Jony Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of Design says ““There is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity, in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation—it’s about bringing order to complexity. iOS 7 is a clear representation of these goals. It has a whole new structure that is coherent and applied across the entire system.”

While the icon driven interface will be vaguely similar (can’t risk alienating the users) it has been redesigned to take better advantage of the screen space and has sharper text.

Basic information is now on Apples site here.  

Control Centre for quick access to Flight Mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Do Not Disturb, screen brightness, pause or play a song, jump to the next track and stream your music with AirPlay. Control Center also gives you instant access to apps such as Clock, Camera, Calculator and the Flashlight.

Notification Centre is now available from the lock screen including a ‘Today screen’.

Multitasking - underneath iOS 7 handles multitasking better which is important to keep other apps updated in the background – push updates.

AirDrop allows users to share content with people nearby and use peer to peer (phone to phone transfers).

Camera apps have feature filters (real time photo effects) and a new square photo option (Instagram style) – now you can take video, photo (widescreen), square and panorama. Photos can be organised by Moments (based on time and location) and iCloud Photo sharing removes the need to use third party photo sharing services.

Safari has a new user interface and has full screen browsing. iCloud Keychain stores passwords and credit card information in the cloud and auto-fills forms.

Siri gets new male and female voices, includes Twitter and Wikipedia integration and Bing Web Search.

iTunes Radio is a free advertising driven personalised radio experience (expected to start in Q3 2013) and you can create genre focused radio stations. It will work on all Apple devices.

Additional new iOS 7 features include:
• a new Find My iPhone Activation Lock feature that requires your Apple ID and password before you can turn off Find My iPhone, erase data or re-activate a device after it’s been remotely erased;
• Night Mode in Maps that responds to ambient light when you use it in the dark;
• FaceTime® audio for high quality calls over a data network;
• Notification sync, so when you dismiss a notification on one device it is dismissed on all of your devices;
• Phone, FaceTime and Messages blocking to prevent specific people from being able to contact you;
• Tencent Weibo support for users in China, a Chinese-English bilingual dictionary, and improved Chinese input including handwriting recognition for multiple Chinese characters;
• the ability for businesses to more efficiently deploy and manage iPhones and iPads; and
• enhanced in-car integration, bringing an Apple designed experience into the car for the first time.

iOS 7 will be available as a free software update for iPhone 4 and 5 in a about three months (US fall) and later for iPad 2, iPad mini and iPod Touch (fifth generation only). Some features will not be available on all products.

Opinion

Evolutionary, not revolutionary but welcome changes and additions to this OS. Most will comment on the new look – crisp, clean, straightforward and it already runs on 600 million devices so changes need to be carefully done.