After iOS 6 hit the Developer Center on Monday, its new features began to come out. Apple n Apps found a new feature today that involves Apple’s iTunes Match, which launched last November as a way to scan and match tracks in users’ iTunes library to all of their devices. One of the downfalls of iTunes Match was its absence of streaming music. Songs had to be downloaded and could not be played from the cloud. With iOS 6, however, songs stored on iTunes Match can be streamed. This leaves out any need to download songs to your device. Since iTunes Match is $24.99 a year, Apple should have always included this feature. Perhaps this will encourage some to ditch Spotify and others, which cost roughly $10 a month. Do not be mistaken, though. You still have to purchase the music to stream it.
Another small change came to Siri that makes her pretty social:
Apple’s iOS 6 seems to include many small, but useful, changes. For instance, Siri has become a lot more social. Users can now tweet and share a Facebook status update from the personal voice assistant. The social prompts include: “Post to Facebook,” “Post to Twitter,” and simply, “Tweet.” There is also a spot in Notification Center where users can “Tap to Tweet.”
So when will you be able to get your itching fingers onto iOS 6? Well, if you are paying for Apple’s iOS Developer Program, you can grab it today from the Developer Center, but you will have to wait until the fall if you are just the average iOS fanatic.
Developers: So far I have been very impressed by how smooth iOS 6 operates— considering it is beta preview 1. Other developer previews, namely iOS 5, were very choppy in the early stages. For those of you who played with iOS 6, what do you think?
Check out our hands-on!
Update: As many readers pointed out, the notification sync has been present since iOS 5.
