When the Apple Watch was launched it supported third-party apps however, those could only work as long as you were connected to your iPhone. watchOS 2 will now bring native apps to the Apple Watch along with many other refinements, performance improvements and features.

watchOS 2 includes 3 new types of watch faces: Photo, Photo Album and Time-lapse. With the new update even App Store developers will be able to add support for complications.

Time Travel allows you to turn the Digital Crown to view complications (events, weather, car charge etc.) as it would change in future or see how it was in the past.

All new Nightstand mode is a very handy feature which is activated when you charge your Apple Watch. The display comes illuminates when you touch the screen, digital crown or the side button. You can even turn off the alarm by pressing the side button or press the Digital Crown to snooze.

Native apps on Apple Watch will bring better performance and even more capabilities. Third-party developers will now be able to use the taptic engine, digital crown, accelerometer, heart rate sensor, speaker and microphone to create unique experiences.

Apple’s built-in apps have also been updated in watchOS 2. Mail app can now be used to reply to emails by either dictating, sending an emoji or selecting relevant preset replies.

With the new update adding more friends has become easier. The Apple Watch now allows you to add multiple Friends screens, each of which can hold upto 12 contacts.

Sending hand-drawn messages to friends who also have an Apple Watch has become more colourful. The new update makes it possible to use different colors to sketch your message.

Just like in iOS 9 Maps app received new transit feature, watchOS 2 also includes Transit navigation. Apple Pay on Apple Watch has gained support for loyalty and reward cards.

Lastly, Apple has brought activation lock to the Apple Watch. In order to activate your watch in case it gets lost or stolen the watch will prompt you to enter your iCloud Apple ID and password.

watchOS 2 brings many new features to the Apple Watch. Some of the biggest enhancements include native apps, third-party complications, and activation lock. The update will be available for free for all Apple Watch users this fall.

‘Orchestra’ focuses on the noise cancelling microphone on the backside of the iPhone, that helps during a call. Apple uses video of an orchestra playing very loudly, followed by the narrator asking the maestro to turn it down, insisting that the microphone does something similar when a user is on a call.

Excuse me, maestro? Bring it down please!
Better.
That’s what happens to background noise when you’re making a call on this.
This microphone here picks up the sounds around you and helps turn them down.
So when the world gets noisy, calls sound better.

Apple’s second ad for the iPhone 5, ‘Turkey’ focuses on the Shared Photo Streams feature on iOS 6. The ad specifically identifies Thanksgiving and shows the iPhone 5 being used for taking pictures at a Thanksgiving dinner, followed by the images being shared via Photo Stream.

Well, it’s that time of year again.
You know, picture taking season?
And, with Photo Stream, you can share all the photos you want.
With just the people you want.
It’s as easy as pie. Mmmm… pie.

{Via MacRumors}

Wake Smarter puts that fancy bedside alarm clock to shame. It has an amazing variety of choices on how you would like your alarm to behave. There are options for the usual alarm sounds, repeats, snooze-ability, and custom labels. But Wake Smarter goes WAY beyond that.

As an alarm clock it has a daytime display with gorgeous background photos or textures to choose from, and it has a much simpler nighttime display with a black background a red numerals that are easy on the eyes in the dark. The fun begins once you set an alarm. You have the ability to set the alarm to the minute and choose which days of the week it applies to. But then you get to add actions to that alarm. Actions such as having a custom message read to you, or the weather, or the news headlines, or your day’s calendar events, or your Facebook or Twitter news. Even the alarm audio allows you to choose from some unique sounds or a radio station or one of your iTunes playlists. And you can have more that one action on your alarm, so if you can’t choose you can focus on which action you want to have first. You can even control the length of the snooze feature and set it between 1-60 minutes.

There is a sleep timer too that is just as customizable. You can control the length, up to two hours, and set the audio mode to radio, playlist, or choose from about a dozen sleep sounds. The sleep timer needs to be set manually, but the audio will stop as scheduled and not interfere with any of the alarms that are set.

Another great feature of Wake Smarter is the voice control. On the main clock face screen, there is a microphone icon. When tapped, Wake Smarter understands a limited number of voice commands such as “time,” “date,” “weather,” or “Facebook.” Wake Smarter will then read out what you’ve asked for. The text-to-speech function does quite well with difficult words and it’s quite understandable. There is even some level of customization of volume, pitch, and speed for the voice to make it suit your ear.

With all these options and features, navigating has the potential to be a problem, but not so with Wake Smarter. The main clock screen has just three icons to interact with. And even the full-featured Settings screen has only four main icons to find what you’re looking for. They are clearly marked and easily understood as to what they control. You shouldn’t find yourself getting lost in complex menu structures here.

Wake Smarter is a fantastic alarm clock app. It comes with it’s own set of sounds and backgrounds. The features and options include something for everyone. But the voice control and text-to-speech feature sets this clock app apart and make it worth the $2.99 price tag.

What we like:

• Handles both falling asleep and waking up functions
• Completely customizable
• Variety of audio sources including radio, playlists, and included sounds
• Brings Siri-like functions to non-Siri-enabled devices with voice control and text-to-speech

What to know:

• Have to keep the app open

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Apart from the lack of 3G and GPS in Apple’s Wi-Fi only iPad 2, the rest of its internals are identical to those packed into its 3G-capable counterpart, so you’ll be surprised to find that iLounge have discovered differences in the quality of audio recorded by each device. The Wi-Fi only iPad 2 achieves higher quality audio recordings, and it’s believed that it’s the differences in materials of the two tablet models that makes the difference.

In both models of the iPad 2, the microphone is housed at the top of the device near the FaceTime camera. On the Wi-Fi only device, the housing around the microphone is aluminum, and is said to offer “markedly cleaner audio than that of the 3G,” which has its microphone embedded within the plastic antenna strip. Audio recorded on this device is said to sound “slightly muffled and echo-prone.”

iLounge noted in their report:

“Curiously, we found the GSM 3G model’s audio to be slightly preferable to that of the CDMA model, which seemed to suffer the issues more severely. The problem is particularly evident when the iPad’s screen is facing the user, as is the case when using FaceTime and a great many other apps.”

On the first-generation iPad, the microphone is located close the headphone jack and housed in aluminum in both the 3G and Wi-Fi models, so the quality of audio recording is identical on both devices.

Although iLounge claims that this is a “particularly evident” problem for the 3G iPad, it’s hard to establish at this time whether it’s enough of an issue to avoid this model for the time being. It’s possible that Apple will modify the iPad 2’s design mid-production if this proves to be a significant problem, however, if you’re an early adopter, you may be stuck with it.