As always when it comes to our iPhones and iPads we get all crazy on our wish lists of what we would like to see. Sometimes we get blown away and sometimes we get disappointed in what we didn't get.
For me all in all it was a good update to a good functional operating system. My favorite announcement is that Siri will finally be coming to the iPad with this update!
Speaking of Siri, she is getting, well useful, haha. You will be able to ask to to tell you the score of a game, stats on a player, or better details on a restaurant that you are looking for. She can launch apps now! Finally for all us lazy people who hate using your finger to find things, hah. Also a neat part of this is no lists with possible answers here. She finds exact info now, and will launch things straight up with out having to show you a list of things you might be asking for.
Next big thing was Apple finally introduced their own Maps App. Now I know we can all say we saw this coming a mile a way with all the buying of the Map making companies, so bye bye Google Maps. What we get with this new Map app is turn by turn navigation (finally) and it is narrated by Siri herself no less. It seems to be a very good implementation of a navigation app and shows you your ETA in real time based on crowd sourced traffic info and can even reroute you if you are coming up on a traffic jam. You also can get 3D overlay of cities and a nice sky view. Now the only thing I will miss from Google Maps would be street view, I can't tell you how many times this has helped me find an obscure place I was trying to get to but I had no idea what it looked like. I hope Apple will implement their own version of Street View in the near future.
Next feature that I really like is the ability to block certain phone calls and notifications during certain periods of time. Need to get some sleep or take a nap without being disturbed then you can easily set this up to be able to block phone calls or any notifications at all. Or you can even tell it to allow certain numbers to come through but block the others. Now this I can think of many uses for. Now don't worry all you stalkers out there if you call enough times the iPhone will think it's an emergency and actually allow your call through. A well needed addition to the OS for sure.
Another feature that I liked that has been a long time coming is the ability to text back an answer to any phone call. Say you are busy and someone calls you can just hit an answer with message button and select the message you want to send. For example: I'll call you back later. or What's up?
Here is a really cool thing and the beginnings of what Apple has planned for a mobile wallet. It is called Passport. You can store card information here, have plane ticket, and movie ticket info. Say you bought a movie ticket online and you pull up to the movie theater, it will detect that you are close to a theater and bring up your ticket on your homescreen. Or you are trying to catch a plane and you are delayed, Passport will notify you of any delays, or gate changes as soon as they happen. Pretty neat and well organized app. I can't wait to see this develop out.
Now there are many many more features being added to iOS 6 but these are my favorites. Let's focus now on what we didn't get. Biggest thing we didn't get a redesigned app icon, or layout change of any kind. Now yes I know the iPhone layout and icon's are getting kind of old in the UI phone race. But Apple is not one to rush in to too much change to quickly. So it doesn't surprise me that we didn't see any major graphical changes with this iteration of iOS. I'm still holding out that they do something similar to the live tiles on the Windows phones. Those are just really nice and user friendly. We also got no mention of what this update will do to the Apple tv, but that is a post for another time.
