Earlier this week saw the release of the latest Apple operating system, iOS8. For those of you who managed to free up the space (4.7GB) and download it straight away, you’ll most probably be aware of the latest features iOS8 has to offer and surprisingly, there are quite a few.

One of things that I noticed almost immediately was the slight design modification to the icons in the Control Panel. In iOS7 the icons and the stroke around the circle would change from black to white once clicked. In iOS8 the whole background of the icon fills with white and the icons stay the same. A small and rather insignificant change I know.

One of the more interesting developments is Siri’s built in song identification software. It seems that Apple has partnered up with Shazam to deliver this feature and I must admit, it works rather well!

Another element that got our Business Development Manager, Steve quite excited was that if you’ve installed iOS8 on your iPad and it’s connected to the same WiFi network as your iPhone, then you’ll be able to take calls on it. When your iPhone rings a notification will pop up on your iPad and you’ll be able to receive the call as you would do with a Skype call.

The camera features a few upgrades too. New exposure settings and a self timer have been built in along with the ability to record time-lapse videos. Here’s our first attempt…

Group messages also get a few enhancements with the ability to name, mute and leave the conversation altogether. To access these, simply click “details” in the top corner of the conversation.

Not so much of a new feature but more of an upgrade, the talk-to-type component on the keyboard (little microphone button) is now more accurate than ever. It’s probably still best to manually type those private message though, especially in public.

Overall, not a huge difference from iOS7 and more upgrades to existing features rather than entirely new ones. You’ll probably get the most out of iOS8 with the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus which have gone on sale this morning, but we’ve not managed to get our hand on one…yet.