As anticipated Apple just released iOS 7.1 for iPhone and iPad. This update includes several feature enhancements to Siri, iTunes Radio, Calendar as well as the new CarPlay feature which transfers your iOS display to compatible in-car displays. The download is a little over 200 mb in size for those who’ve stayed current on iOS 7. More details on the fixes and features below.
To start your upgrade navigate to your iPhone menu and to the General and Software Update option.
This update contains improvements and bug fixes, including:
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
- Improves Touch ID fingerprint recognition
- Improved performance for iPhone 4
- Fixes display of Mail unread badge for numbers greater than 10,000
- Continued user interface refinements
For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222
“Reduce Motion option now includes Weather, Messages, and multitasking UI animations”
Uh oh. I like the motion options on Weather, Messages, and the multitasking stuff, but I hate the motion on the home screen. Are these seperate options, or does one thing turn them off and on?
The 287 MB OTA update on the iPad mini Retina requires an unused 2.5 GB of disk space to install. This is bloody ridiculous, especially if you have a 16 GB model.
Loopyduck- I wholeheartedly agree that that is a bit nuts. That noted… With the size of apps, images and videos these days a 16GB model with no SD slot is “bloody ridiculous” from the get-go.
Nope, it’s binary. No more swooshy app switcher.
I haven’t loaded videos onto an iPad since the original one, so it’s not quite as big a hardship for me as for some other folks. It’s just particularly irritating to see that message when out of the box the 16 GB model makes only 12.8 GiB available to the user. Any less and it’ll be just as bad as the complaints a year ago about the 32 GB Surface offering only 20 GiB at the start.
The real lunacy (from a customer perspective, not from Apple’s; clearly they’re charging whatever the market will bear) is the $100 leap from 16 GB to 32 GB.