Apple's iOS 27 has been out long enough for the novelty to wear off, and according to a three-month review from Tom's Guide, five features have earned a permanent place in daily use rather than fading after the first week.
The review, published Sunday by the outlet's How-To editor Kaycee, singles out tools spanning photo editing, the keyboard, privacy and video. None of them made the splashiest headlines when iOS 27 launched, but Tom's Guide argues they're the ones that actually change how people use their phones.
Fixing photos after the fact
Two Apple Intelligence editing tools, Reframe and Extend, let users adjust a photo's composition after it's been taken. Reframe lets you drag an image to shift the apparent camera angle, as if you'd stood somewhere else when you shot it. Extend works on photos cropped too tightly, generating new background detail, texture and lighting to fill out the frame when you pull on its borders.
A clipboard shortcut built into the keyboard
According to the review, the feature used most often isn't a headline one at all. IOS 27 now shows a smart suggestion bar above the keyboard's top row whenever something is copied, complete with a live preview of the text, link or photo. That replaces the old routine of copying something, tapping into a field and waiting for a pop-up menu to appear.
An opt-in defense against scams
Impersonation Risk Detection, described in the review as a privacy-first security shield, runs entirely on the device and checks behavioral patterns and sensor data during sensitive actions, like sending money. Apple says it never reads private messages or emails. The feature calculates an on-device risk score that apps can use to throw up a warning or demand extra verification.
It's off by default, reachable through Settings, Privacy & Security, Impersonation Risk Detection, because the system shares limited event signals with diagnostic servers to work. Tom's Guide notes that protection signals can take up to 24 hours to fully activate across supported apps once it's switched on.
Pulling stills from video, and taming Liquid Glass
IOS 27 also lets users extract a full-resolution still from any video clip directly, without the old workaround of pausing, screenshotting and cropping out black bars. Pausing a video, tapping the three-dot menu and selecting the save-as-photo option now exports the frame at its original resolution and aspect ratio straight into the photo library.
And Apple's translucent Liquid Glass interface gets a new opacity slider under Settings, Appearance, Liquid Glass, letting people dial transparency up or down depending on whether their wallpaper makes system text hard to read. The review frames it as a fix for one of Liquid Glass's more common complaints since the design language debuted.
None of these features requires new hardware, just an iPhone already running iOS 27. Apple hasn't detailed what comes next for the software, though incremental updates typically follow a major release through the winter.
SDFiled by The Software Desk
Apps, platforms, operating system releases, security fixes and the features arriving in them.
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