Apple has announced yesterday the new version of mobile operating system iOS 5 with many new features, and when I say new, these are new only for the apple platform. As you will see below most of the iOS 5 capabilities are already implemented for some time in Android, Blackberry, Symbian and others.First is the Notification Center which shows all available alerts regarding messages, emails, friends and others. You need to swipe down from the top of the screen and you will open the notifications. Now speaking in a fair way, this looks like was copied exactly from Android and also notifications are shown even if the screen is locked - which again is the same as per Google`s mobile OS.
Next we have the iMessage that offers the possibility to send unlimited texts through Wi-Fi or 3G from iPhone, iPad or iPod and between any of these. But you can also share photos, videos, locations and contacts. It`s great that they have implemented this but I do not see revolution in the messaging system or is not very different than other mobile OS.
Newsstand is the new magazine, newspaper and books reader for iOS. With this you can read and organize your favorite articles, titles, stories etc. I wonder if anyone present at Steve`s Jobs event remembered about Google Books and other book reader applications in Android Market.
Reminders is another application in iOS 5 which works as a To-Do list integrated with the calendar and synchronized with the online server. In Android the Google calendar and Facebook calendar are synchronized in one device and of course this is cloud.
Twitter was integrated finally in iOS with location and contacts features. If you would like to take a picture with the iPhone camera now you can upload it in iCloud. In Android you can upload photos on Facebook, Twitter and others for some time now. Safari is now a tabbed browser, kind of late after the Android, but better late than never.
In conclusion I would like to make a few things clear. The iCloud is the only feature in iOS which brings attention for experienced smartphone users. But again this is not new - it`s just that they have done it better than Google and is extended across all multimedia iOS platform. However iCloud will not beat the already very well known Dropbox cloud service, especially because this works across all platforms like Windows, Android, iOS, Mac, Linux, Blackberry. In the end I am not defending Google`s Android as they have some work to do (like providing a working task manager and others), but I am not going to be surprised about iOS 5 and it`s 'new' features.
