iOS 26 is Full of Surprise Features — Here Are the Best Ones

0:00 So everyone, we've had iOS 26 on the 16 Pro Max for a little over a week now. And in that time, of course, we've played with the big headlining features like the liquid glass UI change, the new home screen, the new lock screen. But I wanted to talk about all the different features that Apple did not mention because with every major update, they add hundreds of new features. And I've been going to every nook and corner and cranny of iOS 26 to see what's actually useful and something that maybe Apple just didn't really tell us about that not people are aware of. So, without further ado, let's talk about the best hidden iOS 26 features currently in beta 1. Let's get into it. So, I thought the easiest way to kind of show this off is just to pull up the iPhone right here next to me and show you guys exactly what I'm going to be

0:45 dealing with when it comes to these new features. So, the first one has to do with battery, battery life, and just a overhaul in the settings menu for the battery. Okay. So, if we go into our settings and go down to battery, you see that we have a brand new settings menu for iOS 26 and everything that comes with that. So, you have the bar on top. You have this recommendation here, which that's been around before, but then you have this brand new UI, which I think is very usable. It's very easy to read and very understandable. And it compares what you did previous days. So, you can see right here, if we tap into one of these, and you can actually go into each individual day to see how much percentage you use of your battery on a certain application. You can also go into here and see your battery health. So, you can see that I'm at 97% battery health, which honestly isn't bad for a year-long iPhone. Then you have your charging limits over here. So, the functionality might not be super new, but it is a brand new overhaul of the

1:30 battery life. And one of the coolest features is that if you do plug your phone in while it's charging and in locked mode, which I'll show on the screen right now, it'll actually give you an estimated time of getting to 80% battery. So, if you're at 50% and you're trying to get to 80%, it'll let you know like, hey, you have 22 minutes left of charging to get to 80%. which that was kind of teased in some of the leaks and rumors and they did implement it but just probably not as cool as what people thought it was going to be. Now this next one and a lot of these features are going to be kind of small nuance features that are just better for quality of life overall. These aren't big headliners. But the next one I do want to bring up is going to be in the clock. So if you go into your clock and go into alarms, if you press edit or add a new alarm. So let's add a new one here. You now have a new option which is called snooze duration. by default for the last I don't know 18 years since

2:16 Apple's been using alarm since 2007 the snooze duration has been nine minutes and again I know that I snooze all the time for better or for worse but now you can go into your snooze duration down here and you can snooze between 1 minute if you want to make sure that you wake up because you can snooze it and then every other minute it'll turn on or you can go as far as 15 minutes when it comes to the snooze duration. So, I guess at 15 minute mark, Apple thought just turn off your alarm or go to a different alarm at that point. But, it's good to know that they added snooze duration in the alarm in the clock app. And also, a quick little tidbit here, Apple did open up an alarm API for those people that are creating applications. Whereas before, the only alarm clock that could be used with Apple was through the clock app. Now, you can probably see some thirdparty alarm clock apps or some kind of features alongside of that because Apple did open that

3:02 other third party developers. the more you know. The next feature, which again goes into that quality of life kind of statement, is going to be with your AirPods. I've had an abundance of situations where if I use my AirPods and maybe I turn on another application or turn on another piece of hardware that's in the Apple ecosystem, my AirPods will kind of switch up or maybe it'll start to play out loud or something like that. Now, we can actually fix that feature in the settings. So, if we go into general, go into AirPlay and continuity. Right here in the middle, you have your keep audio and headphones. So, when using AirPods or other connected headphones, keep audio in headphones when other playback devices like cars and speakers connect to your iPhone. So, this does happen a decent amount. So, if I get into my car and I have my headphones in and I don't really want to get them away from the headphones instead of connecting directly to the car, it'll still Bluetooth connect. So, my calls will come in, but the actual audio will

3:49 still remain in my headphones if I do have that checkbox toggled on. So, another nice little quality of life feature. The next new feature isn't really a feature, but more so of an add-on. So, if we go into our control center, and if you don't have this little ear kind of icon down here, make sure to put that in by adding it via, you know, your regular control center add-ons. But if you hold down here, you actually get background sounds. Now, background sounds have been around for a little while now, but they added so many more. I think before we only had like six or seven. Now, we have, I believe, 20 different ones. So, if you are into ambient noise and background sounds, you know, get a bunch of new ones like fire and babble and steam and airplane and boat. I love the UI, by the way, how it's a little bit bouncy, but the background sounds, we added a bunch of new ones with iOS 26. Now, this next one

4:34 has to do with screen capture and screen grabs and screenshots. Leave a comment down below what you call it, but the first I'm going to do is go into settings and show you that we have a brand new main category for screen captures. If we tap in here, you do have the ability to actually change up some of the settings when it comes to screen captures. So, you have your full screen previews, automatic visual lookup, which I like to turn off, which we'll touch on in a second. CarPlay screenshots. So, that means if you are plugged in either with hardware or if you're wirelessly connected to CarPlay, it'll actually take a screenshot of the CarPlay screen as well, similar to how you would get a screenshot if you are with an extended monitor via the iPad. And then you have the ability to get high quality screenshots by going to HDR. That's going to take up more space. So, I wouldn't recommend it if you take a lot of screenshots, but that is an option. But now for instance, if I go into uh let's go take a screenshot of a 9to5 Mac

5:21 article. So here we have a 9 to5 Mac article. Let's take a screenshot. The new screenshot UI is beautiful. I love the new screenshot UI. It's very useful, very easy to use. You can go with the screen, the full page, which is some of the normal stuff that we've had. But now on the bottom, you have your visual intelligence options. And on top of that, it's going to smartly recommend what it's going to ask. So you can see that we have options down here to summarize, you can ask, and you can image search. So, if I press summarize, it's going to summarize the text that's on the screenshot itself, which is great to see. And this is going to work with a bunch of different screenshots in a bunch of different instances. Maybe, for instance, you're scrolling through Safari or maybe Instagram. You take a screenshot of a product and you can do the image search. You can also ask, you know, Siri and Apple Intelligence about what you're looking at. So, the new screenshot UI for me has been amazing. I absolutely love it. And then one thing

6:07 to note here is if you press the X on the top left, it'll X out and delete that screenshot. Whereas before, if you used to press up there, it would give you the option to save it or delete it. You actually have to press this check mark on the top right in order to actually get your options to save it, save to files, save quicknote, copy and delete, and then delete screenshot. And then, of course, you have your share options up here, which has an also a nice new UI. So, I do love the new screenshot UI and the new screen capture settings. Those are awesome. The next one has to do with the camera. and leave a comment down below if you've been in this situation before, especially if you have older parents or maybe grandparents where they go to your their camera, try to take a picture, and it's super foggy all because they just haven't cleaned off their camera lens. That can now be fixed and at least alerted. So, if we go into our settings, go back to where the camera is. So, if we go into the camera,

6:54 and then if you scroll all the way down, you now have the lens cleaning hints. So, display suggestion when the camera lens should be cleaned to improve image quality. So, if the camera does recognize that there's maybe a little bit of lens blur or if there is just overall blur or smudge on the lenses, it'll alert the person to, hey, clean off your lens so it's easier for you to actually take a crispy picture and it's not this fuzzy mess that most people are seeing nowadays. So, this next one has to be one of my favorite ones and one of the most impressive ones, and it's going to be in the photos application, and it has to be spatial photos. Now, this works with pretty much anything, whether it's a new photo, a photo that you took in portrait mode, an old photo from years and years ago, as long as it has a relatively obvious subject and a good background. You can go into the photo and then on the top right hand corner, right below the ellipses, the three dots, you have this new small button.

7:41 So, if as long as it has that small button, you can tap on it. You get this cool kind of rainbow effect that shows up. It's going to kind of crop in a little bit on the image. And now you can move the image around and you can get this spatial photo effect where the image stays kind of centered and you kind of peek around and see what's going on with the image itself. I think this is such a cool kind of feature. Again, this is just something to kind of show off and some people categorize it as gimmicky, but it really brings photos to life. And it's amazing what they've been able to do on just a 2D field here with a regular iPhone because of course this originally came out with the Vision Pro last year and now the fact that it's coming to iOS 26 and iPad OS 26, I think is so fun. And also, these same images can be used on your lock screen and they will be active and live and be able to have that effect when you move your phone around even when it is locked. I

8:27 think this is a very cool kind of flex your muscles type of feature that Apple wanted to include on all iPhones. And now to round off some of my favorite features here, if we go into our control center again, you might notice that we do have a new system control setting. So whenever you have something plugged in, whether it is a new microphone or something like that when it comes to auxiliary control, you can tap on here and get a much better kind of management of any external accessories. So you go in here, you have your microphone. So if I tap on here, you'll have the ability to change which microphone you have plugged in. So, if I have a physical microphone plugged in via USBC or even wirelessly, you can manage it from there. And then you have the ability to go from automatic to standard to voice isolation and even have a wide spectrum. So, it gives you a lot more control and you're no longer guessing if you do plug in an external mic. I cannot tell you

9:13 the amount of times that I plugged in this mic right here into an iPhone and just had to cross my fingers and hope that it was recognized as a microphone and then it would work even when I was video recording. Now you can just go into your settings when you plug in and manage which microphone you want used at all times and then you don't have to worry about that guessing game in the, you know, crossing your fingers to make sure that that mic is being recognized. And then on top of that, like I mentioned, you are able to then change it up when it comes to sound quality by giving you more voice isolation or wide spectrum. A great little added feature that a lot of people will be enjoying. And then next up, we have an addition to Math Notes. So Math Notes came with iPad OS 18 and honestly it came down to iOS 18 as well. It was something that was built into the notes application. One cool thing about it is that not only were you able to kind of be able to solve equations and things like that,

9:59 but also you were able to graph anything in real time from a 2D standpoint. Now they've added a 3D component to this. So for instance, if I go in here, I'm going to paste this formula that I have from before. You can see that all three variables are highlighted because they're being recognized as variables. And then if I select all, press this little arrow, scroll all the way down, it'll insert 3D graph. I can insert it. And then this thing is magical. I wish I absolutely wish that this was around when I was still in high school and in college. A 3D render of a graph in real time that you can move around and then manipulate as you see fit. So if I add, let's say, if I go in here and add a two in here, it'll change up the graph as well. So again, this is happening in real time. It's rendering in real time. And this is super valuable. And like I

10:45 said, it's not only just the graphing, but you can actually set up these three variables to have certain values and solve for them. So, if you have math problems or word problems that people need to kind of manipulate to figure out what the ultimate variable is, math notes inside of the notes application can help you. Obviously, this works a little bit better on the iPad with the Apple Pencil, but the fact that it's also available on the iPhone is something that I absolutely love. So, definitely check out the Math Notes in the Notes application on your iPhone with iOS 26. So, everyone, that will just about do it for this video. Like you saw, there's an abundance of new features and we're still learning more and more every single day. So, leave a few comments down below of some of your favorite features that you've either heard of or that you've already tried because you do have beta 1 installed on one of your devices. But for me, the sleeper major feature that I like the most has to be the new screenshot because there's a lot more that you can

11:31 do with it and it's going to continue to grow over time. But that'll do it for this video everybody. If you made it to the end, definitely leave a little dolphin in the comments down below so I know you made it to the end. And if you guys want to watch more iOS and iPad OS 26 content, click on one of these videos right here. Until next time, I'm Fernando. Peace everyone. [Music]