iOS 9 Release Set for Fall with Many New Features & Improvements

Apple has announced iOS 9 for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The update aims to refine the iOS experience from the ground up, and is said to make the entire operating system smarter, and faster.

With significant improvements to Siri, Spotlight, smart reminders, Apple Pay, Mail, Notes, Maps, the keyboard, and all new multitasking capabilities, iOS 9 should be a great update for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users.

iOS 9 also includes a variety of features aimed at anticipating what you do or want to do with your device, based upon your location, the time of day, what app is currently open, or what network you’re connected to.

You’ll find some minor user interface changes and enhancements as well, including a revised system font that looks like a variation of San Francisco.

iPhone and iPad users will also find a redesigned keyboard in iOS 9, complete with a variety of shortcuts for actions like copy and pasting, bold and italicize text, and there’s even a new feature that turns the virtual keyboard into a trackpad to help highlight things on screen.

The iPad gains some major features to enhance multitasking, including split-screen views, an all new application switcher, and an interesting picture-in-picture video player that allows a movie or video stream to hover over anything on screen.

Bundled with iOS 9 is a new application called “News”, which is a bit like a magazine app, and updates live by aggregating articles from many popular news sources, ranging from The New York Times to ESPN.

iOS 9 will be available or developers now, a public beta will be available starting in July, and released to the general public in the fall. The update itself will be considerably slimmer than prior updates, weighing in at around 1.4GB.

Supported devices for iOS 9 include all hardware which is capable of running iOS 8, though some features require more modern devices.

Pictures and screen shots of iOS 9 are shown here, courtesy of the Apple Livestream from WWDC 2015:

Separately, Apple announced that OS X El Capitan will be released this fall as well, with a similar focus on performance.