What are your favorite iOS 16 features?

Most people use the new O/S exactly like the old one. Can you remember what was new with iOS 15? I don’t. But this new release brings some new things that I wish had been there all the time. Like haptic feedback for the keyboard, which you enable in Settings/Sounds & Haptics. You can now “feel” that you pressed a key. It’s very subtle, unlike the vibration you get from other phones. It feels like the TouchID key, which isn’t a physical key.

I have been playing around with lock screens a lot. A lot more than I care to admit. The photos that look best are those portraits, where iOS can put the foreground in front of the clock. You can also select multiple photos that appear at random. Notifications appear from the bottom, and they are collapsed until you touch them. This again plays very well with the aesthetics of the new lock screen.

Removing the background from photos is another trick that is new to iOS 16. Just tap and hold the subject of any photo, and you can forward the object without background to a new image, or with a message, or to the clipboard. A pixel pushed might me more perfect, but this is certainly good enough for eBay if you don’t want to reveal your apartment, when you just want to sell a guitar.

Two really useful features in one screenshot: you can now switch on the remaining battery percentage in Settings/Battery, and you can find and consolidate duplicate contacts. Hooray!

Talking about duplicates, you can now also remove duplicate photos right from the folders view of your Photos app. You can play it safe and merge only exact copies or go the whole way to eliminate the bad copies.

What is your favorite new feature?

11 thoughts on “What are your favorite iOS 16 features?”

      1. Sorry, das war vielleicht etwas kurz. Du fragst am Ende des Artikels “What is your favorite new feature?”, und meins ist die “Battery Percentage” Anzeige. Die ist bei irgendeinem Update wegoptimiert worden, und ich finde sie nützlich. Freue mich wenn sie wieder zurückkommt 🙂

  1. Wow, the „copy an object out of an image“ function is nice! I wasn’t aware of it after updating and it isn’t very obvious until one knows about it.

  2. I really struggle with the duplicate contact merge feature since I think it hides an underlying design issue. Most of the duplicates I’ve found manually in the past originate from linking your contacts with multiple data sources. Comes in handy if you use the device for both business and personal purposes. Contrary to multi-SIM where you can associate every call/contact with a specific SIM/line/number, you can not easily see or change the backend source associated with each contact. If Apple now deduplicates these – what will that do to the underlying data sources?

  3. Haptisches Tastaturfeedback klappt bei mir nicht (Töne würden funktionieren).
    Kann natürlich sein dass das iPhone 11 das nicht unterstützt … mal sehen wie das 14er reagiert.

  4. My favourite features are the duplicate detection in Photos and the simultaneous use of dictation and keyboard (e.g. in Messages).

  5. Somehow I cannot find the Battery Percentage Settings. Is this not supported on certain iPhones?

    1. Yes, indeed it seems to be only supported on later generations. iOS 16.1 will add the 13 mini and 12 mini, the XR and the iPhone 11.

Comments are closed.