Hidden features on iOS 9

Lily Ives, Reporter

Every fall Apple updates their operating system bringing a new design along with new features. Over the years, iOS updates have included major design changes like with iOS 5 and 7 or minor function updates like with iOS 1-4 and 8. This year’s iOS 9 is not the most exciting update but still full of hidden enhancements that you’ll enjoy everyday such as, easier multitasking and productivity improvements, a smarter Siri and new built in apps.

Music feature: With the.update, every time your headphones are plugged in it automatically opens up your music app. Even cooler, it brings you to a song that you’d most likely listen to during that period of the day. No more taking 10 minutes to find the perfect song, iOS 9 already knows what you want to listen to.

Nearby Suggestions: Got a craving? This new feature gives suggestions to nearby areas where you can eat, shop, travel, and even find pet grooming. Now your food affixiation can be solved by a click on the food icon revealing a list of options for different snack categories you have a hankering for.

Traffic Notifications: Now this may be a little weird, but the new operating system can now detect when you enter a vehicle and shoot you a traffic update. It can be really helpful when you’re in a hurry or just wondering what your estimated time of arrival would be. However, it does use data so to turn it off you’d have to go into settings–>location services–>scroll down to frequent locations and toggle it off.

Low power mode: If you need that little bit of battery life to last the rest of the day, you can now turn Low Power Mode on. This saves your battery power by dimming your brightness, and automatically changing some settings to save power by briefly stopping battery hungry animations and features. This allows you to save battery while having all your important applications available. Also, it turns off automatically when reached 80 percent so you don’t have to.

Selfie Organizer: Finally you can organize your selfies more efficiently (especially if you’re a selfie fanatic). When you take pictures using your front camera they automatically get placed in a “selfie folder”, separate from all of your other photos, keeping your gallery more neat and organized. So now, you don’t have to look through your whole gallery to post that selfie .you took last week.

The New Siri: Siri is a lot smarter in iOS 9, she can answer a variety of new questions and queries, plus she can access pictures you want to see from specific dates like, “Show me the photos from last week”. She even gets more comfortable with your music playlist, being able to play a specific artist or hot song from different decades for old music lovers.