Foreign Another year, another version of iOS come into an iPhone near you. It seems like usually these updates get smaller and smaller and less and less crazy, but it feels like this year for whatever reason, Apple has packed a ton of stuff into iOS 17. this is going to be launching in September when the new iPhone comes out on everybody's iPhone but it's in beta now and I've been using it and there's a lot of stuff here. I'm going to try to pack it into a top five, but it was kind of hard.

I've been using this iOS 17 beta for a few weeks now. The public beta is out, so if you want to try it before the new iPhone even comes out, you can do that. But let's take a look at the five most impressive new things that are coming to the iPhone. But as we go through this I do want you to keep something in the back of your head.

Just just keep this in mind. A lot of times in the past those features that we'd get were really, really big because they were new capabilities. Most if not all of these features depend on having another iPhone in the mix. Whether your friend has an iPhone or your family has an iPhone, you need two iPhones for a lot of this stuff to work.

Just something to keep in the back of your head. All right. So number five Airdrop Airdrop is one of those things. It's one of those features that when it works, it feels like it's one of the best things ever.

but sometimes it's glitchy and it doesn't work and it seems terrible. So I Hope some stability improvements are also in the works here, but basically Apple is expanding Airdrop to be more capable and easier to use. The big one is that if you meet another person who also has an iPhone, you can walk up to them and bump your phones together. You literally hold your phones up next to each other at a an inch or two apart and it'll play this sweet animation as the phones talk to each other and transfer a contact poster with your name and contact info to that other person in a single touch.

It's called name drops. Pretty cool. Couple things about this one is it lets you actually choose which info you want to share. So you you do that phone bump thing and it goes oh, you want to share something? Do you want to share just your phone number? Okay, cool.

Do you want to share your email address and not your phone number? You can switch it over to that I Want to share a fake number? Sure. program that in two. This will all come from the My card at the top of contact settings that you can customize with whatever photo you want, whatever fonts you want, Etc and everything you change will show up to people that have you in their contacts. What's cooler though is you can actually Now bump to share photos or videos or content links or even start a share play session.

Basically it's making it easier to find a certain iPhone on AirPlay by getting it roughly within NFC distance of another iPhone and then you can share stuff and then another cool thing. Typically airdrop is a Wi-Fi Direct connection between two iPhones but if you leave each other, if you you walk away down the street and you want to continue this file transfer that hasn't finished yet, it will resume over cellular. so it'll start uploading to Cellular and their phone will download and you can just walk away and Airdrop should finish. I Don't know if you remember an app from a while back called Bump.

This was in like 2009. It was literally just an app to bump phones together to share contact information. Google ended up buying them, but I Do have a feeling that if they still existed now, this would be a sort of a Sherlock situation. Just another example of the remora fish to Apple's shark.

If that reference doesn't make any sense, I'll leave a video link below to the video that I did. Comparing Apple to sharks, it's a it makes sense when you watch the video I promise. So anyway, number four is a feature called personal Voice so this one's an accessibility setting. It's not even something that they talked about on stage.

This is something that is not meant for most people to use, but it's pretty cool anyway. So in settings then accessibility, you scroll down to the speech section that's new here and there's something called personal Voice and you'll see a button that says create a personal voice. Basically, what's going to happen is your phone's gonna ask you to take it to a quiet place and then it's going to display a number of phrases on the screen and it'll ask you to say those phrases into the microphone. It's 100 150 phrases.

They're pretty random. they'll be like Sally Sold Seashells in 1979 and the President of Morocco is very tall and you just go through the list and you say a bunch of these phrases and when it's done, it compiles all of your voice and will stitch together a new synthesized voice that can say whatever you want to make it say. It does all of this locally on device so it has no servers involved. It doesn't send your voice recordings everywhere.

it does all the compilation overnight and at the end of this you basically get a new voice on your phone. You can go to accessibility settings and then enable live speech so that on the triple tap of a power button, it brings up a text block and you can type whatever you whatever you want to make the voice say and then just hit send. Hey quick Brown Fox jumped over the lazy dog. All right, let's try another one here.

a little more substance. 30 frames per second is the correct frame rate and anyone who says otherwise is probably lying to you. It kind of sounds like me and it's decently good. I wouldn't I wouldn't pass it off as human if I like played this recording to you, you wouldn't think it's a person, but it kind of sounds like I'm talking on the phone to someone and it kind of has a poor connection, you know? But this isn't some mainstream feature.

Like I said, it's an accessibility setting so a reason. this is designed for people who may know that they are at risk of losing their voice at some point or maybe their vocal cords fatigue after a long time. There are conditions like that MTD is a common one and so they can sort of go through this process and create a voice on their phone so that they can continue to interact with the world without using some generic Siri voice and it actually kind of still sounds like them. All right? Let's move on to the next bullet point: Number three: The little things.

The little things Apple Apple's always tweaking and adding little features here and there to their stock apps, especially. There's a bunch of those this time around, and in total, you could say they add up to a welcome refinement. Uh, you probably heard about the new keyboard which looks the same but should be way Smarter with Transformer based autocorrect and improved it's much faster dictation actually. Oh, and also that thing where you're typing a word and then you spell it a little bit different and then you hit space and it corrects you and then you hit backspace and type it the way you want again and hit space and it corrects you again and it doesn't seem to learn.

They fixed that. Also, widgets are thankfully interactive. Now the whole point of a widget I Always thought was to be able to view and interact with information without jumping into the app which is trying to suck you in. I'm surprised it took this long, but I am happy to finally see that here.

There's also now a bunch of new messages features including one called check-in This is good for I think either kids or maybe significant others or friends. You know the dance you do where someone's gone somewhere and you're like all right? Text me when you get there and then you wait for them to text you back or you can share location or you just have them text you when they arrive. Now there's just a feature built in. you just hit the plus button you go to check in.

Whoever is going to be checked in on can decide who to share their location with, how much data they want to share, and then there's this nice little tracker that updates you and lets them know when they've arrived, where they're supposed to. And there's a bunch of other little stuff like that sort of sprinkled around the OS no doubt you've noticed. Still, a lot of these depend on also having a friend with an iPhone That's how most of this works. but you know, if you do have that ecosystem in your life, then yeah, there's a bunch of good stuff that adds up to a good welcome.

Improvement Good little stuff. So all right. Number two is called standby Mode. So when I first saw this feature I thought it was really interesting.

but now I've thought about this a lot the more I think about it. I have this so high on the list because I Think genuinely, this is better than a home pod for most people who already have an iPhone Basically it's a smart home display so anytime your iPhone is both charging and horizontal, it triggers the standby mode which is basically a clock and then whatever useful Widgets or photos you want to have in the background. It really reminds me of the Apple watch. it kind of has a bunch of these preset layouts and then you can literally swipe between these three faces to find the one you like and then swipe vertically to go through the different styles.

So a lot of these yeah, will look just like an Apple Watch face. But yeah, to be honest, very useful. so that's already pretty convenient. You can kind of just have it display information ambiently to you, whether it's on a nightstand or anger kitchen, whatever.

But then on top of that, what makes it much more home pod like is the fact that Siri is better in two ways. First of all, it's conversational so you don't have to keep hitting the button over and over again to keep asking it questions or follow-ups. You can just keep talking and it keeps listening, which is great. The other has been doing that forever and then the other is you don't have to say hey her name, you can just say Siri what's the weather in Manchester on Saturday hover around 67 degrees with overnight lows around 57.

what about Sunday thank you and then it sort of stops listening. But the idea is it's just going to keep listening and talking to you and that's better than before. Also, that weather is not great for golf, but I don't know, we'll make it work. Either way, big improvements to Siri there.

That's what makes it feel kind of like a you know, a smart home display. Now if only they could make Siri actually good at other things. So then number one, the top new feature in iOS 17. I Think we figured our phones are still phones sometimes, but it's the phone app actually I'm combining combining the phone app and FaceTime but generally there's a lot of nice features that sort of just make it easy to clean up and have a better phone experience.

First of all are the contact posters. like I mentioned earlier. You set up your own contact poster and then everyone else who has you in their contacts gets that updated in their phone. at least if if they have an iPhone.

But then yeah, whenever you call someone, that's what they see and this sort of automatically cleans up everyone's contacts with a nice photo I know for for one I Basically have no photos for anyone in my contacts list outside of my family, so this is a nice effortless Improvement for that. And then another fun piece is if someone calls you and you don't pick up and it starts going to voicemail, you will actually get a live transcription of the voicemail as they're leaving it, and if you want to interrupt and pick it up at any time you still can. Some of you are too young to know that that's actually a throwback to physical answering machines that were in people's houses where you could actually hear someone leaving you a voicemail and then pick up the phone and interrupt it and actually talk to them just I'm old now so I get to say stuff like that. But also FaceTime gets voicemail too, which you might be thinking, wait, it's FaceTime it's a video.

So what is a FaceTime voicemail? And it's literally just a video message. So like if you're about to FaceTime someone and show them something but then they don't pick up, you'll just you know record your video and then send them the voicemail and then it shows up inside the FaceTime inbox Which is cool, but there you go. That is it. That's that is the iOS 17 biggest stuff.

Honestly I Think this is one of the biggest best updates to iOS in a long time and somehow there's still a bunch of little stuff I didn't even mention from camera effects to you know, stickers all over iMessage and stuff to Safari getting profiles. Now there's a lot of stuff, but again, now that we've gone through all of it, don't forget about how many of these things are intentionally just for people with another iPhone in their life. Whether it's a friend with an iPhone or a family member with an iPhone or you just met someone with an iPhone. From name drop to share, play to all the iMessage features the contact cards the FaceTime features.

That's the ecosystem at work. That's them going. Hey, this is a cool new feature, but it'll only work if your friend also has an iPhone so maybe you pressure them into getting an iPhone too. Either way, that's it.

Feel free to share this video with others who will probably have this software update on their phone sometime soon and until the next one. Catch you guys later! Peace.