More New Features - iOS 14.4 Beta 1

 Hi, everyone.

iOS 14.4 beta one has been out for one or two days depending on whether or not you’re using the developer version or the public beta version. And it’s not currently available to the public. So that will be later on. But I wanted to talk about a couple of questions. People have asked me about this update and then also go over some new features. Now in my initial video of iOS 14.4, there really wasn’t anything new that we could find except for one feature I knew about, but didn’t mention because I wasn’t able to show it to you. 

Now I am. And I figured that out and wanted to share it with you in a moment. But the first thing is, people are asking me every day is the 5g dual SIM option working yet. And what they mean by that is if you use an iPhone with 5g, which means an iPhone 12 Promax and iPhone 12 pro iPhone 12, or iPhone 12 mini, you can use 5g. If you have it supported by your carrier and in your area.

However, if you’re using it, you’ll need to use your regular SIM card along with your ECM. And they’re currently not working together. So you can’t use 5g at the same time. you can use 5g and 4g on an equivalent time, but not dual 5g. And Apple apparently has said, they’re going to fix this with a software update, but so far it’s not in this beta. Now, the next thing is, there’s a new feature in accessibility. So if we go to settings and then we scroll down to accessibility, and then we go to voiceover under voiceover there’s rotor actions, under rotor actions, there’s a new option for direct touch apps. If I tap on this, I have access to all sorts of apps. So you could just pick the app store or the Apple store. And if you’re using voiceover and rotor actions, you’ll be able to use this now.

And before you could play a song and just tap the home pod mini, and it would transfer the music, however, there’s a feature where you can just get near it and it will transfer. And that’s something that Apple showed off in its initial sort of videos of this. Now I have a song selected and as you can see here already, it says home pod mini, right home pod. And it says starting now, and now, as I get closer to the home pod, it will actually start to vibrate the phone more and more.

And then the light comes up brighter on the home pod mini and it jumps. And so the music jumps your home pod from your iPhone to your home pod mini. And it just sort of feels magical as it jumps. There’s sort of a haptic feedback where it jiggles the phone and then goes here and then goes away and starts playing. So it’s kind of interesting.

They’ve done that and you can see it says starting now. So again, I can just go closer and it’ll start playing if I want it to do that. And so I’ll stop it and were back to normal. So it’s a kind of a neat feature that they’ve added and it works with any home pod mini as you get close to it. It’s just sort of interesting that they’ve made it kind of simple. 

If I bring it back, you’ll see that it all of a sudden shows up on my phone. If I bring it away, it goes away. So again, and then the light gets brighter as I get closer until it jumps. So it’s just really interesting how that works and it’s kind of a neat feeling on the phone as well. So I’m glad to see they’ve done that. And it will be in 14.4 when its available to the public. Now, when you go into settings, there’s something else that’s new as well.

So under settings, If you scroll down and also you tap on passwords and it seems on your face or your touch ID to recognize who it is so that you can get into your passwords, you’ll be presented with a little icon that says passwords are locked and it’ll pop up face ID in front of it. And then it will unlock and show you the password. So that little icon is new. I wasn’t able to find it on 14.3. So that shows up now, additionally, there’s a new option in shortcuts as well. Now with 14.3, they added back the ability to create or set a wallpaper using a shortcut.

However, there’s now the option. If you go to show more after you have it set to actually go to perspective zoom, and what that means is it gives you sort of that parallax effect. As you tilt the phone, you can see behind the icons. So now you have perspective zoom as an option. So you add your photo where its grabbing the photo from, with the wallpaper and then you go to wallpaper and you can set the lock screen or the home screen. 

And then again, you can show a preview and then have perspective zoom on or off if you don’t want it, if you have shown preview on the option disappears. So turn off show preview, and then there’s perspective zoom. So it’s a nice little option. That’s there. Now, in addition to these features, some people have asked, has it fixed the overview or heating problems or the phone warming up?

And it seems it’s like quite a few people are saying that, yes, it will perform really well, but not get as hot with this update. So a lot of people are saying it’s just not as warm as it was before. So that’s a great thing. So I know a lot of people get concerned about that. The phones getting too hot, sometimes even too hot to hang on to now, it seems to be fixed with 14.4 beta one. Now, as far as performance while I still do have that stuff, or sometimes when I go into an app and close it, it will sort of jitter away or have a frame rate drop. 

And so this is something they need to fix, which I’m sure they’ll fix with future updates as well. Battery has been good for the past couple of days, given that I just installed an update. So I’ll show you here, but I wouldn’t really count on this as it usually takes a few days to measure that for sure. But you can see yesterday.

I only had a couple hours of screen on time and six hours and 56 minutes of screen off time and used about percent of my battery with all of that usage. It’s actually pretty good. But again, it’s doing a lot in the background after you install an initial update. So give it a few days to actually stabilize. Now, of course, we’re waiting for beta two, which will probably not be until January based on what we’ve seen with the previous release. 

So 14 point or 13.4 last year. So based off what Apple did last year with their releases, technically we should see a break between now and January and then they’ll release beta two. Now they could change that, of course. And hopefully they get out more updates before the end of the year. But with the holiday being right around the corner, we probably won’t see anything until after the beginning of next year.

And so that’s it for those new features. Hopefully I can find more. And if I do, of course, I’ll share those in an additional follow-up look for my follow-up of 14.3 with all the community poll this coming weekend. If you’d like to get your hands on this wallpaper,