As announced yesterday, Apple just released iOS 5 for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. The new operating system for Apple’s mobile devices includes cool new features, such as wireless syncing, improved notifications, PC-free setup, Twitter integration and over 200 other new features.
Let’s take a look at the best new features…
Notification Center
No more annoying blue box in the middle of your screen. Rather, a smooth little bar (quite the same as the one on the Android devices) will spin at the top of your screen. If you drag it down, you’ll see all the notifications you received and also your emails, weather and stock information. Tap any to access the appropriate app. The Notification Center also appears on your lock screen.
iCloud
This is what I personally consider one of the most important feature. iCloud stores your music, photos, documents, etc., and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices. You can get a free email address, 5GB of cloud storage, syncing for all your contacts, calendars and yes, much more. Also, you can now download your past iTunes purchases.
iMessage
When you’re texting or sending an MMS to another iOS 5 user, the operating system will save you money by sending your message (or pictures) using the internet, rather than your carrier. If you don’t have an Internet connection, the sending button will be green and it will be through your carrier, if it’s blue, it will use iMessage and it will be free of charge. The best part is that you don’t have to do nothing at all about it, iOS 5 will take care of everything in the background.
Newsstand
You can get now your newspapers and magazines delivered on the iPad. The new OS organizes your magazine and newspaper app subscriptions in Newsstand: a folder that lets you access your favorite publications quickly and easily. There’s also a new place on the App Store just for newspaper and magazine subscriptions. And you can get to it straight from Newsstand. New purchases go directly to your Newsstand folder. Then, as new issues become available, Newsstand automatically updates them in the background — complete with the latest covers. It’s kind of like having the paper delivered to your front door.
Camera
Apple understands that people use their iPhone camera quite often. In this manner, they made the camera app faster and you can now take pictures using the volume-up button. You can launch the camera app right from the home screen by double-pressing the home button. You can use grid lines, pinch-to-zoom gestures, and single-tap focus and exposure locks to compose a picture on the fly. Also, if your Photo Stream is enabled in iCloud, your photos automatically download to all your other devices. Moreover, you can now easily crop, rotate, enhance, and remove red-eye without leaving the Photos app in the new iOS.
Safari
Safari it’s not only much faster, but it now allows you to read online content with a “reader” button more easily , that strips out the ads and makes the text look nice. Also, you can save text for later using a feature called “Reading list” which you can find in your bookmarks.
Twitter integration
With the new OS, you only need to sign into Twitter once through the settings. Then you can tweet directly from Safari, Photos, Camera, YouTube, or Maps. Want to mention or @reply to a friend? Contacts applies your friends’ Twitter usernames and profile pictures. So you can start typing a name and iOS 5 does the rest. You can even add a location to any tweet, no matter which app you’re tweeting from.
Reminders
Reminders lets you organize your life in to-do lists with due dates and locations. Let’s say you need to remember to pick up milk during your next grocery trip. Since Reminders can be location based, you’ll get an alert as soon as you pull into the supermarket parking lot. Reminders also works with iCal, Outlook, and iCloud, so changes you make update automatically on all your devices and calendars.
Independence
With the new OS, you no longer need a Mac or PC to own an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. You can now do everything wirelessly, right out of the box. You can download iOS software updates directly on your device and you can now back up and restore your device automatically using iCloud.
Wi-Fi Sync
Every time you connect your iOS device to a power source, it automatically syncs and backs up any new content to iTunes wirelessly. So you always have stuff synchronized everywhere you want them.
Note: iOS5 can be installed on: iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 4 CDMA, iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch 4G, iPod Touch 3G, iPad, iPad 2 Wi-Fi, iPad 2 Wi-Fi+3G and iPad 2 CDMA.
iOS5 is free and the only thing that you have to do in order to update your device is to connect it to iTunes and it will begin the update.
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