixels that you saw on the iPhone.
In any case, the new iOS Maps app offers those features - spoken navigation, vector maps - and more. You can just tell Siri where you want t o go (“Give me directions to LaGuardia Airportâ€), and let the app start getting you there with one of the cleanest, least distracting navigation screens ever to appear on a GPS unit. The visual cues are big, bold and readable at a glance, and the spoken cues are timed perfectly so that you don't miss a turn. You can even turn the screen off and let the voice alone guide you.
Real-time traffic and accident alerts are built in - no charge, courtesy of crowdsourced speed and position data from millions of other iPhone owners out driving.
Not all is rosy in Mapsland, though. Apple's database of points of interest (stores, restaurants, and so on), powered by Yelp, is sparser than Google's. There's no built-in public-transportation guidance. For big cities, you get Flyover, a super-cool 3-D photographic model of the actual buildings - but losing Google's Street View feature is a real shame.
During navigation guidance, you can't rotate the map with your fingers or zoom in by more than a couple of degrees-to see your entire route, for example. Turns out you have to tap the screen and then tap Overview to access that more detailed, zoomable, rotatable map.
Flyover and the vector maps require a fast Internet connection, by the way. When you're not in a 4G cellular area, it can take quite awhile for the blank canvas to fill in. (Navigation and Flyover don't work on the iPhone 3GS or 4, the original iPad, or pre-2012 iPod Touches.)
Call smarts. These are some of my favorite new features. If you're driving or in a meeting when a call comes in, you can flick upward on the screen to reveal two new buttons: Remind Me Later and Reply With Message. The first button offers choices like “In 1 hour†or “When I get home†(a message will remind you to call back); the second offers canned text messages, like “I'll call you later†or a custom message, that let your caller know you can't take the call now. Excellent.
Do Not Disturb is also incredibly useful. It's like Airplane Mode - the phone won't buzz, ring or light up - except that (a) it can turn itself on during certain hours, like your sleeping hours, and (b) it can allow certain people's calls or texts through (people on your phone's Favorites list, for example). You can sleep soundly, knowing that your boss or family can reach you in an emergency, but idiot telemarketers will go straight to voice mail.
(Similarly ingenious: The option called Repeated Calls. If someone calls you twice in three minutes - possibly someone who needs to reach you urgently - that call is allowed to ring during Do Not Disturb.)
Siri. Siri, the voice-activated servant, now understands questions about movies (“When is the next showtime of ‘Finding Nemo 3D?'†or “Who directed ‘Chinatown?'â€), sports (“Who won the Yankees game yesterday?â€) and restaurants (“Where's the closest diner?â€). In each case, Siri's responses are visual and detailed-for restaurants, you can even make a reservation with one tap, courtesy of Open Table.
You can also speak Twitter or Facebook posts (“Tweet, ‘I just broke my shin on a poorly placed coffee table'â€) and-hallelujah!-open apps by voice (“open Cameraâ€). That's a huge win.
Siri is also available in more languages and on more gadgets (the new iPod Touch; the iPad 3).
FaceTime over cellular. FaceTime is Apple's video-chatting feature - and until today, it worked only in Wi-Fi hot spots. Now, at last, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 and cellular iPad 3 owners can make video calls (to other iPhone, iPad, Touch and Mac owners) even when they're out of Wi-Fi range, out in cellular land. When the signal is decent, the picture looks great. (AT&T doesn't let you use FaceTime over cellular unless you have one of its complicated and expensive shared-data plans.)
Camera panoramas. You can now capture a 240-degree, ultra-wide-angle, 28-megapixel photo by sw inging the phone around you in an arc. The phone creates the panorama in real time (you don't have to line up the sections yourself). Available on iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, and iPod touch (5th generation), and very welcome.
Passbook. This app collects and consolidates barcodes: for airline boarding passes, movie tickets you bought online, electronic coupons and so on. The feature hasn't gone live yet, so I couldn't test it except with phony coupons and boarding passes supplied by Apple to reviewers. But the apps for Delta, American, Starbucks and Fandango will be Passbook-compatible almost immediately, and that should be a great time-saver-your boarding-pass barcode appears automatically when you arrive at the airport (thank you, GPS), even on the Lock screen.
Safari browser. You can now save a Web page to read later, when you don't have an Internet connection, and in landscape mode, a full-screen browsing mode maximizes screen space by hiding toolbars. (I don't think the third new Safari, feature, iCloud Tabs, will be as useful. It lets you open up whatever browser tabs you left open on your Mac or iPad-if, that is, they're all signed into the same iCloud account.)
Shared photo streams. You can “publish†groups of photos to specified friends; they can view the pictures on their Apple gadgets or on a Web page. They can add comments or “like†them.
Mail. In Mail, you can indicate the most important people; they get their own folder in the Inbox, helping to lift them out of the clutter. And at long last, you can now attach photos to a Mail message you're already writing, instead of having to start in the Photos app - better late than never, I guess.
Miscellaneous. The option to publish utterances, photos or other bits to Facebook pops up in a bunch of different apps. In the Weather app, you now see an hour-by-hour forecast for today, in addition to the five-day outlook. A new Privacy settings page gives you on/off switches for the kinds of data each app might request (access to your contacts, location and so on). Tweaks have been made to the App Store app, Reminders, Videos and other apps.
And you no longer have to enter your Apple password just to download an update to an app you already have. Hosannah.
In the end, iOS 6 is to software what the iPhone 5 is to hardware: a big collection of improvements, many of which are really clever and good, that don't take us in any big new directions. Lots and lots of nips and tucks - that's Apple's motto lately.
Unlike the iPhone 5, however, upgrading to iOS 6 doesn't cost anything. It's free and available now. In general, you should go get it-and you sacrifice very little (a few Maps features) and gain a lot.
