yesterday, apple released the fifth major iteration of their lightweight os, which now animates all iphones, ipods touch, and ipads, as well as newer appletvs. there are a number of new features, but i thought i'd consider a few that will make the largest difference in my use of those devices.
1. pc free
in my writeup in april, i complained that for all its post-pc aspirations, the ipad suffered from an unfortunate dependence on a mac or pc home base, for initial setup, backup, and some document transfer. ios 5 does away with all that nonsense - along with icloud's demotion of the mac from digital hub to a mere device, apple's new data storage and sync paradigm enables ios devices to operate without any base computer. so that $500 entry-level ipad is finally a total system unto itself. as much as i recommended the ipad previously, there were some use cases that itunes syncing made problematic - this was especially true for first-time computer users, for whom the ipad would have otherwise been perfect, but who would need some sort of confusing bridge computer or a kind friend or relative to host the itunes backups. this is probably the best news of the whole announcement yesterday, especially for any of us who provide tech support to our social networks, and signals apple's real determination that ios is where they want most users to go in the long term.
2. multitouch gestures
while developers have been playing with these for months now, it's good to see that the swipe-to-multitask gestures are making it to all users. along with identical gestures for similar behavior in osx lion, these will vastly speed multitasking on the ipad, bringing it to something that, at least from a user perspective, feels more like the command-tab app switching that mac os power users enjoy. if you haven't tried these, this will be a real treat, and a real productivity booster.
3. reminders
brilliant to-do implementation that took about 4 years too long - why didn't the original iphone have this again? but i won't complain too much - the push and geolocation features here are really quite something. reminders will let you set your ios device to notify you of a task when you meet certain location conditions, when entering or notably even when leaving a defined area. have you ever needed to do something right after you leave work, or even just the next time you leave home? yeah, this will remind you with a push alert on your iphone or whatever. i've really enjoyed location-aware task management with omnifocus, but building it into the os and adding when-i-leave functionality will be great for a lot of people.
4. free icloud
i've long been in that weird minority who happily paid $99 per year for mobileme, and the contact, calendar, and data syncing it provided have been well worth the investment. i've also long thought that this added so much value and joy to the ios experience - particularly ability to go long periods without itunes syncing and still have up-to-date calendars and contacts across all my devices - that apple would do well to build the features in for all users. well, now they have - most of the previous mobileme services have been wrapped into icloud, and will be free for all apple users. free is really the magic here - it ensures that you can count on all users to have these services, so long as they have a recent ios device. this is really meaningful for developers, who might have avoided integrating with idisk, or even dropbox, because only a fraction of users would be able to leverage those services. icloud, being free and available to all, will be the go-to cloud storage and sync method for apps.
my concerns here are several, however. users will get 5gb of storage, not counting music, apps, books and photos. that might be a lot for storing the average user's pages or keynote documents, but within a few short months i'll have a good bit more artwork than that on my ipad, and other media not included in the icloud freebies already makes up more than the 5gb limit. looking at the list of information included in icloud's backups of ios devices, 5gb will be a pretty laughable amount for me for this purpose alone. will i be able to pay more and get more storage? similarly, will there be a way to pay a premium to extend the photo storage maximums beyond 1000 images and 30 days?
also, if i have several ios devices registered to one store account, some of which are used by other members of my household, will those other users be able to create individual icloud or @me.com accounts, and if so, will they still be able to get the apps, music, and books purchased by the currentlty central itunes account? this is an important questions for families, who so far have been able to share one store account, but who nonetheless require app data to be stored in different accounts. mobileme had a family feature, though, so perhaps icloud can address this problem satisfactorily.
5. imessage
living in a different country than my family and many of my friends, facetime has changed the way i call to catch up or check in. imessage promises to do the same for text messaging, as many of the people i currently txt with are iphone users. my biggest hope here - that imessage replaces or integrates with messages on the iphone the way facetime integrates with phone, and that it is more transparent to the user. i get so many text messages from iphone-using friends, which is aggravating given that we obviously both have email, which is free to use. there's an immediacy to texting, however, as well as habit, and so i keep getting texts i have to pay for rather than emails i don't. apple goes for there carriers' lunch money here, and i'm glad for it - provided apple makes it easy enough and transparent enough that imessages are the default when you try to text someone with an iphone.