New in iOS 9: All the new things you can ask Siri

Siri has been a consistent cause of frustration or jubilation over last few years. When Siri works, she can be extremely helpful and downright impressive. But her limitations in understanding context and your speech patterns caused many to downplay Siri’s usefulness. Apple looked to improve both those aspects with the new Siri setup andProactive. Let’s see just how much Siri has improved in iOS 9.

What’s New with Siri: New Commands for iOS 9

Contextual Questions

Probably one of the most important improvements is Siri’s ability to understand what you mean based off of recent actions or the current app you are in. For example, you can ask Siri to, “Remind me about this place,” when you have arrived at a new restaurant or are checking out a local hotspot in the Yelp app.

You can also ask Siri to remind you to do something when you get into your car or arrive at work. Siri knows that you are in your car if you have a Bluetooth connection and can tell when you arrive at work based on your saved locations. Furthermore, if you find an interesting article on Safari, you can tell Siri to “Remind be about this”. She will understand that “this” means the current article, and she’ll set up a reminder with the link to show you at a later time. These commands make Siri much more than a gimmick; upgrading her to a pretty productive virtual assistant.

And if you have an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus, having the ability to use the “Hey Siri” prompt without needing to plug in the device is pretty awesome. The completely hands-free experience makes Siri feel much more refined and futuristic, which is exactly what Apple hope for.

Better Sports Updates

Siri has always been able to help out with sports scores. But in iOS 9, she gives much more detail like who scored the point, the time games are playing, and even the time remaining in the quarter.

Find Specific Photos

The iPhone is the only camera for a lot of people, which means there might be a ton of photos stored on their device. You can always manually search your photos for specific images or albums, but that takes time and you need to know where to look. Unless you ask Siri.

In iOS 9, you can now ask Siri for specific locations, times, albums and more. I wanted to see all the photos I took last week, so I asked Siri, “Show me photos from last week.” Sure enough she opened the photos app directly to all the photos from last week. Mostly screen shots, but it works.

How about getting the best selfies? Well you can ask Siri to, “Show me my selfies” and she will bring up the new Selfies folder containing all your best glamour shots. 

These prompts work for pretty much anything photo related that you can think of. Did you take a bunch of pictures when you visited London? Well ask Siri and she will show you all the glorious photos of Big Ben and more.

Find Friends and Family

I think Find Friends is a pretty creepy feature. I simply can’t think of many useful scenarios where giving my exact location to anyone other than 911 would be ideal. Nevertheless, Find Friends is an iOS 9 mainstay, and can be used to locate and track you friends or family members. After you have added someone to the app, you can ask Siri to help locate them for you. Simply as, “Find Mom.” Siri will open Find Friends and the location of your search will be shown on the map.

Quick Conversions and Math Solutions

Instead of showing you an answer from Wolfram Alpha, Siri will speak the answer and show you herself. This is great because you don’t have to look at the screen to know the answer. If you’d like to know how many ounces are in a pint when making dinner, you can ask Siri with the “Hey Siri” command and never have to stop what you’re doing if you’ve an iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus.

In total, Siri is a much smarter, faster, and better version of her old self. She can answer much more specific questions, like “Will it rain in the next hour” or “What’s my schedule look like for tonight?” Transit directions have also been added to her support system. I have always found Siri to be useful, but iOS 9 makes Siri much more appealing for everyday use

How does iOS 9’s Low Power Mode extend iPhone’s battery life

One of most useful features in iOS 9 is the Low Power mode, which extends battery life by an additional 3 hours.

Low Power Mode can be enabled manually at any time through the Settings app, and you get an option to enable it when you get an alert when 20 percent and 10 percent battery is remaining. Once enabled, you can either disable it manually, or your iPhone will turn it off automatically when it hits 80 percent charge.

Low Power Modes comes at a cost. According to Apple, the Low Power mode reduces performance and multitasking activity to extend battery life. When it is turned on features like Mail fetch, Background App refresh, motion effects and animated wallpapers are disabled.

How does Low Power Mode extend iPhone battery life?

So what does it mean in real world situation? We take a look at the actual cost of enabling Low Power mode on your iPhone.

• Screen Brightness: It slightly lowers the screen brightness. You can, however, increase the screen brightness manually if you don’t like it.

• Auto Lock: It locks the screen automatically after 30 seconds. You can’t change this setting.

• Background App Refresh is disabled so that apps won’t update the content in the background. The content will get downloaded only when you launch the app.

• Mail: Push and fetch for emails is disabled. So you won’t get a notification for a new email. The only way to check for new emails is by launching the Mail app.

• Automatic Downloads: It also disables automatic downloads. So new purchases made of other devices and app updates are not downloaded automatically. You will need to download them manually.

• Visual effects: It seems to tone down the visual effects. So things like the parallax effect of icons, Dynamic Wallpapers, perspective zoom of wallpapers are disabled.

• Performance: One of the things, that may come as a big surprise to most users is the performance degradation. With Low Power mode enabled, iPhone 6s Plus got a single-core score of 1465, and a multi-core score of 2491 when we did the benchmarks using GeekBench 3.0, compared to the single score benchmark score of 2510 and 4360 without Low Power mode enabled (higher scores are better). To get some perspective, based on the benchmark scores, the iPhone 6s Plus runs as fast as the iPhone 5s in Low Power mode.

Benchmark scores – Low Power mode disabled (left) vs. Low Power mode enabled (right) 

• Always-on “Hey Siri” feature that is available on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, which allows users to use “Hey Siri without connecting the device to a power source, is also disabled in Low Power Mode.

Apple has smartly implemented some of the battery saving tips and tricks in Low Power Mode to get more battery life. The thing I like most is that it doesn’t turn your iPhone into a featured phone to extend battery life. It still feels like you’re using the iPhone, and for most activities you don’t feel the performance degradation.

I end up putting my iPhone in Low Power Mode when I’m going to sleep, and can’t charge the device. It ensures that there is enough charge left when I wake up.

It would have been perfect if Apple offered an option to enable or disable it via the Control Center or in my case, offer an option to schedule Low Power Mode. For now, I use Siri to turn Low Power Mode On/Off

How to get the iPhone 6s Selfie Flash on any iPhone

How to Get the iPhone 6s Selfie Flash on Any iPhone

Go to the App Store and search for “front flash: selfie camera” and select the app with the baby blue icon created by Wanaka Mobile LLC. The app is called, Take Selfies Free – With Front Flash In Low-Light. I’ll be using this app with my iPhone 5s.

After downloading the app, open it up. The app is ad-supported so will see a few banner ads during each session of use.

The app works by mimicking the same front-flash actions that appear on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, where your screen becomes the flash. The app has a timer in the corner that you will tap. The countdown is 3 seconds, so beautify yourself quickly.

After those three seconds, the front of your screen will flash to help add light to your selfie. Please note that, the brightness of this flash is based on the brightness of your display. The lower your display brightness, the lower intensity the flash will be. So, of course, if you need more light, increase the screen brightness to its max.

Now, let’s take a look at the comparison below. I shot both images in our kitchen with very little lighting in the room. The image on the left is from the stock Camera. The image on the right is from the Take Selfies Free app. Without question, Take Selfies Free added enough light to at least make my face visible. Without the front screen flash, the default Camera cannot overcome the darkness at all.

So there you have it. That’s how easy it is to get the iPhone 6s “selfie flash” on any iPhone. Of course, it is not the same as the technology Apple has used in the new iPhones, which comes with a special display chip that allows the display to flash three times brighter than usual, but as you can see it is better than nothing.