Yes, There’s a New iPhone. But That’s Not the Big News.

September 17, 2013, 9:01 pm

The big Apple news this week might seem to be the new iPhones. But truth be told, the bigger news is iOS 7.

This is the free software update for iPhones (iPhone 4 and later), iPads (iPad 2 and later) and iPod Touches (fifth generation). It’s a radical, huge redesign. Its master architect was Jonathan Ive, the Apple designer who has brought us astonishing hardware designs for many years; now, for the first time, he’s been put in charge of a whole software universe.

The look of iOS 7 is sparse, white â€" almost plain in spots. No more fake leather, fake woodgrain, fake green felt, fake yellow note paper. It’s all blue Helvetica Neue against white.

The complete absence of graphic embellishments makes it especially utilitarian â€" in both senses of the word. That’s good, because whatever button or function you need is easier to find; it’s bad, because, well, it can look a little boring.

Then again, the new look is primarily visible at the Home screen, where a jarringly different color palette greets you on the Apple app icons, and on the options screen. The rest of the time, you’ll be using your regular apps, many of which will look no different than before.

The look of iOS 7 may grab you or not. But once the fuss about the visuals dies down, something even more important comes into focus: the work that’s been done on making iOS better. The longer you spend with the new OS, the more you’re grateful for the fixing and de-annoyifying on display.

For example, you no longer have to burrow into infinitely nested Settings screens to adjust your control panels. Now you can just speak what you want, using Siri: “Open Wi-Fi settings,” for example, or “Open brightness settings.”

Or, when speaking to your phone isn’t socially appropriate, you can swipe upward from the bottom of the screen to open the Control Center: a compact, visual palette of controls for the settings and functions you’re most likely to need: brightness, volume, Bluetooth, WiFi, Airplane Mode, Play/Pause Music, calculator, camera, and â€" my favorite â€" Flashlight. This panel slides in over whatever app you’re using, so you don’t lose your place.

This idea â€" swiping in from the margins of the phone â€" also plays out in the new Back gesture. The iPhone doesn’t have a Back button, as Android phones do. But now you can swipe in from the left margin of the phone to go back one screen. It works in Mail, Settings, Notes, Messages, Safari, Facebook and some other apps. It’d be great if worked in every app.

The iPhone has never had a system-wide Search button, either, but here again, Apple has made some strides. The Search screen is no longer off to the left of the Home screens; now it’s above them â€" all of them. From any Home screen, you can swipe downward from the phone’s top margin to open the Spotlight search screen.

Reducing steps seems to be a running theme in this release.

To turn on Private Browsing in Safari, for example, you used to have to open the Settings app, burrow around, find the on-off switch, then return to the browser. Now the Private button is right in Safari, where it belongs.

The Camera app has gained a better design. Now you swipe across the preview screen to switch among modes: Video, Slow-motion video (on the iPhone 5s), still photos, Square photos with Instagram-type filters, and Panorama. It’s easy to learn and use, but it does mean that it’s harder to open a photo you’ve just taken for inspection. (Swiping to the right used to make it appear; now you have to tap the tiny thumbnail button in the corner.)

There was supposed to be a password- and credit-card memorizing feature that would make it much easier to buy stuff and fill in forms on the Web, like the LastPass, 1Password or Dashlane apps. And this information would sync across all your Apple gadgets. But it mysteriously disappeared in the release version; Apple says it will reappear in a few weeks, at about the same time as OS X “Mavericks.”

The new iTunes Radio is here, though, and it’s very good. The idea is exactly like Pandora; you choose a “seed” song, performer or musical genre, and it plays nonstop songs in that style. But it’s not as sophisticated as Pandora, and not nearly as powerful as Spotify; on iTunes Radio, you can’t explicitly request a certain song or album by name.

Still, having it built in is nice. For example, you can say, “Play Soft Guitar radio,” or whatever you’ve named your “seed”-based station, to start it up.

As with Pandora, the free version subjects you to a brief audio ad every now and then; also as with Pandora, you can pay for an ad-free version. It’s $25 a year â€" part of Apple’s existing iTunes Match service.

Siri, over all, is much better. The voice sounds more natural, and you have a choice of male or female. Apple did a lot of work “on the back end,” so that Siri responds much faster to commands. The Siri screens are redesigned to look nicer. And Siri can do more things.

More stuff:

- Internet phone calls. Now free, high-quality voice calls (to other Apple phones, tablets and Macs) are built right in. Apple calls it Audio-Only FaceTime.

- Carpenter’s Level. The Compass app now has a three-dimensional level in it!

- Auto-app updates. You can opt to have new versions of your apps downloaded and installed automatically, in the background. The App Store app keeps a list of everything you’ve received.

- Today screen. As on Android, there’s a single screen that lists everything that’s happening today: your next appointment, today’s weather, reminders due, whose birthday it is and so on. (Right now, mine says: “It looks busy right now. There are 8 events scheduled, and the first one starts at 8:30 am.”)

- Smarter Wi-Fi network alerts. If you’re driving, iOS 7 on the new iPhone 5s no longer keeps announcing that it’s discovered new Wi-Fi networks. Obviously, you’re moving too fast to hop onto any of them, so this is a smart little tweak.

- Photos. The app that displays all your photos used to be a single endless scroll of tiny thumbnails. Navigationally speaking, it was really pretty useless. Now it self-assembles into clusters by year, by month and by occasion (based on time and location data). Sooooo much better.

- Maps. Apple still has work to do before its Maps app has anywhere near the quality of Google’s Maps app. Apple’s Maps still can’t give you directions using public transportation, but at least it now has walking directions. And when you’re driving at night, Maps automatically enters Night Mode, in which the map itself is dark gray instead of very bright.

- Global Type Size control. For the first time, there’s a slider that controls the font size in all your apps. Well, all of them that have been rewritten to hook into this feature, anyway. So far, it’s mostly just Apple’s built-in apps.

- Activation Lock. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. If some thug steals your phone, it’s worthless to him unless he enters your Apple password. Even if he tries to erase it, even if he jailbreaks it, even if he force-reinstalls the operating system. Thousands of iPhones will not be stolen now, because thieves will learn that they’ll be “bricked” without your password. (To make this work, you have to turn on the “Find My iPhone” feature. Which you should do anyway.)

There are a zillion other nips and tucks, many of which make you smack your forehead and say, “Yes! Why didn’t they think of this sooner?”

The software is available to download on your existing iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch tomorrow, Sept. 18.

If you decide to install iOS 7, as you learn your way around the new system you’ll stumble across all kinds of handy features and techniques. But without any further delay, at least make these two features part of your new routine: Control Center (swipe upward from below the screen) and Siri’s new settings-changing commands.

I think you should install it. The structure, layout and features represent some of Apple’s best work. The look of iOS 7 â€" well, that judgment is up to you.