Apple Reveals iOS 5 Apple Reveals iOS 5

The iOS preview stole the limelight at the WWDC event in San Francisco. The event also saw the beta release for iOS Developer Program members. The prominent features announced were Notification Center, iMessage, Twitter integration, Newsstand, Game Center, and Airplay.

Apple claims that the Notification Center provides an innovative way to easily access notifications such as text messages, missed calls, calendar alerts, app alerts, and more. This is a nice addition, but it cannot be labeled as innovative, knowing that it's already present on Androids.

Considering the popularity of Twitter, its integration was inevitable. Twitter integration runs down to apps such as Contacts, Photos, Camera, Safari, YouTube, and Maps. Interestingly, there is no word on Facebook integration. Makes us wonder if the relations between these two companies aren't that good.

With iMessage, you get the functionality of iPhone messaging to all of your iOS devices such as the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. The application lets you send text messages, photos, and videos to other iOS devices. Thankfully, it not only works with Wi-Fi but also with 3G. iMessages actually sounds like BlackBerry Messenger to me. After all, there is nothing wrong in taking inspiration.

Newsstand will help you organize all your newspaper and magazine subscriptions at one place. Game Center will now let you add photos to your profile. It will also let you find new friends online. Airplay is essentially Apple's version of DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance), letting you stream videos to your HDTV wirelessly - provided your HDTV supports it.

The Camera app gets a long awaited update. The volume rocker on the phone now doubles up as a shutter key. This is weird, knowing that the Camera + app with the same functionality was banned from iTunes last year.

The number of updates sounds overwhelming. However, only a few of them are actually noteworthy. Furthermore, the added features aren't really original. Is it possible that Apple is running out of ideas?

source: Techtree.com