Top 5 additions in the recently released iOS 9.2 Update for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

At the time of writing this, Apple has released the iOS 9.2 Update for all iOS devices that support it. And it comes with a slew of fixes, improvements, and new additions to iOS 9. Here's the Top Five most interesting ones.

1. New Top Stories section in News

   Available to English speaking countries, the News App features the most relevant stories for your neck of the woods. Now in iOS 9.2 you get a section entirely devoted to the Top News items, whatever those may be. 10 to 1, Donald Trump is there in some form or another.

2. 3D Touch for iBooks.

   For iBooks users on iPhones 6s and 6s Plus, you can now peek and pop the book's table of contents for a quick preview of the relevant section. As well as your Notes, Bookmarks, and search results. This sounds useful in principle, but lets see how useful it really is in practice to get quick glances at these things.

3. Apple Music Improvements

   Apple Music has received a ton of criticism over its lacking set of features. Specially when it came to playlists. With iOS 9.2 You can now more easily manage your playlists. Apple has added the ability to create a Playlist directly on your iOS device from a single song via the Add Song to Playlist option. Previously you were limited to existing Playlists, and would have to go out to the Playlist section of the music App to create one before adding songs to it. Apple also added the ability to download an entire playlist for offline listening with single tap, instead having to download each song individually.

   Apple has also added a new indicator for downloaded songs in My Music and Playlists so you know which ones are on your device and which ones are not.

   Apple added a few other less relevant features to the Music App, but by far Apple Music got the most attention this time around.

4. Mail Drop in Mail

   Previously limited to Mac and PC, Mail Drop has now been made available on iOS devices. Basically it lets you upload larger attachments, that would otherwise go over normal E-Mail server attachment limits, to iCloud, and share them with your email recipients instead. This is specially handy when trying to send things like videos taken directly on the iPhone.

5. Camera USB Adapter support for iPhones

   Probably the most requested feature ever, since it was only available for iPad. With iOS 9.2 Apple has now made it possible to connect your camera to your iPhone using the USB camera adapter, and transfer photos onto the iPhone directly.

   This is probably the most useful new feature since many people now rely solely on their iPhones and being able to transfer photos to the iPhone from a digital camera has always been a necessity for many.

Useful Links

Lightning to USB Camera Adapter

About Mail Drop

About 3D Touch on iPhone 6s and 6s Plus

Apple Music vs iTunes Match

Let's get ready to ruuuumble!!!!.

With Apple's new music service now available on all promised platforms, including Andriod Devices, lets take a quick look at what it does and compare it to iTunes Match.

iTunes Match

iTunes Match is a $24.99 per year service that will upload your music library to Apple's servers, and make it available to all your devices directly. It will take a max of 25,000 songs, that's twenty five thousand songs. Its been recently updated to take up to 100,000 songs.

The service will attempt to match any song in your computer's iTunes library to a song in the iTunes Store catalog. It if finds a match that song can then be played on any device you own that is using the same Apple ID. Your matched songs will be replaced with the high quality versions of the songs in the iTunes Store catalog. Any song it cannot match will be uploaded to Apple's servers as is, and will be offered to your devices for streaming and download as they were originally in your library.

The Central storage option in Apple's servers allows instant access to stream and download form any Apple device using the same Apple ID for iCloud, and the iTunes Store. This can come in handy, if you have several devices, and do not want to spend a lot of time syncing your library to each of them.

Matched songs are DRM free. Which means you can download the higher quality versions and burn them to CD, or copy them to another computer / device without any problems.

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Apple Music

On the surface the service may seem very much the same as iTunes Match, but there are some key differences to be aware of.

Apple Music costs $9.99 a month for single user. or $14.99 a month for Family Membership. This means any member of a Family Sharing group can have access to it, unlike iTunes Match which is a single user service, and cannot be shared.

Like iTunes Match Apple Music will match any song in your library to a song in the iTunes Store Catalog, and will upload as is whatever it cannot match. It will make all your songs available to all your devices using the same Apple ID for streaming and download in as high quality as it can just like iTunes Match would. Up to here, Apple Music appears to be just a more expensive option to iTunes Match.

But Apple Music does a bit more than that. With the $9.99 monthly fee comes access to the entirety of the iTunes Store music Catalog for streaming and offline play back. That is you can play anything in the store for free in its entirety while you remain subscribed to the service. That is literally access to millions of songs and albums.

You also get specially curated lists of songs tailored to your tastes, as well as access to artists and albums features not available otherwise.

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Differences

While iTunes Match lacks access to the entire iTunes Store Catalog, its also noticeably cheaper. $7.91 cheaper to be precise, per month. But as said you don't get access to the iTunes store catalog. This may or may not be important to you. But it needs to pointed out.

The other major difference is iTunes Match offers DRM free versions of your matched tracks. Which means you can use these anywhere you want to. Burn to a CD, copy to a USB drive sync to non Wi-Fi iPods etc.. Apple Music on the other hand will offer DRM protected tracks, which means they will only work with authorized devices, and ones that can support the Apple ID authentication. So no copying to USB device or burning to a CD, and no syncing directly form a computer to anything. All music syncing must be done over the internet to validate the subscription to the service. This Applies to all your tracks: matched and uploaded. They all become DRM protected.

This makes Apple Music simultaneously more restricted, but with much more content to offer than iTunes Match.

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Cancellation

So what happens when you cancel either of these?

When you cancel iTunes Match, any downloaded songs, to your devices remain functional and playable on the device they are on. You simply loose the central cloud access on Apple's servers. So anything not on a device would need to be synced from your computer normally.

When your Apple Music subscription expires however, any song whether it was matched from your library, or made available offline from the iTunes Store catalog will stop working. You will not be able to play it, or move it, or do really anything with it. Since Apple Music songs are DRM protected, they require the subscription be active for the DRM to validate and let you play them.

Judges' Ruling

At the end of the day, if you can do without access to the iTunes Music catalog, iTunes Match is the better service in most respects. If you do need or just really really want the access to the iTunes catalog then choose Apple Music, but be aware of the DRM limitations.

Useful Links

Apple's Apple Music Website

Apple's iTunes Match Website