iOS 5 Announcement

This update, to come in the fall takes care of most of the annoyances that exist in iOS today and brings us iCloud. [Link]

Right on schedule, Apple has announced iOS 5 at WWDC today, bringing with it a slew of new features — many of which iPhone users have been pining for for years. Here’s the full press release — and read on for the breakdown.

Notifications, lock screen improvements, quick photo editing

First up, notifications are a biggie — gone are the annoying modal dialogs, replaced with something called Notification Center that presents notifications, live stock quotes, and weather by dragging down from the top of the screen (a big nod to Android). Those notifications carry through to the lock screen, where you can swipe across any line item to go directly to the pertinent app. Speaking of the lock screen, you’ll now be able to access the camera directly from it to nab those quick shots without fumbling around the UI first — you can even do it if you’ve got a passcode set. The phone just blocks you from every other feature until you’ve properly unlocked. iOS 5 also adds inline quick photo editing with common tasks like red-eye reduction — nothing fancy, it seems, just a fast way to improve shots a bit before sending them out to friends.

Details on iCloud. [Link]

With iCloud, the PC gets demoted to just another device and everything gets stored and synced in the cloud. Add a new contact, calendar entry, document, photo, song, and it’s all available in iCloud. If you buy a new device, or switch from your Mac to an iPhone to an iPad, your most important data is all there. “Keeping those devices in sync is driving us crazy,” notes Jobs. “You know, it’s the same old story. I buy something on my iPhone. And it’s not on my other devices.”

Apple started with its MobileMe apps. “We’ve thrown them away and rewritten them from the ground up to be iCloud apps,” says Jobs. Contacts, Calendars and Mail are all synced through iCloud. Same with iTunes and the App Store. If you purchase a song or app on your Mac, it is available for download to your iPhone or iPad without cables. It knows what songs and apps you’ve purchased, and if you want to have all the songs you’ve ever ripped available on every device (even those you didn’t buy on iTunes), that will cost you $24.99 a year through a new service called iTunes Match.

Anything purchased from iTunes (music, apps, books) will be backed up in iCloud, as well as the photos in your camera roll, device settings, and app data. Documents created in iWorks (Pages, Keynote, Numbers) can also be stored in iCloud. “Some people think the cloud is a hard disk in the sky,” says Jobs with a chuckle. “We think it’s way more than that.”

iCloud will just be built into many of Apple’s apps. If you are reading an iBook on your iPad, it will remember any page you bookmark so you can pick it up on your iPhone. iPhoto will have a new Photo Stream button which automatically uploads those photos to iCloud, where they are then available to your other devices (including Windows PCs and Apple TVs) or for sharing. Apple will only store the most recent 1,000 photos, and albums will be stored for 30 days. The Photo Stream won’t count towards the 5 gigabyte total, and neither will music or apps (only mail, documents, and backup, and people will be able to buy more storage).

Watch the keynote which covers Mac updates as well as iOS. [Link]