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Pam asked: “I have an iPhone 6 and I keep getting an alert to download iOS 10. I keep getting told by friends that they don’t like it. Can you please give me some advice or a review of what you think of it?”
Pam, you must have been tapping no for a while! iOS 10 has been out since September 2016.
As much as iOS 10 is a major update with plenty of new features, it largely feels evolutionary. It’s not too different from iOS 9.
If you use messages, they were improved over the older version. You can send various flavors of useless little images and stickers and animations, handwriting is built in, it displays links in line, you can play games with your friends within the app.
The phone in general gets better at offering suggestions from the context, offering suggestions for directions, contact information, that kind of thing.
Notifications do give you more options than before, but you’ll miss out on a little bit of that because you don’t have 3D Touch on your iPhone 6, but you’ll still get more options, and a better notification center.
A big selling point is that you can get rid of the built in apps you don’t use
A big selling point is that you can get rid of the built in apps you don’t use. Don’t listen to music? You can delete the app. Prefer Outlook over Apple’s Mail, you can delete Mail.
Most of the major apps have had some kind of update, News is a little different, Mail is a little different, Notes features collaboration now, the Clock app has a new type of alarm dedicated to waking you up and getting you sleep on time, you can now receive calls from VoIP apps like Skype, WhatsApp and others the same way you receive regular phone calls, your phone rings normally with your ringtone as opposed to just getting a notification as you would with a message, Siri can do more things for you like get you an Uber.
Overall, you shouldn’t feel too lost, it’s similar to iOS 9 (so similar in fact that it’s hard to remember what changed without making an effort), and it’s probably worth the upgrade.
Also, you have an iPhone 6. A lot of the genuinely new features of iOS 10 seem to be oriented towards the 6S and 7 with their “3D touch” screens. Having an older phone certainly lowers the urgency to upgrade. There have also been widespread reports, all anecdotal at this time, of iOS 10 causing rapid battery drain. It’s certainly something to look into more carefully.
Here’s the bottom line: You can upgrade to iOS 10 whenever you want, assuming your iPhone has enough free memory. That’s easy, whether you do it now or three months from now. Going BACK to iOS 9 is a problem. So you might want to consider being cautious just for that reason.