If you’ve had today marked in your diary for some time, you’re not alone.
More than 5,200 people attended today’s Apple event in San Francisco, watching and waiting for the next big-thing to be unleashed by the company. And when Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, came on stage to commence Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2011, it was to “huge applause, standing ovation”.
Jobs said at the start of the event: “We’ve got some great stuff to talk about: OS X Lion, iOS 5, and some kind of interesting new cloud stuff.”
On the agenda were OS X Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud.
First up was the OS X Lion, the latest OS for the Mac – “a major release with over 250 new features” including multi-touch trackpads on all notebooks. The guys over at Engadget captured the exciting new details of 10 of the brand new features in all their glory, so you can head on over for more Mac news.
We have to admit we’re a lot more excited about the new iCloud service and iOS 5 announcements!
“As you know iOS powers the iPhone, the iPad, and the iPod touch,” Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iOS Software, began, adding that to-date Apple has sold 200 million+ iOS devices. This means the iOS has an incredible 44% share of the mobile OS market.
So, can iOS 5 live up to such heady expectations? Of course it can! iOS 5 comes with no less than 1,500 new APIs, 200 new user features, and 10 key features. Forstall said: “iOS 5 is a major release. This is incredible for our developers and our customers.”
There is a new notifications centre, for example, that merges all your alerts into one so you’re not interrupted on your iPhone when playing a game or typing an email.
Notifications in the list are easy to get rid of too, and simply require a tap of the circled X on the right hand side.
Twitter has also been improved to include single sign-on and integration with many apps – camera, Safari, Maps and more, making it so much easier to share the content you want to share with friends.
Safari has been enhanced too to make it “really convenient”. For example, you can email content of a website story not just the link.
And with Reminders you can “store lists of things, assign a reminder to any dates, and you can even assign a location”. The Camera feature is pretty impressive too, and the Camera button is now located on the lock screen so you can go straight into the app. You can also use the volume up button on the side of the iPhone to take pictures, and edit images directly on the handset.
Good news if wires annoy you too: with the new phone, “You can now setup and activate your device right on the device and you are ready to go. It’s that easy.” And you’ll be able to sync your iTunes library over Wi-Fi too.
There is also a new Message feature, a messaging service created to work between all iOS devices including the iPhone 4, iPad 2 and iPod.
The new Apple iOS 5 “will ship to all of our customers this fall”.
And let’s not forget today’s other big announcement: the iCloud. This exciting new service lets your Apple devices connect to the cloud service at any time. Steve Jobs said: “iCloud stores your content in the cloud and wirelessly pushes it to all your devices. It automatically uploads it, stores it, and pushes it to all your devices.”
So any changes you make to data stored on your device will automatically be sent to the cloud. You can even share your calendar with other devices, and new messages are pushed to all your devices. You can view all your App Store purchases, even those not currently on your device – same goes for iTunes purchases.
Content is backed up every day in the cloud.
“We’re making it free, and we’re very excited about it,” Jobs summarised, adding: “So that’s iCloud. It stores your content and pushes it to all of your devices, and it’s integrated with all your apps.”
You’ll get 5GB of iCloud storage onboard all new iOS 5 devices, excluding Photo Stream and music downloads so it’s “more than it sounds”.
So no new phone, as previously rumoured. But lots of software!
We’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s announcements, so please leave your comments in the box below.
Via: Engadget
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