iOS 17 standby: Apple’s painted screen is the best iPhone feature of the year

It only took me a few minutes to take advantage of the iPhone’s new standby mode before I started using it constantly. After a few weeks of testing the early beta of Apple’s iOS 17, I’ve really changed up my daily phone routine — and picked up a new office accessory in the process. I can’t remember the last time I loved a new iOS feature so much, and I can’t believe the iPhone hasn’t always had it.

Standby, in case you missed it during this year’s WWDC flash announcement, is a new docking mode for the iPhone. When your phone’s screen is off, charged and rotated to landscape, it becomes a widget device. You can see a full-screen clock, a clock next to your calendar, a full-screen slideshow of your photos, music controls, your daily progress, weather, live activity, and more. Basically, Standby turns your iPhone into a small, smart display. You can interact with Siri and see notifications, but mostly it gives you something to look at even when your phone is off.

You don’t need any special accessories to make standby work, just a charger and a way to stand the phone upright on its side. I haven’t been able to figure out the exact writing angle needed to activate standby, but it’s in the 45-degree range. Flat on a table: no standby. I turn over my coffee cup: standby. A window sill and a lightning cable ensure a fully functional stand-by

But I always play for one reason, to buy equipment I don’t really need, so I choose High rise building 3 From Twelve South – This is a wireless charger for iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods and keeps the phone at a nice angle from my desk. (In case you’re curious: Apple doesn’t sell its own dock, but it appears to be an unofficial dock for its employees. Baro South Fort, a $40 docking station where you clip your MagSafe charging plate. (There are countless variations on this idea if forte isn’t your style.)

When entering a convenient standby setting for the first time, a pop-up appears prompting you to enable and configure the feature. All this means is that you have to choose the tools that you really want to see. I ended up with a digital clock on the left – a stylized version of the watch utility face – and a clever stack of scrolling widgets on the right. I can see the weather, my upcoming calendar events, my to-do list, the battery status of all my Apple devices, and my activity results for the day. Of course, I can find a lot of this information on the Apple Watch as well, and it’s just as simple: it’s right right thereA tap or swipe without being swamped by a home screen full of icons and other notifications

Standby is brand new and most apps don’t seem to support it yet. In theory, any app that supports your iPhone’s smallest widget size (the small square that takes up four icon slots) will work with Standby as well, but developers need to update at least something to show up in the menu. . I suspect most will, as they are also working to make their UI elements interactive (another iOS 17 best feature). I’ve only been able to test a few interactive widgets so far, but I like being able to open the app from my home screen or check off a task without adding credit to my habit tracker. All interactivity also works in standby, so you can finally do a lot without looking at your home screen.

Apple’s approach to tools in general is cool and important. The basic phone model has been the same since the inception of the App Store: Your phone is a collection of apps, and you live your life in those apps. But in recent years, Apple has been trying to find ways to display some information behind those app icons so you can find and interact with them more easily.

Application clip Part of this effort; A complete history of the Apple Watch can also be found here. But the concept of interactive tools that appear and work across all your devices is still the most powerful and useful. Your Mac now has the tool; The Apple Watch is now essentially a gadget. If Vision Pro is to work, it needs to encompass a world of widgets, not a world of apps.

I’m confident in the future of widgets for everything, but standby still needs a lot of work (and a lot of widgets, of course). The biggest problem is that it features a landscape mode on a relatively small-screen portrait device. Most of the time, when you tap a widget to open the corresponding app, that app looks weird. Even for my bedside table, night mode is still too bright and the always-on function, which is supposed to turn off standby mode when not in use, doesn’t seem to work at all. And I can’t figure out how to get from sleep mode to my home screen without undocking my phone from the docking station. The next version of Standby should integrate better with the rest of the iPhone experience.

Even in this early beta state, standby is the most useful new iPhone feature in a long time. (I think the picture-in-picture mode in iOS 14 is probably the last thing I really like — that or iOS 13’s dark mode.) It’s a huge improvement over the existing always-on display iPhone 14 Pro mode because it Makes the iPhone useful when not in use and when you’re not around. I no longer have to reach for my phone and turn it on a thousand times a day just to check the time; It just sits on the sidewalk and shows me the time and my next appointment.

I hope developers see standby as a reason to make bigger, better, and cooler widgets because there’s so much new screen space for them. I hope Apple eventually brings standby to the iPad as well, which would actually be a more natural place for this feature — most iPad apps run in landscape mode, and you probably won’t pick up and park the iPad like you would a phone. Of course, the iPad doesn’t have a docking ecosystem to speak of, nor does it have built-in MagSafe, but Apple can certainly work around these issues as well. Apple is said to be working on a standalone Smart Display, but a standby-equipped iPad might be better.

I’m very happy with the little smart screen I have on my desk right now. If only Siri were better, I’d never touch my phone again.

Photo by David Pearce/The Verge