If that headline sounds like a negative way to end this review, rest assured that it's not.

A user experience first, and everything else second

Suffice to say, 10 brings a lot of welcome changes. Maps now takes reservations, and has seen a significant redesign besides. These features seem small, but they're carefully crafted as part of an update to a larger 'mega-app' – to iOS itself. And you can send hidden images or messages, to be revealed with a swipe. You can send your messages in various styles of speech bubbles. The same rounded edges you see throughout the interface are a part of Messages.

Let's take the bubbles mentioned above as an example. By making their first-party apps worth using on their own, and updating them significantly through core changes to iOS itself, Apple creates a cohesive, quality-assured experience. One area where Apple has always excelled in its user interface. The changes Apple has made are modest, yet probably necessary. In other words, this is the same iOS as before, but much improved. This means that ultimately, developers are free to make even better apps that take advantage of modern Apple hardware. Most of the devices not usable with 10 are based on an older 'A5X' CPU architecture. The iPhone 4S and iPad 2 are both incompatible, however, as are the iPad mini and touch.

Notably, iOS10 is compatible with almost every Apple iPhone or iPad device released after 2012. Many of these ideas aren't unheard of, but they're new to iOS, and welcome improvements. Notifications are the same as ever, save for the addition of 'rich notifications' – images and video that provide more information. 'Slide to Unlock' is now 'Press to Unlock' – a move that goes hand-in-hand with Apple's growing fondness for touch-based security, and that matches up well with the other modernization efforts you'll find in iOS10.įor example, the edges of things are rounded, more like bubbles than blocks, so although they contain the same information, it's often easier to read a large amount of information, with less screen space being wasted. The first time a returning user boots up iOS10, they'll probably be surprised.

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