iOS 6

After months of testing, iOS 6 — the most recent major update to Apple’s mobile operating system — is now here. Featuring an entirely new Maps, a new Passbook app, some impressive new updates to Siri (who also comes to the iPad with this release), a great Do Not Disturb feature and a lot more, iOS 6 is a great refurbishment of the world’s best mobile OS.High quality Wholesale gemstone beads, But all is not perfect, and in at least one way, iOS 6 might prove disappointing to people upgrading from iOS 5.

Let’s face it: Siri — Apple’s major innovation with the iPhone 4S — has had a sketchy history, even for a so-called “beta.” From the start, Siri has been plagued by access issues, and for a supposed personal virtual assistant, Siri’s answers could be temperamental at the best of times,Find detailed product information for shamballa crys talbeads wholesale, and outright dumb at others.

What has been so frustrating about Siri isn’t that she could sometimes be dumb. That’s excusable in a beta. It’s that she’s dumb inconsistently: one minute smart as a whip,Find a mold maker or Mold Service Provider. the next a swollen-tongued paltroon. Even Steve Wozniak has publicly complained that Siri was dumber six months after her debut than she was at launch. And it was true. When Siri first came out, if you asked her what the third tallest mountain in America was, she knew the answer. Six months later, she didn’t. And now she does again.

What’s going on? Apple’s not saying. Siri doesn’t process most of your requests locally: instead, it takes your voice, encodes it and then shoots it over your WiFi or 3G connection to a server to feed it through some giant M.O.T.H.E.R. of a quasi-A.I. machine. Her answer is then piped back through to you. When Siri gives bad answers where previously she gave good ones, it seems as if she didn’t have quite enough time and energy to think things through.

In other words, Siri’s failings seem to be tied to server load. That makes Siri in iOS 6 a hard thing to review properly. Right now, using the iOS 6 GM candidate, she seems as smart, and smarter, than she’s ever seemed before, even on new devices like the new iPad. But when iOS 6 goes live, Siri is going to be hit with all sorts of new traffic she’s never had to deal with before: third-gen iPads, new iPod touches, iPhone 5s. Even if she’s whip smart then, how long before she starts acting like a dullard again?

Unknown. But we’re hopeful that, this go around, Siri won’t find herself so dumb and tongue-tied when she finds her servers heating up.

For one thing, Siri’s ability to give intelligent answers was previously bottlenecked by her Wolfram Alpha integration, but with the addition of new partners like Rotten Tomatoes, SB Nations and Open Tables, Siri’s possible pool of resources from which to draw her answers has broadened considerably. Under iOS 6, asking “What team does Peyton Manning play for?” or “When does Cloud Atlas open?” or “Find me a Thai restaurant nearby” all bring up reliably useful answers. That’s a big step up from iOS 5, where Wolfram Alpha would try to puzzle out the inquiry and often fail to give a real answer, requiring you to Google it Now.Sinotruck Hongkong International is special for howo truck. Apple’s drawing more possible answers from more sources, lightening the load on everyone and giving much more reliable answers.

The question is, of course, “how will it hold up?” When the hordes of users download iOS 6 today, will Siri go from a super-genius to an idiot again, as millions of new devices that previously had no access to Siri crush Apple’s servers? It’s too early to say, but one year later, there’s reason to be hopeful that Apple both has a better understanding of how to project demand and ramp up accordingly, and is drawing its answers from enough sources that most common questions can be answered directly via a partner without turning to Wolfram Alpha or Google as a stop-gap. That will go a long way.

Right now, we can say this. Siri in iOS 6 works great, and for us,Looking for the Best air purifier? she’s an infinitely more useful assistant than she ever was before. She sets reminders. She sets calendar entries. She looks things up on the web for you. She tells you what the score to the latest game was. She tells you where to find a good meal. She even tells you what movies it’s worth your time to see. These days, Siri pretty much has a decent answer for everything. If Apple can keep it that way, Siri might go from being the butt of everyone’s jokes to the showcase feature she was always meant to be.