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Apple is set to release iOS 18.3 next week, bringing further refinements to Apple Intelligence features, a couple of neat new capabilities to iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 devices, and bug fixes.

iOS-18.3-Everything-New-Feature.jpg

While not quite as packed with new features as Apple's preceding iOS 18 point releases, iOS 18.3 still introduces capabilities that aim to make your iPhone smarter and more intuitive. Below, we've listed five new things your iPhone will be able to do when the update rolls out later this month.

Add an Event to Calendar From a Poster or Flyer

create-event-visual-intelligence.jpg

For iPhone 16 models, iOS 18.3 adds Visual Intelligence support for adding events to the Calendar app. After installing the software on an iPhone 16, long press the Camera Control button to activate ‌Visual Intelligence‌ when viewing a poster or a flyer, and you will be given the option to add an event to the Calendar app.

Easily Identify Plants and Animals

ios-18-3-camera-control-animals.jpg

Apple's latest update also adds a feature for easily identifying plants and animals with ‌Visual Intelligence‌. You may be familiar with a similar feature in the Photos app that provides insight into plants, animals, and insects when viewing additional image information. Well, with iOS 18.3 installed, you'll be able to reveal these details with Camera Control's Visual Intelligence option, but in real time.

Manage Notification Summaries More Easily

manage-notification-summaries-lock-screen.jpg

Available on compatible devices in iOS 18.1 and later, ‌‌Apple Intelligence‌‌ notification summaries are designed to group multiple notifications from the same app together, providing a one-sentence overview of the content. In iOS 18.3, you can now more easily manage individual app settings for notification summaries directly from your iPhone's Lock Screen. A quick swipe leftwards across a summarized notification reveals a new option to turn off summaries for the related app. You can reinstate summaries for the app in question anytime by toggling the associated switch in Settings ➝ Notifications ➝ Summarize Notifications.

Identify Notification Summaries More Easily

italics-notification-summaries.jpeg

In iOS 18.3, notifications that have been summarized now appear in italicized text, with the aim of making them easier to differentiate visually compared to regular notifications. It's also worth noting that Apple has temporarily disabled notification summaries for apps that fall into the News & Entertainment category, following widespread reports of misleading summarized news headlines.

Perform Repeating Operations in Calculator

iOS-18-Calculator-Feature.jpg

Apple is using the iOS 18.3 update as a chance to bring repeating operations back to the Calculator app. When you tap the equals sign twice, the app will now repeat the last mathematical operation. For example, if you tap in 10x10 and tap the equals sign to get a 100 result, if you hit equals again, it will multiply 100x10, and will continue multiplying by 10 every time you tap the equals symbol. It's a small but meaningful change that should make it easier to calculate compound interest.

Article Link: 5 New Things Your iPhone Can Do in iOS 18.3
 
You have to wonder why Apple are bothering with .3

I mean, theres next to nothing of interest here surely.

Bug fixes will be welcome, but thats more a .x.x update.

Surely .4 is a bigger deal
 
My God! Colour me totally underwhelmed… The return of a simple calculator feature there was no need to get rid of in the first place? A poster reader that you can bet will make such a hash of half the events you may as well enter it yourself (not least because your own entry will be different - eg meet Jill at 18:30 for supper before the concert. And it won’t be the standard hour. Notifications summaries that I keep meaning to turn off (if I can)… I mean, I get nothing for days, then a backlog of ten messages telling me my bag is (actually was) at a hotel I stayed at last week. I am getting seriously fed up with all of this 💩 When will my phone actually intelligently help me with something. At the moment I seem to spend most of my time nursing IT.
 
Does anyone know if the volume bug in Photos when watching a video on the iPhone is solved? When I start a video there‘s no audio until I press volume up
 
Does anyone know if the volume bug in Photos when watching a video on the iPhone is solved? When I start a video there‘s no audio until I press volume up
Is your phone set to Ring mode? I think this has always been a default approach if phone is set to silent mode.
 
Is your phone set to Ring mode? I think this has always been a default approach if phone is set to silent mode.
No it was in silent mode, but works in ring mode directly. Previously though I heard my videos directly in silent mode, now I have to push volume up and miss some seconds, and have to scrub annoyingly back to the start of the vid. Just wondering if this is a bug or the new way how it works, which would be very annoying. My iPhone is always in silent mode…
 
*looks at list and my iPhone 11*

woooo! New calculator function!

To be honest, it's the only one that I would find useful, and I don't even find that particularly useful either :). However, iOS 18.3 betas have run very well on my phone, so it's still a good upgrade for me.
 
Losing the ability for user choice as to whether to install Apple Intelligence or not, and while one can turn it off, there's no uninstall and it eats (a minimum of) 7GB of storage. Current and upcoming features nothing I need, and if I were to want an AI product, I'd look at standalone apps.
 
I can hardly contain myself. I guess the options for a dedicated number row for the stock keyboard and a digital clock widget with a dark theme will be forthcoming in iOS 37.2?
 
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Losing the ability for user choice as to whether to install Apple Intelligence or not, and while one can turn it off, there's no uninstall and it eats (a minimum of) 7GB of storage. Current and upcoming features nothing I need, and if I were to want an AI product, I'd look at standalone apps.
This storage space for nothing and turning it on automatically is some microsoft level ****.
 
The notification summaries in italics are ugly, couldn't people already see those are AI summaries based on the glyph (I guess not...).
 
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Since the 15 Pro is getting none of the Visual Intelligence stuff, will the AI model actually be smaller in terms of storage as compared to the 16 series?
 
A poster reader that you can bet will make such a hash of half the events you may as well enter it yourself
Maybe they'll get it to work some day. They might have to pinch some engineers from Samsung or Google to do that though.

Apple claims the iPhone 16's A18 chip and Camera Control button are needed for Visual Intelligence. But VI could be invoked in the Camera app using an onscreen button rather than the mechanical Camera Control button, and the A18 chip might make VI work only about 15%-20% faster than the A17 chip in the 15 Pro and Pro Max. I think anyone interested in using this feature on the iPhone 15 Pro/Max would have been willing to wait 15-20% longer for it to work, at least to try the feature.

While of course this feature bifurcation between models is another way of enticing people to replace their earlier iPhones with a 16, it doesn't endear owners of the 15 Pro/Max closer to Apple.
 
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