We Tried iOS 17 for Ourselves and We're Impressed So Far

Speaker 1: Turns out iOS 17 is really, really good. You see this? It's an iPhone 14 Pro Max and that clock screen there, that's standby mode. I adore it. I've been running the developer beta for a few weeks now, and the public beta for iOS 17 is now out for all to try. Yay. Though I recommend checking it out on something other than your main iPhone because it is still a beta and there are still things being worked on and [00:00:30] bugs being addressed. So you know what I wanna do today? Well, besides go to the beach, I wanna show you a handful of my favorite iOS 17 features that truly bring me joy. Also, I want to try a couple of iOS 17 features out for the very first time, what could go wrong? So join me, will you? Now I'm not going to go exhaustively over every feature in iOS 17 <laugh>. Speaker 1: I already did that in another video, which [00:01:00] you should watch instead. I'm gonna show you the good stuff. You see nearly everything in iOS 17 falls into one of four categories for me. There are delightful features in intuitive improvements, personal additions and helpful tools. Kind of sounds like jeopardy categories, potent potables for 200, please. Now those categorizations are things I made up, but all of this adds up to an iOS that is a major quality of life improvement, but [00:01:30] enough of my jibber jabber. Let's get into it and start with a couple of delightful features. Your iPhone has a home screen, a lock screen, and always on display if you have an iPhone 14 pro and now a standby screen. So when I turn my iPhone on its side while charging the standby screen pops up, it's basically like a giant clock, but it can show photos, a calendar, widgets and notifications. Speaker 1: [00:02:00] It's perfect for a nightstand, uh, kitchen counter or in my case my desk. Oh, and the stand I'm using to charge my iPhone is the Balkan Boost Charge Pro two in one. You don't have to use this stand. Any stand with MagSafe should work. But what I really like about standby so far is how everything flows. If I wanna change up the standby screen, I can swipe up to select a different style or layout. It can display my photos and live activities too. When [00:02:30] in low light, like when you're sleeping, the standby screen turns red. Another delightful feature is stickers and messages. Now stickers are not new, but there are more of them including being able to use emoji as stickers, which is great. When you wanna express something more than a thumbs up, thumbs down, heart laugh, haha, haha or exclamation points and question marks on a bubble. Speaker 1: All of the mini iMessage apps are no longer above the keyboard. They have their own menu. [00:03:00] Tap the plus sign button to pull it up. Then I tap on stickers to get a tray of stickers and customized stickers that I made from my photos. And it's the customized stickers that are truly amazing. If I wanna make a new one, I tap the plus sign, select a photo, tap add sticker, and then the subject of the photo is removed and becomes a sticker. I can add an effect now or edit the sticker later to have one, and it's now in my stickers [00:03:30] drawer. When I wanna use one, I just tap and hold a sticker and drag it on top of a message bubble. Just want to add a cat to the dog photo. There we go. We have a cats and dogs living together. And my stickers, this is what Iowa 17 is about. Speaker 1: And here's the best part. You can use a live photo to make an animated sticker. I mean, this is so addictive and I foresee a future where there are hundreds, thousands, millions [00:04:00] of customized animated stickers being sent between iPhones. Now let's jump into some intuitive improvements. Sticking with messages. A small but potent feature is swipe to reply. Message replies are nothing new, and definitely help keep a group thread from turning into a mess. But being able to swipe to respond to a specific message seems quite obvious, like, why have I not been able to do this the whole time? [00:04:30] Then there are widgets, which have been around since 2020, but have mainly been used for showing glanceable information or as a shortcut to open an app. Now with Iowa 17 widgets become interactive. So I could start or pause a podcast straight from the widget. Same goes for music. And right now in beta, most of the interactive widgets are apple's own. So I'm excited to see how non-Apple apps take advantage of it. And now let's try a new feature. That's definitely an intuitive improvement, [00:05:00] which is the ability to leave FaceTime messages when the other person isn't there or doesn't answer. Now I'm gonna try a FaceTime call with my pal, Lexi. Speaker 1: All right, so now there's a uh, call again close or a record video. I'm gonna hit record. Video is counting down. Hey Lexi, this is Patrick. You can kind of see the top of my hair here. And this is a top-down camera [00:05:30] here and we're filming the iOS 17 hands-on with the public beta. I just wanted to share this with you. I think this is a fantastic moment. I'm just having a really good day and I just want you to know that. Alright, I'll talk to you later. Bye. Speaker 1: Cool. And then it says save, cancel, retake, or send. I'm gonna tap the little send button. In a moment we'll have Lexi show us her side of the things so we can actually see what she sees. Hopefully it's the video. [00:06:00] I just wanted to share this with you. I think this is a fantastic moment. I'm just having a really good day and I just want you to know that. Alright, I'll talk to you later. Bye. Hey, that was pretty fun. Now let's check out some personal additions. The first are contact posters. Now this basically turns your mundane contact card into a mini movie poster and you can select between a few different templates, like ones that show your initials or emoji or a photo of your choosing. Now [00:06:30] this reminds me a lot of the lock screen customizations. We got an iOS 16 and your contact card can have a contact poster and a contact photo and you can hear your contact poster using name drop, which is kind of a cross between Airdrop and Apple Pay sends the credit card information. Speaker 1: Now I can hover my phone over someone else's phone similar to how you trigger Apple Pay at a contactless payment terminal and I can share my contact poster. Let's try [00:07:00] it out. If you can select the specific phone number or email address you want to share in the moment. And if you wanna just receive someone's information and not share your own, you can simply tap receive only. Another personal edition is aimed at people with pets who doesn't love pets and the Photos app can now identify and find pet photos better. Now if I tap Cat it pulls up all the photos of cats on my phone. Hm, only 562 would've thought [00:07:30] there would've been more. Guess I really don't love cats. Also, when you pull up a photo of a cat, there's a new visual lookup icon with a tiny cat silhouette and a similar icon for photos of dogs and related slash unrelated is that there is now a photos widget for albums. Speaker 1: Once you add the widget to your home screen, you can edit it to show photos from a specific album. Again, why has this not been on my phone the whole time? Next, let's look at some helpful [00:08:00] tools. Okay, this first one I am stoked to try and it's live voicemail transcription. Essentially, when someone calls and leaves you a message, you'll see a live transcription of the voicemail as they speak and record it. And if it turns out to be something you want to address in the moment you get, pick up the call and talk to them at any time. So let's give this a try and see it in action. And for this I'm gonna pester my pal and CNET principal video producer [00:08:30] John Kim, Speaker 2: You want for lunch? Okay, Patrick, I've been texting you this entire 10 minutes. I dunno why again, you catch, but Speaker 1: Turns out my voicemail pretty impressive. But that's not the only helpful tool. There's the messages catch up era, not catch up like you put on fries, but catch up like I'm running behind. I gotta catch up. Now this arrow is great for long threads where you need to catch up. Just tap the arrow to go back to the [00:09:00] first on red message. And then there's check-in, which lets a friend know automatically when you've arrived at a destination safely. Now I haven't tried this out yet, so let's do it now. Hey, this looks a little bit different. I'm outside the studio. I'm actually on Market Street in San Francisco and I'm about like four or five blocks from the office. So I just did a check-in with my pal and colleague Lexi. And uh, we're gonna see on her end what she receives and I'm gonna head back to the office and see what happens with check-in. Wish [00:09:30] me luck and I've arrived at my location. It was pretty interesting and easy to try check-in. That is really impressive tool and I think it's gonna help a lot of people in a lot of different situations stay very safe and feel more comfortable. And now I want to hear from you. Are you trying out the public beta for iOS 17? If so, what are your favorite features? I'd love to hear them. And thank you for watching.