iOS 9 from 16 September

 I've noticed battery life has improved,  not sure by what as I was not measuring iOS 8 battery life,, I just grabbed the charger as & when needed, but since I loaded iOS9 & I had the charger connected to do that & left it to go to 100%,  its now at only 70%.  I would have expected it to be around 50% or less,  so that gives the the impression it is an improvement.    

Possibly unrelated, but today I found my phone had stopped charging while in the car. I was running the Tom-tom app, which is power hungry, and the low battery warning came up. Unplugged the lightning connector, plugged it back in, and charging resumed.

A little buggy and stuttery at times on my old Ipad 2, can't see  great deal of difference other than that.  Does it do anything great that I haven't noticed?

Reading some of the press reviews before it was released it seems little is changed. 

Some folks are excited about Safari (always wondered what that does  ?)

Me - I've found that annoying keyboard less annoying & thats about it,  but I only use it for the Naim app & quick & easy forum read/write & e-mailing without opening up the laptop 

Thanks Mike, I only use mine for Audirvana, emails, the forum and the odd google search to be honest.

There is a ton of new stuff in iOS 9, it's just that most of it is under the hood or they are relatively small improvements to the overall experience.

These are the things I'm really enjoying:

- Better battery life.

- Siri can search for more things either online or locally e.g. it can now search your photos. It's also doing it faster.

- You can now search inside apps now from the main iOS search screen and get proactive suggestions. So instead of opening Mail or Outlook to find a message, you can do it from the main search screen. Because it's faster you can also use the search screen to launch apps more quickly especially if they are on screen 1 or 2.

- You can now send more attachment types in mail.

- Split view i.e two apps side by side, either sharing fiftey per cent each of the screen or slideout where the second app takes about a quarter to a third of the screen.

- Picture in picture, so you can follow a video tutorial while working in an app or just have an eye on a sports event while using your iPad for something else.

- The proactive assistant looks inside emails and messages for relevant events or contacts details and provisionally adds them to your contacts or calendar. For me this is a big deal.

- Text selection is much easier. You can now use the on screen keyboard like a multitouch trackpad to move the position of your cursor or to make text selections.

- Better hardware keyboard support, including keyboard shortcuts which is very cool. I use a hardware keyboard a lot, so this is great for me. More layouts and are supported. This is really big if you write in more than one language as I do. On the surface it's a small thing, but it can have a dramatic effect on your productivity.

- The Notes app; previously a joke, is now really powerfull. I'm a heavy Evernote user but I'm going to give it a shot and potentially save some money on my subscription.

- Safari now supports content blockers. This potentially a big win as many modern websites use third party trakers. These track you from site to site and device to device. Not only is this an invasion of our privacy, it also slows down page loads and can use quite a lot of battery as they constantly run in the background. They can also block ads.

I would also add transit directions for some major cities. It's not something I can use as I don't live in a supported city, but if you do it's pretty big.

Regarding the subject of backups. Yes use iCloud backup. Like Time Machine on OS X it's a great feature.* That said if you are setting up a new device from an old backup iTunes encrypted backups do have some advantages. Firstly it's a lot faster as you don't have to download all of the apps. Secondly if the backup is encrypted it will remember many of your passwords, particularly in third party apps, which iCloud backups don't. If you use a lot of third party apps and services that can save a ton of time.

*Apple should however provide more free storage. If you have an iPhone and iPad 5 GB is pushing it even before you look at using iCloud Photos. I'd be happy if they offered the sum of the total storage of your iOS devices on the account.

I found, on my iPhone and iPad, the brightness levels had been reduced to the lowest level after downloading iOS9. Is this the reason for the increased battery life?

yep all 4 of the families phone/pads have had light levels altered, but easily changed.....if you can see the screen!

I noticed screen brightness was reduced, I adjusted to my preferred brightness and have still got significantly improved battery life. I have a 6s arriving at the end of the week so will be interesting to see what battery life is like on that.

 Yes, considering the iPhone 6S has a 1,715mAh battery compared to the 6's 1,810mAh. 

Yes, the split screen and multi tasking enhancements are nice as long as you have a bang up to date iPad. I have an iPad and my wife has an iPad Mini and they are not that old but neither has the benefit of these enhanements supposedly available with iOS9. If the older models are limited by their internal hardware/components then I can understand but I fear it is a cynical ploy by Apple to get us all to buy the latest models!

All I want to know is if they have cured the fault that developed a couple of iOS8 upgrades ago.  

the fault?

When listening to audiobooks on my iPhone 6s (I don't really use it for music) playback will sudenly stop with the screen displaying something about Voice Control.  Sometimes it will radomly start playing at double speed.

Usually (but not always) cured by pressing the home button.  This happens mainly when using headphones, but also occasionally when connected to my car radio via the headphone socket or just when listening via the built in speaker, although I will admit is much more frequent with headphones

Tihis happens with the supplied earbuds as well as my B&W SP5.  Incidentally, I don't like earbuds.

The limitations are largely hardware based. For example some features like Content Blockers are only available on 64-bit devices which were launched in 2013 e.g. iPhone 5S, iPad Mini 2 and iPad Mini 3. The Split Screen view is only available on the iPad Air 2, because it has twice the graphics power and double the RAM of the iPad Air.

In general Apple provides updates to older hardware for significantly longer than it's competitors, but it does have to decide whether or not new features comprise the usability of older devices too much. Perhaps it would be simpler if Apple adopted the Android approach where most manufacturers support hardware for a maximum of 2 years.

If you are saying there a legitimate reasons for not providing these software based benefits due to hardware limitations of older versions of iPad hardware then I accept this. I am a hard-bitten Apple convert and have been for many years however there is a part of me that thinks that such a simple improvement should (and could) be available to ALL iPad users. Call me cynical....

Apple want the new features to work, and if they roll out new, processor-intensive features for hardware that is not up to the task, owners complain.  If they don't roll out the new features for hardware that is not up to the task, owners complain.  See where I'm going??

Whether Apple have 'drawn the line' at just the right place -- I don't know.  Does this spur some owners of older hardware to buy newer hardware?  I'm quite sure of that.

Hmmm..... This all depends on your view of whether Apple have decided that 'old' (not that old really) hardware is not up to the task of supporting the new features or whether they are after new (unwarranted?) sales. Only Apple execs will know for sure!

Maybe I am becoming cynical (or realistic) in my old age - who knows!

I bet that no one remembers an android phone from 2011 when the 4s was released, let along it be supported by anyone. Apple are by far supporting the oldest devices for as long as possible.

The fact is the A5 chip in the 4s and ipad2 is around 15 times slower than in the 6, it simply cannot do what new phones can do. The general response from industry has been surprise they have managed to keep it going this long.

All seems to be well in this latest iOS update.

Up next will be El Capitan, which should not cause any major problems, even on a five year old MacBook!