6 Best New Features in iOS 11 That’ll Make Using the Phone Better (Video)

And there we go, iOS 11 is finally official and on it’s way to an iDevice near you. In case you’re maybe wondering what all the chatter is about, here’s a quick rundown of the five best features to look forward to in the new iOS 11 update.

Control Center

One of the biggest aestetic changes we’ve seen in iOS 11 comes in the form of the new design of the control center. The new control center has a bit more of a bubbly look to it and it now takes up the entire screen when you swipe up to get to it instead of just half like before.

In addition to the full screen we have these bubbly, smaller icons that when combined with the larger real estate means you have a lot more settings you can get to from the control center quickly.

You can also go into Settings > Control Center to be able to customize the different options you want to show in the Control Center and reorder them, as well.

Finally, you can now also 3D touch on them to get extra options to quickly show up and change them.

All in all, making the Control Center a lot more functional than before.

Lock Screen and Notification Center

The other big change to the UI is the combining of the lock screen and notification center. Swiping down now on the phone now gives you the lock screen (which also now shows your unread notifications) while swiping up will bring you to older notifications.

Also, these are no longer annoyingly grouped by app and show up in a much more logical chronological order thankfully.

Files App

Apple added something that I think should be on every smartphone since inception–a file manager.

It might seem simple, but being able to find all of the documents, folders, photos, videos, etc in one place is handy a lot of the time and frankly is one more small step to making the device feel a lot more computer-like.

Updated Live Photos & Portrait Mode

Live photos can now be edited to only show the part of the live photo you want to be shown (similar to editing a video on the phone). They can also be set to Bounce (play backwards automatically when reaching the end of the video then starting over and so on and so on) or just repeat over and over and can be saves as a gif and shared (finally non-iPhone users can see the glorious live photos you’ve taken).

In addition to this, Portrait Mode–the mode that allows you to get those blurred background photos everyone on Instagram goes nuts for, has been updated to support HDR, Optical Stabilization, and just has been overall bumped up in quality.

Dock on iPad

Besides these updates there were some iPad specific ones that I think are a bit of a big deal even though they might seem like subtle changes. The first is the revamping of the dock.

The iPad dock in iOS 11 now resembles the normal MacOS dock in that it can hold a lot more icons (up to 13 apps) and can be pulled up by swiping up on any screen instead of just on the homescreen like before. It also has a section for your most recent apps and makes it just feel a bit more desktop like and more efficient for multitasking in my opinion.

Drag and Drop

Another change that makes the iPad running iOS 11 more desktop-like is the new ability to drag and drop. This is pretty much what you would think, but basically if you have multiple apps running on the device you can actually drag items (like a photo, for example) over to the other app and have it seemlessly copied over and placed where you want it.

Again, small, but one more small thing that makes the iPad feel just that much more desktop-like (and is frankly one of many more things Apple needs to do if they plan to keep telling people an iPad can replace your computer).

Conclusion

Now there are a lot more changes to iOS 11 that have happened and you can click the link below to be taken to my article on my site where a list a few more of my favorites, but these are some of the bigger ones. iOS 11 isn’t a huge update really but there are a lot of little changes like these that I think feel like they are steps in the right direction to making the OS more intuitive and especially make the iPad feel just a tad more desktop like.

Let me know what you think and don’t forget to follow me on social to be updated when I do new tutorials, best of’s, reviews, and more.