Apple’s iOS 8.1 beta 1 was pushed to developers earlier on this week, and as well as gaining a decent insight with regards to its features, we now have what is claimed to be a solid release date in October 20th. Apple Pay is set to be the flagship implementation of the next major update, but there are a number of other tweaks besides, and thanks to the digging of one eagle-eyed developer looking into the features of iOS 8.1 beta, it has also emerged that Apple will offer much better flexibility when it comes to data usage through voice calling.

The new feature, found in Settings under the Cellular > Voice & Data menu, will allow users to hand-pick the level of connectivity used when making and receiving voice calls. The options of 2G, 3G or4G LTE will not only save on bandwidth, but also help to conserve battery, while also empowering iOS users to make their own choices.

At the launch of the all-new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Apple noted that the larger model could muster an incredible 24 hours of talk time on a full charge, with the only catch being that the figure only applies to 3G only. As impressive as a full day and night’s talk time does sound, it’s not as though users are going to manually flit between 4G for general data and quickly adjust to 3G for calls, but thanks to this simple, neat little feature, they will be able to.

iOS 8 has not only offered more new features in one hit than any other installment before it, but has also enhanced functionality beyond levels that anybody could have foreseen. Third-party keyboards, widgets, extensions and such have greatly improved what users can achieve at stock level from a productive point of view, and with iOS 8.1 already just a couple of weeks away, there’s still a great deal to look forward to.

The closed-source nature of iOS has long since been regarded as its stumbling block, but with Apple finally offering some of those features that Android users have been lauding for some time, iOS 8 can provide a comparable feature-set to its Google-made counterpart without the obvious drawbacks of being an open-source platform.

(Source: DaNa KvNg [Twitter])

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