The
iOS 5 is fricken' awesome. I personally downloaded the developers release last week and have been loving all the new features. The official release is Wednesday 10/12/11 (tomorrow/today depending on when I finish writing up this article.
It supposedly has 200+ new features, with alot of them seeming to be theme tweaking. But the main goal is to have the iPhone or iTouch reliant on the computer which is preferably a Mac in Apple's eyes (side note... i F*CKin' hate MACs... but love the iPhone).The top new features are iCloud, Notification, Reminders, and iMessage.
iCloud:
Apple wants you to start to store any files, photos, or music within their cloud that is advertised by the great Steve Jobs as being able to "just work." This would allow for all your devices to sync automatically. A new feature on the iOS 5 is photostream. So you snap a picture and then the BAM it is uploaded to your digital photo album and synced with all your devices. Another awesome addition is over the air backups. So every night you can set you phone to back itself up via WiFi (wifi only as of now) and a backup will be placed in your cloud for those just incase moments that you lose your iPhone or delete something, you can easily restore the files. And the best things is that you get 5GB of space FOR FREE.
Notifications & Reminders:
The first thing I noticed with the iOS 5 is when I received a text, I got a notification on the top of the screen (as seen here):
So you can simply tap the notification which can be text, facebook, ect. in order to go right to the app. Also when your phone is locked, notifications will list from any apps you have running so you can again tap the notification and it will go right to the app. Very neat and useful feature.
The reminders are pretty sweet. Any reminder or calender event, even weather is linked right to one neat place. All you need to do is pull down from the top of your main screen a a drop down screen will appear with all of your information. I can see how Siri with the
iPhone 4S could make this feature much more useful.
iMessage:
iMessage is pretty neat. For those people who have an iTouch, you can have a text like interface via WiFi so that can be very useful. And for those who chat with others with iPhones, the iMessage uses the internet and not your texting plan (but who doesn't have unlimited texting now a-days anyways??). But regardless, its much faster when sometimes you have poor service because the messages are sent instantly.
There are other smaller features such as you can launch the camera from the lock screen and it has a built in photo touch up as well as move the keyboard to the middle of the screen for typing.
Stay tune for more updates.
Click