The latest revision of Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 4.3, sneakily arrived on 9 March - a couple of days before its official release date. As with other versions of iOS, many of the changes are minor, but there are nonetheless fairly major updates to Home Sharing and AirPlay, along with the introduction of a long-awaited personal hotspot feature. Naturally, the release also retains revisions included in previous versions of iOS 4.x, such as multitasking, springboard folders, Find My iPhone, Game Center and enhanced Mail. Home Sharing Since iOS devices have utterly fixed storage, they are restrictive for anyone who has a large media library. Even the iPad 2 won't assist on this score, since it tops out (like the current-generation iPod touch) at a mere 64GB of storage (several GB of which is taken up by system software). This forces a pick-and-choose approach to media-syncing, but iOS 4.3's Home Sharing provides a logical and flexible alternative, streaming media from a Mac or PC on the same Wi-Fi network as your device. HOME SHARING: this new feature enables you to play iTunes content from a Mac or PC on the same network as your device In use, set-up is simple, as outlined in TechRadar's Home Sharing tutorial , and playback appears efficient and robust. Our test Mac's relatively large media library, with over 90 GB of music, didn't cause crashes or lock-ups, and the library loaded in around ten seconds; subsequent audio playback was instantaneous, and switching between a remote and local library is child's play. Video is less impressive, since it's slower to begin playback over a network, and Apple's Videos app is bare-bones and buggy; during testing, it regularly forgot to apply thumbnails and titles to videos it found in a remote library.
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