Apple iOS 8 upgrade gives everyday life a facelift but it’s no cure for old age

YOU can give an Apple device a Botox facelift by upgrading it to iOS 8. But like Botox, it’s not a cure for old age.

HAVE an older Apple device? You can give it a Facelift by up­grading it to Apple’s new iOS 8 ­operating system. But like Botox, it’s not a cure for old age.

People report that iOS 8 can be sluggish on old devices such as iPhone 4S and iPad 2 — the oldest it works on, and even iPad 3.

Animations and browsing may be slower, and apps can take longer to open. If that concerns you, delay upgrading until Apple further optimises iOS 8.

If you upgrade, it’s best to use the old-fashioned method of upgrading through iTunes. Connect your device by a USB cable. It’s a 1.1 gigabyte upgrade after all, so downloading to a “wired” computer should be faster. And iTunes will save you freeing up most of the 5.8GB needed on a phone to unpack the upgrade if you do it wirelessly.

Not all new iOS 8 features work on older iPhones and iPads. Connecting phones to Macs using AirDrop, TouchID — if you don’t have it already, and the new 240fps slow-motion video capture mode may not work, depending on the model. Pre-iPhone 6 models can’t count stairs you climb without a barometric sensor.

That said, I have tried many iOS 8 tweaks and, while some might seem modest, they greatly improve everyday tasks: searching, emailing, messaging and typing. If you’re like me, much of your iPhone time is spent on these.

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Some enhancements are well hidden.

On menu screens, a gentle swipe downward that starts from below the top of the screen brings up an expanded Spotlight Search.

Whatever I typed was matched against contact names, events, mail, apps, track names, podcasts, videos as well as Wikipedia, and results from Bing — information that’s on my phone and the web. It proved a catch-all.

I now use Spotlight all the time. For example, if I can’t find an app among the several menu screens of apps I have accumulated, I just start typing its name, maybe two letters, and up it comes.

Double-clicking the home button brought up a line of icons across the top of the screen representing favourite contacts and people I’d contacted recently. Tapping an icon brought up ­options to contact them again quickly: by message, phone or Facetime — all so fast.

Notifications shown on the lock screen and pull-down notification centre have an instant reply feature but you have to swipe from right to left, and hit reply to see them. The app displays two reply options worked out from parsing the question, plus “not sure” or “Talk later?”.

Apple keyboard now has predictive text. The keyboard throws up options for words as you begin typing them. Select the predicted word with a single press.

You can also use third-party keyboards from the App store. Popular Android apps Swype ($1.29) and SwiftKey (free) are already in the Australian Apps store and huge hits. By Friday, Swype was the No 1 downloaded paid app in Australia and SwiftKey the No 4 free app locally. Instead of prodding keys one by one, you glide your finger between them.

After downloading a keyboard app, you activate it by heading to keyboard settings, found in general settings.

The next time you type an email or message, you can toggle through the various keyboards using the globe icon at bottom left.

Apple displays a stinker of a privacy warning when you activate third-party keyboards.

It says everything you type from then onwards and even before, including credit card details, could be accessed by the keyboard developer.

Both Nuance, the maker of Swype, and SwiftKey have strict privacy policies. The ball’s in your court on that.

In Messages, you can now send audio and video messages as well as text. Here Apple is catching up with third-party apps offering this.

I held down the camera button on the left hand side which brought up a circle of options and one was to make a video and seamlessly message it. I could preview before sending. I also could invoke the front camera quickly and message an instant selfie. Video messages disappear from your messages dialogue once they are read.

Alternatively, by holding down the audio button on the right, I could dictate and send a voicemail.

You can also send your ­location to a chosen messages contact. You hit “details”, and ­select. You can also keep sharing your location for either an hour, till day’s end, or indefinitely.

If you’re meeting someone in 30 minutes, you could have Messages keep both of you up-to-date on where you are. Sharing your ­location with someone indefinitely joins you at the hip — but you can revoke the connection.

Mail also has new features. In the past, it was hard to check new mails when you were in the middle of creating one. Now I could swipe down from the message bar of a partly completed email to view mail underneath it, and then tap near the bottom to restore it.

While fossicking through my inbox, I could swipe gently to the right to mark (or unmark) an email as read, or to the left to flag or delete mail and other functions. A faster flick deletes it. That’s ­really useful for managing large email boxes on the go.

Mail also will invite you to ­create a contact entry when you get emails from people not already in your contacts list. This worked for some but not all of my email accounts.

I also tried the new Apple handover feature. It lets you start a task on a Mac, and continue it on a phone and visa versa. I had handover working in both directions. Picking up my phone and pressing the mail icon on the home screen brought up the email I had begun on the Mac, and an icon appeared in the Mac dock when I went in the other direction.

But you’ll need a Beta version of OSX Yosemite on your Mac for this to work or wait for Yosemite’s public rollout probably next month.

Many of these features are small steps, but they make a big difference to everyday use. But you’ll need to put time into learning them.

Rating: 9/10

Price: iOS 8 is a free upgrade