Apple Brings the Emergency SOS Feature to the iPhone Starting with iOS 10.2
A great Apple Watch feature is making its way to the iPhone starting with iOS 10.2. The second beta version of iOS 10.2, which was seeded to registered developers and public beta testers earlier this week, contains the Emergency SOS feature.
What is it?
Once starting the feature, you'll have a three-second countdown to cancel a call.
As you could probably tell by the name, the feature is designed to help you quickly and easily call emergency services using an iPhone. Just to note, right now, the feature only works in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In an emergency, rapidly click the sleep/wake button five times to call emergency services. You can toggle that on and off by heading to Settings, General, Emergency SOS. Through the menu, you can also select to play a countdown sound while the Emergency SOS is counting down. It should give users three seconds to cancel a call if needed.
As a nice extra layer of protection, whenever you call emergency services, anyone selected as an emergency contact will receive a message saying that you’ve called for help. The message also includes your current location.
To set up emergency contacts, go through Apple’s Health app.
Arriving before the end of 2016
Apple's TV app is one of the new features in iOS 10.2
Apple says iOS 10.2 should arrive to the general public sometime before the end of the year.
The software sports a number of other new features. Photographers should be happy to hear about the new Preserve Camera Settings feature. Instead of completely resetting after each time the Camera app is closed, you can select to preserve the last camera mode, photo filter, and Live Photo setting.
Also included are three new wallpaper options, a video widget, and some new emoji.
We’ve also gotten our first look at the TV app.