iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus: the review

Mashable Senior Tech Correspondent Raymond Wong has a separate review of iOS 10(opens in a new tab), but so much of the experience of using the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus is tied to the update that I can’t ignore it here.

First of all, slide-to-unlock is gone. Instead, iOS 10 asks you to press the non-moving Touch ID button. From the lock screen, sliding the screen to the left opens the camera. It took me a while to get used to this. Register your fingerprint with the phone and you’ll never have to think about this again; just put your finger on the Touch ID button, press once and the iPhone 7 or 7 Plus will unlock.

If you slide your home screen to the right, you’ll see the new widget screen with Spotlight search at the top. Notifications, which pop up on screen and can be revealed with a swipe down from the top, also get this new, richer treatment. At first, I didn’t like this. I missed iOS 9’s more concise look. Eventually, I came to appreciate the extra detail and, sometimes, level of interaction I got from some app notifications. Twitter, for instance, shows me a new follower notification and offers me the ability to “say hello” in Twitter without even opening the app.

Photos also got a bunch of updates, including the new Memories, which is already hard at work giving me collections of my best photos in attractive slideshows that even include music. Memories employs computer vision to analyze each photo to identify the people and objects in them as well as the places where I took them.

Most of the choices Memories makes are good, but some are silly. It should know better than to include screenshots in slideshows. I suspect it needs to learn more about my photo habits before I trust it to refine my photo presentations.

One of the other big iOS 10 highlights is the new Messages. Digital Touch, which was first introduced on the Apple Watch, has made its way to the iPhone. Now I can quickly add photos, videos, heartbeats, taps and even doodles to my messages. Many of the animations, though, are lost when I send them to someone not yet on iOS 10 or on an Android phone. The heartbeat I sent to my wife’s iPhone 5S showed up as still image of a blurry heart. I’m sure this will be a lot more fun when everyone upgrades.