The best hidden new features in iOS 9!

Apple's iOS 9 has finally arrived near you. A fresh version of iOS 9 features you might not have discovered
yet — or ones that you'll find surprisingly useful.

   

Searchable Settings

The settings menu on iOS has always been a chore to navigate, but with iOS 9 you finally won't have to suffer through three, four, or five taps just to do something simple like manage your location services. One quick swipe down from the top of the settings menu lets you search for any one of the myriad settings that are typically buried, meaning you can get back to texting or scrolling through Twitter faster than ever.

  

Low Power Mode

 

When your battery is hovering around 20%, iOS will ask you if you want to enable “Low Power Mode”. Once toggled, it’ll disable mail fetch, background app refresh, automatic downloads, and a few other things that might help you squeeze some extra time out of your battery. Once you plug it back in and have charged it a bit, low power mode will disable itself.

You can also turn this setting on manually under Settings > Battery.

Image Markup

Want to point directly at something in image you’re attaching? Just doodle it right on the photo. Attach the photo to the email (hold your finger in the body of the email for a second, release, hit the right arrow button, then tap “Insert Photo or Video” and pick your image). Once it’s in place, do another long tap on the image itself, then release. An option labeled “Markup” should appear; tap that, and doodle away.

Convert Website to PDF in Safari

Need to save a website to a PDF for some reason? You can! 

It’s a bit obfuscated, but there’s a button for it in iOS 9’s build of Safari. Bring up the share sheet, then scroll the middle section over a bit until you see “Save PDF to iBooks”. Tap that, and voila! You can then share this PDF via email via the iBooks app.

Math In the Search Bar

 

Bonus slide!

From your homescreen, pull down (or swipe to the left most screen) to bring up the search page. Tap the search bar. It can now do basic math! It’s not a fully featured graphing calculator or anything, but it’s an easy, app-free way to calculate tips or split bills in a pinch.

Attach Any Type of File To An Email

You can now attach any type of file (as opposed to just images). By default, it’ll pull files from the iCloud Drive app — but you can also hook it into things like Dropbox and other third party apps by tapping the “Locations” button in the upper left.

Detailed Battery Usage

Sometimes the apps that eat your battery the most are the ones you actually see the least. iOS has long been able to tell you how much battery each app was guilty of eating, but now it provides an extra bit of information: the amount of time you were actually looking at it, compared to how much time it spent just devouring juice in the background. To expose the new info, go to Settings > Battery, then tap the clock icon at the top of the app list.

Headphone smarts 

Plug your favorite pair of headphones or earbuds in, and you’ll notice a new icon at the lower left of your iPhone / iPad lock screen. iOS 9 now understands that the presence of headphones probably means you want to listen to music, so it’ll automatically suggest the app you’ve used most recently. And best of all, no one’s forcing Apple Music on you; this also works for Spotify and other music services.

Add a Find my Friends widget

Find My Friends isn’t a new app but it’s now a stock app that appears on your iOS device whether you like it or not. It also gains a Notification Center widget with iOS 9, so you can see where all your pals are right from the Today page (drag down from the Home screen and tap Edit to set this up).

Call up Siri from anywhere

“Hey Siri!” is the new “OK Google!” now iOS 9 is here. Previously the voice shortcut only worked when your iPhone was charging, but you can enable it anywhere via Siri under General in the Settings app. It only works on the latest iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus handsets though, unfortunately.

Veiw all your selfies or screenshots at once

If you head into Photos, you'll find two new sections: selfies and screenshots. That selfies folder will probably be a lot of fun to browse through, but it's the screenshots section that's going to be most important for the tech obsessives. No longer will you have to hunt through your entire photo stream to find and delete accidental or old screenshots. Just pop in, swipe across all of them — another new photos feature — and delete. No more mess.