Hey guys so today at the Worldwide Developer Conference Apple unveiled iOS 5.
There are a lot of great new features so let’s begin with the new Notification Center.
If you are an Android user these new notifications will look very familiar as you pull
down from the status bar to see all of your new notifications. On top of that you can
see notifications on your homescreen from a wide variety of apps. To access a missed
call for example you just need to swipe across the notification to view it.
Next is Twitter integration. In iOS 5 you can log into your Twitter account from
a new Settings page and have access to your account from several built in applications
such as Safari, YouTube and Maps. Once Twitter is connected you can use it to populate
your Contacts page as well which looks really awesome. Moving on we have a revamped version
of Safari. The first new feature is Reader which works similarly to Safari on the Mac
and PC
and allows you to strip extra content out of websites to give you a more basic and
simple reading interface. There’s also a new feature called Reading List which allows
you to save webpages to read later. It even works on multiple devices so for example
you could begin reading a page on your iPhone and finish later it on your iPad. Best of
all is the new support for tabbed browsing in Safari making it much easier to view
multiple sites at a time. The Camera app has been majorly overhauled. You can now take
a photo right from the lockscreen as well as use the volume up button as a shortcut
to
taking a picture. You can also do some neat tricks such as pinch to zoom while taking
a
photo as well as a decent photo editor that will allow you to do some retouching from
inside the Camera app. A huge feature is PC Free. Now in iOS 5 you can sync and activate
your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad without even needing a computer. Keeping with this all
new software updates are going to be downloaded to your device making it totally plausible
to never plug your device into a computer ever. Software updates are now going to be
much
smaller as well, only downloading the updates as opposed to the entire OS. Another big feature
is iMessage. Drawing a lot of inspiration from BBM and working for the iPhone, iPod
touch and
iPad, you can now message between other users with text, video, photos and contacts and
it
is supported on 3G and Wi-Fi. There are also a lot of smaller updates including Wi-Fi syncing
to iTunes and multitasking gestures. iOS 5 will be released later this Fall for everyone
and
a beta version is available to developers starting today. It will be available for the
iPhone
3GS, iPhone 4, iPod touch 3G, iPod touch 4G, iPad 1 and iPad 2. So overall I have to say
that I’m very impressed with iOS 5. While it wasn’t a revamp Apple certainly added
a wide
variety of new features giving a lot of new life to the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. What
do you think? Definitely be sure to let me know in the comments below.
