iPhone Hidden Features! iOS 15 TIPS & TRICKS

Hey, what's going on guys? Sam here and today we're checking out some new hidden features for your iPhone. This time all new for iOS 15 because Apple just launched this update a few hours ago and while there's a lot of obvious things like some updates in FaceTime and some fresh cards and messages, I always have more fun looking at the deep cuts, the things that Apple didn't tell you about and that I bet you haven't seen before. So if you guys are excited for this one, drop a like down below and of course hit subscribe so you're always staying up to date on the latest Apple news. Now let's go ahead and jump in. First off, I actually just want to begin with a PSA because I think this is really important. The date and time picker is back. That's it. That's all I want to show you. This was gone in iOS 14. I don't know what the crackheads at Apple were snorting the day that they decided to remove it. It's back in iOS 15. All right, now for the actual hidden features. So Apple's talked a lot about the FaceTime upgrades like the ability to do a portrait mode blur now or new mic effects that either isolate your voice or capture literally everything in the room around you. But it's not just for FaceTime actually. It also works in apps like Snapchat. So you can see right now, no effects, no voice modulations or anything, but you can go up here and enable something like portrait mode blur system level and you can see it already updated the camera to have way more blur effects around my body now. So you can get the same like Snapchat blur. If I go off screen here, watch this as I play it back, you can see how much blur was added for something that looks like I'm sort of filming on this camera right here, a DSLR, but you know, it's just your iPhone. Also, you know how in video calls, everybody does that thing where they talk for four minutes and then they're muted the whole time and then the whole group is like, Hey, you're muted. And you're like, Oh, was I muted? And then everybody's like, yeah, you were actually muted. Well, Apple has thought about this and will now tell you if on FaceTime while you're talking and muted so that you can actually unmute right away rather than do your whole soliloquy and then everybody just staring at you. And if you tap on your FaceTime window in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, you reveal a ton of new options, but specifically the ability to change your zoom level on your back camera. So you can finally go from like the standard one X to two X or even ultra wide now to show people a bit more context when you're calling them. Following that, you've got these new focus modes inside of iOS 15 right here and they allow certain notifications or people to contact you when you're in either work mode or sleep mode or even gaming mode, dude. That's a little cringe. I can't believe they actually put that one in here, but Hey, I'll use it. But what if you could set custom home screens and custom apps depending on which mode you were in? Well, Apple has actually enabled that. If you go over to settings and then focus and then tap on work, which I think is by far the most practical. You can set people and apps that can come through, but you can also set a new home screen. You just tap on custom pages right here and you can select what you want to see when you're in this mode. So I actually already have a work mode page set up with things like Google drive, zoom, WhatsApp and my email. You hit done and watch what happens. If you go to here, you'll see the home screen change immediately. And now when you go here, you've got one page. It is only work. You can go out of your phone, go back in and you've got your work functionality right here, which is a great way to focus and it honestly will help you separate your work and life at home balance a little bit easier. All right, next up in Safari, you guys remember how the bar used to be at the top of your screen? Well, Apple's introduced a wild new design where it's at the bottom, but it doesn't have to be this way or vice versa. If you head over to settings and then Safari, scroll down just a little bit, you've got the new options laid out right here. This is the new tab bar where you can swipe left or right to switch tabs or even over to make a new tab like that. Or you can go back to the traditional Safari design where it's one at the very top. This is exactly how Safari has looked since I think iOS 7. Next up, guys, we're going off the grid. This YouTube lifestyle has just become way too much for me, but I still need to set a timer while offline. Well, on iOS 15, you can finally do that without cell service or Wi-Fi connectivity. Siri set a timer for seven minutes and now it actually works. Siri can do that and also do things like launch apps. Open the app store. So while it's kind of useless for a lot of apps because obviously you don't have the internet, you can finally open apps even while being offline. And you'll also notice how fast Siri is offline or offline. There's some new on-device processing. So when you ask Siri like, how's the weather? It's instantaneous. I've never seen anything like this. And while Siri still isn't necessarily smarter than the other assistants, I would argue that she is the fastest now. And I've also noticed huge improvements to dictation, including the fact that it's no longer limited to 60 seconds. So anywhere you want to dictate, whether it's in messages for a long breakup text, not saying I've ever done that, just saying hypothetically, you could do that with iOS 15 for a period of longer than 60 seconds. And I'm also amazed at just how responsive it is. I mean, the dictation is still not perfect, but I mean, if you're really close to your phone and there's not a ton of echo, which is not where I am right now. This feature is phenomenal and it'll help you write papers faster than ever before. I think one of the most useful features in Snapchat is the ability to zoom while you're taking a video. Well, Apple has now allowed you to do that in the iOS 15 camera app, exactly the same. So if you want to actually capture a better video quality than Snapchat, but have the exact same effect as Snapchat, you can even go here and lock it and keep recording. Or you can just start something new. It's called quick take video and zoom in. Look, I'm spying on all these, these people in their cars. They don't even know. Next step. This feature is about to make me act up because there's now drag and drop in iOS 15. You can literally tap and hold on something like you could on a Mac or a PC, leave the app. So this is now on the home screen. I'm still dragging this photo. Then go into something like email and drop the photo in like that. This works for places like Twitter. This works in the messages app, and then you can send an email and type a message to someone just like this with the content that you, you drug and dropped. It's, it's actually really, really cool. And I've seen literally nobody talk about it following that in voice memos. I don't know about you guys, but I use this absolutely constantly. And by the way, this is not my address. All right, you guys, you guys think I'm playing like that or not, but I did record a lot of voice memos here and invoice memos. A lot of the time you can kind of scroll through, you hear me playing guitar, but uh, there's a lot of silence. So Apple's now introduced this new option called skip silence. So when you play this, anytime it detects silence, it's just going to move forward to the next section, which is really handy. If you have some extended length voice memos that you don't feel like manually editing to the T it's like a, it's a really quick super edit that I believe works pretty well. Next up in the weather app. One of the longest running complaints is the fact that there's no radar in here. You have to download a third party app from the app store to get radar. But now in iOS 15, if you guys scroll down, you'll see this one that says temperature right here, which okay, is temperature. You know, that's where I live. It's St. Louis. But if you guys tap right here, you get the option for two more things, including precipitation and air quality. And this is radar. You guys can see if you scroll out the patches of weather just like that. Now obviously a third party app might do a little bit of a better job, but you can see exactly right here that there's a pretty big storm front coming in to St. Louis. And uh, you know, I'm feeling kind of like a weatherman already. Phenomenal. Game changing. Another adjective that you might want to use here. It's absolutely the reason to update to iOS 15. Next up spotlight searches. One of the features on the iPhone I use the most where you can swipe down and then type and search for things. But Apple has now expanded that to two new places, which one is in notification center and the second, which is on the lock screen. You guys can now search for things like Apple right from the lock screen. And then obviously you have to unlock your phone to get there, but I'm pretty sure my neighbor upstairs is actually opening his sawmill. Can we close the sawmill for the rest of the video? Do you guys hear this? Okay, I'll be right back. Moral of the story, you can now get a spotlight search for more places than ever before. And it actually makes finding content a lot faster because you can do it from pretty much all the essential areas. And this one unironically changes everything because in photos, even when you've shot things on an angle, you can now do this, which is select the text and you can look it up or copy it or search the web just like that. Even on small words, like you'd say, oh, that's pretty tiny yet the iOS 15 software knows that and you can just look up that exact word. This is insane. By the way, this is not a screenshot. This is a photo I took like this against my laptop. It is mind blowing. And I've already used this so much. I was 15 also includes a new feature. When you swipe down on a photo, it'll give you more information than ever before about it. So you can see right here, it tells you the exact camera, which was my iPhone 12 pro that I'm holding. It was on the wide camera specifically rather than the ultra wide or the telephoto, the exact millimeter length of the lens. You can even add a location. I mean, it goes to show things as specific as ISO and as like F stop. It's really wild and it's a fun way to get more context about your photos and also just like understand where and how they were taken. And finally, I want to leave you guys with something peaceful. So if you head over to settings, accessibility, and then scroll down to audio visual, there's a new option right here for background sounds and things like white noise or bright noise or dark noise or the ocean. Oh, that's kind of relaxing. I'm not even going to lie. Rain. Oh man, I could fall asleep right now making this video or even stream something as serene as that. Obviously there's not an insane amount of sounds here, but these are now built into the iPhone. So when you do this, they still play. Your iPhone is now a stream. Anyway guys, I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you learned something new. If you did drop a like down below and hit subscribe so you always stay up to date on the latest Apple news. I've been Sam. I'll see you in the next one. Peace.