Transcription
So, exactly one week ago, we got beta 1 of iPad OS 26. And honestly, it wowed everybody, from the floating windows to the new windowing management to the new file system. And today, they released beta 2. So, let's see exactly what they changed up, what they improved, and if they added any additional new features. So, stay tuned. Let's get into it.
But before we continue, definitely consider subscribing to the channel if you like information like this one and videos like this, as these updates come to light. Now, let's see exactly what they changed up.
Well, all right, everyone. We have beta 2 installed on my M4 iPad Pro; when it was about a 2-gig update. So give yourself about 4 GB of open storage in order to get this installed and installed correctly, and it installed pretty seamlessly. And then, in terms of a build number that we have right here, we go into our general, go into our settings or about, go into our iPad OS version. You can see that we are on 23A 5276F. So we are getting closer. I believe the first one was actually a U indicator. So again, we are getting closer, and it does feel much, much smoother once you do get into this thing. If it is a tiny bit jittery on the screen recording, it's because again, I am screen recording, but just know that it is much smoother than it was before when it comes to the animations. 120 Hz promotion, being able to open up and switch between the applications as well, is gone much, much better with beta 2 so far.
But now, what exactly is new with iPad OS 26 beta 2? The first thing you're going to notice is if we go into control center; control center is actually gotten much clearer in terms of, again, excuse the pun there, clear with liquid glass, but it's gotten a lot easier to read. There was a lot of people saying that it was a little bit unreadable when you were going to control center, especially on the iPhone when you don't have a large canvas. But now, they did edit the contrast a little bit, increase the actual blur of the background, making it easier to really distinguish what control center looks like when you are going through them. So, as you can see, it is much easier to actually see what's going on, which is nice that Apple was able to go into the feedback, listen to it, and then make those adjustments as they see fit.
So, in the messages feature in beta 1, we got this new icon up here on the top right, this hamburger-ish style menu to help with filtering. And what was nice about this is that was easy to go in between them in terms of unknown senders, seeing what's spam, seeing the recently deleted, and then also filter by unread. So, you can basically filter based on who you know and who you don't know. What's nice about this, and I'm going to put a screenshot right now, is that whenever you did get an unknown sender message, you would go into the unknown senders and you would get a red badge, which kind of felt out of place in the iOS ecosystem or iPad OS ecosystem, and now it's turned into a blue badge, which is good to know. So, if you are getting that, it's going to be a blue badge moving forward.
Another new update into beta 2 is if you go back into our settings, go into Apple intelligence and Siri, and of course, this is going to be for Apple intelligence enabled devices. We now have a new section under advanced capabilities if you are not signed in. So, if you're just using the free version that comes with Apple Intelligence, you're going to get these two new limits called image limit as well as other requests, and it'll let you know if you're under the limit. We're not 100% sure what it looks like in terms of what that limit is on the top end, but just know that if you do upgrade to ChatGpt Plus, sign in, these advanced capabilities will be completely removed from the settings, and that's good to know moving forward.
A couple of other interesting ones here in the settings is if we go into the actual sounds over here, and it would be sounds and haptics on an iPhone. If you go into the ringtone, we get a new actual ringtone in here called alt one under the reflection. So if you click on it, that's what it sounds like. This is what the old one sounds like. Very familiar. We all know what this sounds like. So that's what the new ringtone sounds like if you do want to make it that way. So I will be using that new ringtone. I think it sounds kind of cool, a little bit different, a little bit more melodic. So I'll definitely take that.
And then another one in the settings. If we go into our new phone application on iPad OS, go into the phone section here. Scroll all the way down. You now have a new form of detecting call waiting or a new toggle for that called detect call waiting. So iPad will detect calls you can put on hold and notify you when it's time to pick up. I'm going to leave that toggled on moving forward, which is something that Apple did show off in their presentation at WWDC, the new call waiting feature as well as the call forwarding. And also, if we go back into the sounds, if you scroll down, we have this new late night mode, which dims down the volume when it is late at night, so you're not waking yourself up or anybody else up if you don't want to see that happen.
Another new one is going to be a brand new widget. So, if I scroll over here, we have two new widgets for Apple Music. The one being the large live radio, which is new to beta 2, and then the pinned one, which is going to be new to beta 1 and new to iPad OS 26. So, you can pin individual albums or playlists, and they'll show up here. And if you do want to see what that looks like, if we go in here, you can see that we also have a new pin tab on the lefthand side of the music app. So you can pin any of your playlist. And it's very easy. You just tap into one of your playlist, hit the three dots on the top right, press pin playlist. We're going to press not now to turn on the downloads. See that it shows up there, and it should dynamically change and show up in the new pinned widget, which is awesome to see. And then you do have all the live radio largeiz widgets right here. So you can kind of jump in here however you see fit. Again, I'm a Spotify user, but it is good to know that these are available.
So, next up, if we go into our lock screen and we create a new color or a new focus mode or a new custom wallpaper, you do now have the ability to have those legacy wallpapers show up. So, if we press a plus sign, it'll show you a couple of new things here. Again, we are in beta 1, so it's still a little bit different, but the new thing here is that we do have parallax photos. Now, they were there before, but now we have this new little 3D moniker down here, which is nice to see. And then they also brought back the stock wallpapers, which were omitted in beta 1. So, all these collections down here of stock wallpapers weren't available in beta 1 and now they are available for the iPad as well as iOS 26. And I like how they now distinguish it with little monikers down here. We have the 3D moniker. We have the little shuffle moniker as well. So, always good to know that there's little insights in there with these new features.
And then the last one I wanted to bring up is going to be in the journals application. As you can see here, this is just a screenshot of it, but when you open up the journals application, you'll get this new pop-up called get journaling suggestions. You press continue, and then you're going to get this new splash screen. This new splash screen is to let you sync all your journal application or journal entries across your iPad and your iPhone because when it first opened it in beta 1 and let me know with a comment down below if you dealt with this as well because I've seen some mixed stories. It wasn't syncing across with iOS 26 on your iPhone. But now you can sync it in all of your stuff that was in your journal app before. So if I type in the journal, go into the application, it's all going to be there as it was before. You can also lock your journal to require password and stuff like that. I'm going to press not now. But you can see these are all old, you know, journal entries that I've had in the past that weren't there before. And as you can see, this is the one that's going to be, as you can see, this is the one that I inputed when the first journal app took out on iPad OS.
So, those are all the changes. Let's check out the battery life real quick to see how it did with the first version of the beta, cuz of course, battery life is still kind of pending with beta 2. But if we go in here and go into battery into our settings, again, I love the new battery menu. Here you can see an outlook of how we've been doing. But you can see on a day like Thursday, we use up about 85% of our battery, had 5 hours of screen on time. A day like Saturday here, 83% of our battery, we had 3 hours and 20 minutes. So battery life again is going to be taking a hit because we are in the beta program, but it really isn't that bad. And you can see all this new information of daily usage and what's taking up a lot of time and what's taking up the most amount of battery because of the high intensity of this. And then, of course, we have a day like Wednesday here that it was charging. It lets you know how quickly it charged. But we had screen on time of about 3 hours and 40 minutes while using about 65% of our battery. So you can get probably 6 to 7 hours on a full charge when you are using some high-intensity tasks like Lumaf Fusion, like a Blackmagic, like an Infinity Photo. But if you're just using the regular stuff like Safari, web browsing, YouTube, Netflix, you should easily get 7 to 10 hours even on the beta. And then hopefully when the public release happens, it'll be much longer than that. But that's going to pretty much do it for this section of the video. Let's finish it up.
So, the name of the game with this update has to be that it's all about bug fixes and improvements, and it's a lot more fluid than it was before. It's a lot less jittery. Even in some of the things that required a lot of customization, like in messages when you can add a new background, with the first version of the beta, it was very jittery and very broken every single time I opened that particular one because I guess it was using a lot of RAM management and it kind of got confused as to what was going on. So, overall, everything just gets a little bit tighter. Some decent improvements. So, a couple of tangible things like the new wallpapers or, of course, like bringing in the new widgets from the music app and things like that. But definitely stay tuned to see how it turns out by the end of the week and see if you find anything else. I will also leave a link down below to our article that gets a running updated list of all the different changes that happened to iPad OS 26. But that'll do it for this video.
If you made it to the end, leave a little dolphin. Let me know what you think about iPad OS 26 in general. Do you like it? Are you having fun with it? Do you have it installed? Is your iPad now your computer? All things I'm curious about. But that'll do it everybody. If you want to watch more videos like this one, check out one of these videos right here. Until next time, I'm Fernando. Peace, everyone. [Music]