Apple iOS 9.2 boosts Music, News, Mail, iBooks, and connecting digital cameras

 

 Apple released iOS 9.0 on September 16, 2015. Less than three months later, they released its second major point update. Here’s a summary of what’s new and what’s fixed:
The Music app now lets you create a playlist when adding the first song. More useful, however, is that the most recently changed playlist is listed at the top when adding new songs to a playlist. This lets you create new playlists a lot faster. Albums and playlists can be downloaded from your iCloud Music Library. But custom playlists created on your device requires Apple’s paid iTunes Match service to let you upload a playlist to the iCloud Music Library. If you download a song from your library, a tiny checkbox now appears in between the song title and the song time length. And if you enjoy classical music, you can finally see works, composers, and performers while browsing that genre in the Apple Music catalog.

Apple’s News app, which was introduced with iOS 9.0, gained a Top Stories section (at least if you are in the US, UK, or Australia). The News app will ask you if you want to add Top Stories to your Favorites when you launch the app after updating to iOS 9.2. If you have a lot of categories in your Favorites, you will have to scroll down until you find “News Top Stories.” If Apple considers this a destination section, it should have bubbled it up to the top of the list.
Mail Drop is a feature that was reportedly available during beta testing of iOS 9, but pulled out before the final 9.0 release. Now it’s back, and lets you send large file attachments by storing the large file in iCloud instead of directly attaching it to the mail message. The file does not count against your iCloud storage quota. The attachment stored in iCloud expires after 30 days (Ref: Apple Support HT203093 Mail Drop limits).

If you have an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus, iBooks now lets you use 3D Touch to peek and pop out pages from the table of contents. The iBook app also lets you listen to an audiobook while performing other activities within the app, such as browsing your library, looking through the store for a new book, or even reading a book.
iOS 9.2 lets you connect Apple’s $29 Lightning to USB Camera Adapter directly to your digital camera to import photos. If you look at the comments section for this product in Apple’s Store, you’ll find some people have also been using this adapter to connect USB microphones and MIDI keyboards.
The iOS 9.2 update also includes a large number of improvements and bug fixes related to Safari, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, AirDrop, and more. One fix is particularly interesting to me. It is described as “Fixing an issue that prevented some manual iCloud Backups from completing.” Although backing up to iCloud works from my iPhone 6 Plus, my aging-but-still-useful iPad 2 has not been able to backup to iCloud since upgrading to iOS 9.0. We will see if this update fixes this specific problem.