By help of the new function, you can create a mysqli_result object from a statement that returns data (SELECT and other - version dependent!). Then you can use the mysqli_result object to process the returned data: fetch results, access meta data - all you can also do using a mysqli_result object returned by mysqli_query().

Included in the post are a few code examples showing the simplicity of the function and how it can still be used with the standard mysql_* functions to grab the results.