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Apple iOS7 (rating: 4/5)

Available as a free download for iPhones 5 and older, iPads 2 onwards, and last year’s iPod touch

Before we go any further, let’s stop and back up a bit. I mean it – stop, and back up your iPhone, iPad or iPod. This is iOS7, Apple’s most radical operating system update in years, for crying out loud. You don’t want to lose all those photos and apps, do you?

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Installing a new operating system is not nearly as stressful as it used to be, but any sort of software surgery like this is always going to come with a small amount of risk. And here’s the thing: if you do make the jump to iOS7, there is no turning back. Like the relentless innovator it is, Apple will take you forwards, but not let you regress into the past. So the big question is: should you update to iOS7 or not?

An update to any familiar software can feel a bit like someone rearranged all the furniture in your living room. It is still your stuff but in new places. But iOS7 is different: the furniture is largely in the same place, but it has been reupholstered.

No more wooden bookshelves in Newsstand, no more green felt in Game Center. It is also really, really bright. If the original iOS was all natural colours and low tones, iOS7 is brilliant white, neon and pastels.

Fundamentally, the home screen is the same: a grid of 24 little squares with rounded corners. But Apple’s icons have new designs – the cause of considerable consternation among graphic designers when the icons were first unveiled in June – and most app developers will soon follow suit, so as not to look out of place. Shiny bubbles will be replaced with flat, bold icons.

My favourite new feature of iOS7 is Control Center. Swipe up from the bottom edge of the iPhone’s screen, and a translucent layer appears with one-touch switches to toggle Bluetooth, WiFi and airplane mode on and off. It also has shortcuts to a torch that uses the iPhone’s flash (instantly putting several independent apps out of business), as well as the camera, timer and calculator. Control Center will save the world millions of hours lost to fiddling around in Settings.

Also in Control Center is Airdrop, a new Apple widget that uses WiFi and Bluetooth to send a photo or other file to another iPhone owner who is standing next to you. Yes, you could do this by iMessage before, but this is a few taps faster – a recurring theme of iOS7.

Another big change is the light Helvetica font used throughout. It is thin, but easy to read on a Retina Display (a feature of all compatible devices except the iPad 2). The removal of superfluous lines and buttons means more information can be displayed on one screen.

The downside of the light font and the removal of anything that looks like a physical button is it makes it less clear-cut where you are supposed to tap to do something. Colour-coding helps but iOS7 will be a test of how well Apple has trained us all in how to use a touchscreen operating system. It wants to teach us a new gesture, too. Swipe sideways from the left of the screen to go back a page in the web browser or from an email to the inbox. Some apps, such as Snapchat, already use this: expect many more to adopt it in the near future.

Apple claims iOS7 will learn when you typically open particular apps and pre-download content for you, which as well as being quasi-clairvoyant is intended to save battery and data usage. Other neat updates include improvements to Siri, the voice-activated question-and-answer service, the way it organises photos, and iTunes Radio.

iOS7 is not perfect and it is not – as Apple claims with the iPhone 5s hardware – the world’s most advanced mobile operating system. Some bugs will doubtless need to be ironed out. If you are really into lots of customisation, live homescreen widgets and general geeking out, the latest Android smartphones are still a better bet. And Google Maps is still streets ahead of Apple’s offering.

But Apple has made a huge number of nips and tucks to iOS that make the software much more pleasing to use. In fact, if I were an Apple investor, I might be worried that iOS7 is so transformative that people with old iPhones will feel like they have a brand new device, and do not need to shell out for the latest 5s or 5c. Apple does not even charge anything for the download.

For most people, iOS7 will be a breath of fresh air that brings back a bit of that gee-whiz feeling that some say Apple has lacked of late. Just do not forget to back up before you enter its brightly coloured future.

Planet of the Apps

Tim Bradshaw picks his favourite from the latest crop

What it is: Pocket, free for iOS and Android mobile devices.



Why you should try it: With 8m users, Pocket lets you save articles to read later on your mobile. It is now one of the first iPhone apps to incorporate iOS7’s new background updates. Instead of having to wait for new content to load when you open the app, the new Pocket has it all there ready from the start.

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