10 New iPhone Features In iOS 13 To Try Out Right Away

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. So whether you got a new iPhone 11 or you are just updating your old iPhone to use iOS 13 here are ten new features of iOS 13 to try out right away. 

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So you know when you get a major new update you want to try out new things. We've got a lot of new things in iOS 13 and more coming soon in iOS 13.1. But for now here are ten little features that you can play around with today on your iPhone. 

First there's Dark Mode. A lot of people are looking forward to having Dark Mode in iOS. To turn it on you can go to Settings and then look for Display & Brightness. Then right at the top there you've got Appearance, Light and Dark and you can switch to Dark Mode. This changes a lot of default apps to Dark Mode and more third party apps are going to be supporting this. You can also set it to Automatic and from the options you can do Sunset to Sunrise or Custom Schedule. Now if you want to be able to turn it On and Off easily you can do that as well. Go to Control Center and then Customize Controls and make sure you have Dark Mode added. So now it will appear in Control Center. Just swipe down from the top right bringing up Control Center and you'll see it there. It's the little circle that's half dark and half bright. You can tap that On or Off.

In the Messages app you can now Share your name and photo with somebody automatically. So instead of relying on them to actually add you to their Contacts and assign a picture you can actually give them that information. When you first go to use Messages after updating you'll be prompted to choose a name and photo. But you can also go and set it up later in Settings. If you choose that just go to Settings and then look for Messages. In there you could Share name and photo. So I can go in here. I can Edit my photo. It's going to pick the one from my Contacts but I could set my first name and my last name and I can enable  Name and Photo Sharing. When they're viewing a conversation that's from you they will have the ability to add this to their Contacts or to replace their Contact information with the one you provide.

Also new in Settings is a Low Data Mode. Go into Cellular, like I just did, then look for Cellular Data Options where before you had roaming and things like that. Now you will have a Low Data Mode which reduces your use of data while you're on cellular networks rather than WiFi.

Now let's jump to the Camera and also the Photos app. Now when you take video you can apply Filters to it. So I'll just do a quick scan on my keyboard here and stop. I can go and view it and if I'm doing this here in the Camera app or in Photos I have the ability to Edit. Now I can use things like Filters on the entire video. So I can Filter the video. I can go into Settings here and I can do all sorts to the Controls that I'm used to doing in the Photos. Now they are available on Video as well.

There's some new gestures for handling text. So if you have text here in Notes, in Mail, whatever you're using to edit text you can now tap and drag to select. It's a little tricky. I'm going to tap, then wait for a second where the word The appears, then I can kind of drag to select it all. Also instead of using the Cut, Copy, and Paste there I can actually select some text and I can pinch in with three fingers, do a three finger pinch-in, and look at the top of the screen. It says Copy. Then I can go and Paste it with three fingers pinching out and you can see it says Paste there. To Undo you can take three fingers and swipe left and it does an Undo. Now you can also Swipe Type which means you can put your finger on the keyboard and swipe around to the different letters to type something. So you can see how there was that little swoosh there on the keyboard. All I did was put my finger down at the beginning of the word and swiped to each letter. You don't have to get it perfect. It kind of has a little bit of error correction there so it gets the idea if you just go near the letter that you need and there's only one word that can match that kind of swipe.

If you're like me you have a ton of Tabs open in Safari on your iPhone at all times because you only see the current tab and as you open up new links and hit links that open up a new tab automatically you just end up with more and more tabs. So you end up with like sixty, a hundred tabs, and you just clear them all out every once in awhile. There's a new feature that you're really going to like. If you go into Settings here and you go down to Safari you have the ability to set Close Tabs to After One Day, After One Week, After One Month. So as tabs get older and you haven't accessed them in awhile then they will automatically close. I'm going to start off with After One Week.

Now it's so annoying that every time you want to change a WiFi network you have to go into the Settings app and then into WiFi and then select a new network. Well now you can do that in Control Center. You swipe down here. You've got a WiFi setting. I can tap and hold WiFi and this menu comes up. Then I can tap and hold WiFi there and I get my list and I can switch all without ever leaving my current app. 

Here's one last one in the Settings. If you go to Settings and then go to Phone you've got a new setting here for Silence Unknown Callers. What happens then is if somebody calls and they're not in your Contacts list you still get the call but it's not going to ring. It's not going to bother you. This is a great way to deal with phone spam. Now it's probably not going to work for people who use their iPhone for business. But for a lot of us we simply don't want to get a phone call from anybody that's not in our contacts list. So at least now we can silence all of those and not be bothered. 

A big new feature in the Maps app is Look Around which is Apple's version of Street View in Goggle Maps. Now it only works in Honolulu, Vegas, and San Francisco right now but Apple is going to be adding tons more cities really quickly. Until then you can go to one of these cities and try it out. So you just go and tap and hold in a spot. It's going to go to the marked location just like before but now you get the Look Around View and you can do exactly as you would expect. You can tap to go down the street. You can pinch-in to see more detail and pinch out. It works great. I can't wait until it's rolled out all over the place so we can use it instead of having to rely on Goggle Maps for this.