This was a tough post to write. I really had to think about what the best features that came with iOS 8, even after shuttering many of the new functions. What can I say. I like the minimalist approach to what I allow the phone to do.
Podcasts App: Under 'Settings', if you want to preserve the battery life, you'll want to refresh episodes manually. Podcasts are MP3s, so the more you have on your device, the more it'll take up in your native storage. Fortunately, you can also stream from the app without having to download any of the episodes. The "featured" and "top charts" shows the top subscribed to podcasts.
iCloud Family Sharing: Have not activated this yet; not sure it'll be all that useful at the moment.
Time-Lapse option for Camera - Maybe this will work better than the panoramic option that I can't get to work right. The concept videos look nice though.
Battery Usage by App - Shows a percentage used in the last 24 hours or last 7 days. I don't know what I'm doing other than checking the time, but the Home & Lock Screen shows that it eats 9% of the battery. Even with the cache cleared, I'm not sure why Bing hogs 747 mb of device storage. Compare that to Chrome which uses 162 mb or Safari with 130 mb.
Hey Siri - only for the truly lazy. Siri still eats up battery power like candy; so, it's best to use her if you are connected to a wired power source.
Bold, Italics, Underline in Notes - I have not noticed this before the update. But now when I copy/paste from a website to Notes, some of the formatting stays.
There doesn't seem to be any way to disable the default view from showing up as 'Recently Taken' and 'Recently Deleted' folders for the Photos folders.
