iOS 5. We knew it was coming. So, it came. iOS 5 includes a bunch of new features for both iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch like:
Notification Center
Notification Center gives you all your alerts in one place. That one place lives at the top of your iDevice all the time. Just swipe down from the top and your notifications appear. These include Messages, Mail, Game Center friend requests, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, games, weather and more. The best of it is, all this is also right on your lockscreen. Notification Center is great too when you are in the middle of a game and have a really high-score and you don’t want to be distracted. That’s when you’ll be all over this. A window the size of the top of your screen appears, simultaneously while playing your game. It may be a text, email, or just a plain old voicemail. You have the option to tap on it or not, and if you choose to tap on it, your game is paused. That’s Notification Center.
iMessage
iMessage is great for those of you left buying hundreds of different texting apps for iPod Touch and iPad. iMessage basically adds free, unlimited texting to now all iDevices. But, theres a catch. You can only unlimited text people with iDevices that have iOS 5. Which means you have to pay to text others. Which is normal, but of course you didn’t pay for a phone, you payed for a iPod or an iPad. A great feature of iMessage is if your texting an iDevice you can optionally see if the other person read your text vice-versa. You can also see if the other person is typing. iMessage is great for some but soso for others.
Newsstand
Newsstand is a great newspaper, magazine, newsletter app for you iDevice. All you have to do is go into the Newsstand folder, hit store, subscribe to your favorite paper, and your done.
Reminders
Reminders is great for those who don’t always remember what they went to the supermarket for or what time that dinner is tonight. Well, this app will help. Reminders is the best at GPS notifications. What that is, is when you reach the supermarket, it will notify you what you went there for, with a list that pops up that you created earlier. The dinner thing you may think you mine as well use iCal. But, in this case there’s a good catch. Reminders is linked with iCal and iCloud(which I’m going over later). So when you make a reminder from when you leave work, which is leaving the location, also a feature of reminders, it will notify you to get home and get dressed for dinner at 7:00 pm tonight and also iCal will be ringing on your Mac when you get home. Two reminders. Half the work.
Twitter
iOS 5 now has native Twitter which allows you to tweet a photo, email, or even a short video at the tips of your fingers. Notifications also includes Twitter, so you can be up to date, all the time.
Camera
Camera just got a load better, system-wide, and when I say system-wide, literally. Now, with iOS 5 installed you can access your camera from the lockscreen by just double tapping the home button. A little camera icon will appear next to “Slide to unlock.” When you tap on that it brings you to the camera app. All so simple. But the best comes next. You can edit your photos in Photos just as you do in iPhoto.
We continue iOS 5 and talk about iCloud in Part 2
BK
