if you can't wait until iOS 18 hits in the fall, well, you can give yourself a little taste of it now because Apple released the iOS 18 public beta, and beta being the key word here. This is not final; this is a product that can be glitchy, and it can crash, and you won't want this on your main phone. Okay, amazing, but you know what? I did put it on my older iPhone to tinker with it a bit, so let's talk about iOS 18. I want to give you some of my first impressions of the new features to give you a sense of what's in store later this year. I'm Bridget Carey, and this is One More Thing. This early iOS 18 beta is all about personalization. Details of the features were revealed at the Worldwide Developers Conference back in June, but not every feature announced is in the beta release today. It's not Apple intelligence test time; that comes later. I put the public beta on my older iPhone 12 Pro, and in my brief time with the beta, I noticed the Photos app sometimes

abruptly closes on me. So yes, I am very proud of myself for not putting a beta on my main phone. iOS 18 gives you a lot of freedom to make your screen look really cool or absolutely revolting by turning all the icons into a ghastly shade of BL. Also, the icons can now be moved to any spot, and you can decide to have blank spaces with no icons. Doing what you will with your app icons is now your god-given right. It's also my right to judge you for your design decisions. So now in your home screen, you can put a cool photo up there surrounded by app icons, but then that means you probably have fewer apps displayed. It's give and take. You got to Choose Wisely. Now as for these app icons, you can have them exist in different colors like a dark mode, or you can make them all a certain color to match your Motif. Now you can go large and get rid of the app names. This can feel nice on the eyes.

Choosing larger apps is not a sign that your eyes are getting old. We're going to call this streamline style iOS 18. Also gives you a lot of control over the control center. You can place shortcut buttons now in any order your heart desires. You can put up high the things you care about most. And you're going to see some new shortcuts like this translation one. Third-party apps can now make their own control shortcuts. So maybe your favorite app will have a surprise for you. But not every button might be what you wish. Now there are four pages of controls. If you keep scrolling, you're going to see a whole section just for media controls. And then there's another page to go more into smart home controls. It's almost like you don't need the Home app anymore. And we're not talking just simple on/off switches. You can even make shortcuts to specific scenes like mood lighting. And then you get to the page for connectivity. Now I wish this was flipped because I am using this stuff the most.

but hey, I want to go back to the top. The top card that I can customize. And I want you to look at how they changed the shortcut to your Bluetooth connections. There's no direct Bluetooth button. It's hidden inside this larger connectivity box. Now, that is a whole extra tap now to toggle it on and off. Airplane mode, cellular, they all get their own buttons. But I don't see one for poor little Bluetooth. Well, it is beta. Maybe I can keep wishing for that Bluetooth button to show up. So, photos has a new app layout and it'll take a little getting used to. Everything is just rearranged a bit into one big page of content and memories and settings. So, there's no more bottom row of icons. Now, as I show off my photos app, I should point out that my photos are messy. Okay, I take photos and screenshots as reminders for me to do things. I'm a journalist, so I take photos of products for stories. I'm a mom, so I'm going to take a zillion photos of my

Kids In Action just to find the right candid shot. I'm never going to delete anything. Yeah, I do have a clutter problem, but that's okay because there are a lot of ways to find what you need. When the app opens, you're just going to pull down a little bit to see all your recent photos. There's a bottom arrow button down here that you click to narrow your photos down to different filters. Like you can only show favorites that are also videos. Or if you want, over here in view options, I can take out all of the screenshots. But if you scroll down, you're going to see more ways to customize various groupings and collections that are highlighted for a trip down memory lane. And you can customize exactly what kind of collections you want highlighted up high. But keep scrolling and you get more ways to find your stuff. In utilities, there are more options that can be handy along with recently deleted and duplicates. You can now expand this and see options to just pull up receipts, handwriting, illustrations, or QR codes. I can also

find my QR codes. If I use a search bar and type in the word tickets. Little trick there. There are many ways to filter your photos in multiple places, so give yourself a little time to play around. Here, there is a lot more I'm going to keep diving into as time goes by. It's hard to test everything, like the silly side of iMessage when it's in beta. My friends in the real world don't have iOS 18 and male categorization. Yeah, it isn't here yet to try, and I still want to test the ability to record a phone call and have the transcription sent right into notes. Safari has updates too. It can give little summaries of the article that you're reading. I turned it on. I didn't get any summaries on most stories I clicked on, but I did see a summary on a really old set story for some reason. That's beta, baby. The calculator now has this neat thing where you can write out a problem with your finger in Math Notes and get an answer. You just got to click this button.

switch to math notes, and then you click the drawing tool, and you then scribble out a problem. It solves it and then saves it to your notes app. It's kind of fun to see how it reads your terrible penmanship or finger mhip overall. You are probably better off waiting a bit longer to download it, but if you really want to try stuff out early, you can sign up online for the Apple beta software program. Once you do, it should show up in your device as an option to upgrade to the beta in the same place that you usually see operating system updates. There are also betas available for the Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch. In the meantime, I will just be living the two iPhone life, one on iOS 18 and one on 17, such as the tech reporter way. But if you're testing it out, tell me what you think so far. Have you messed with the new passwords app? And also let me know what you're interested in as more beta updates roll out. Maybe this customization tool will get me to

Finally cleaned up my apps. Yeah, I feel like I have chores now. Thanks for watching. I'll catch you next week.

iOS 18 Hands-On: Prepare for a Lot of Changes

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