Mondays don’t generally offer much to get excited about what with the return to the harsh, fluorescent lighting of the workplace, the annoying commute, and the reminder that you stayed up too late drinking on Saturday AND Sunday; but at least Apple there for you this week with a shiny, new iOS update. Yep, 7.1 is here, a little later than expected, but still in time to beat the iTunes Festival. Seeing as how this is a “major” update, you should probably have iTunes make a backup of your device before pulling the trigger on the 7.1 update. If you can’t wait, because maybe you are stuck in a boring meeting, you can update over-the-air too, but you’ll probably need around 2 GB free on your device.
Here are all the goodies that Apple says have been baked into the update besides the usual “improvements and bug fixes”;
- 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 (YAY!)
- Improves Touch ID fingerprint recognition (YAY!)
- Improved performance for iPhone 4
- Fixes display of Mail unread badge for numbers greater than 10,000
- Continued user interface refinements
You can find detailed security information about 7.1 here.
Enjoy!