The iPhone 5 News Blog News Feed |
| Posted: 06 Jun 2011 01:16 PM PDT
As widely anticipated, Steve Jobs unveiled iOS 5 in his WWDC keynote at San Francisco today, but many readers of this blog will be disappointed in the short term, not only because the revamped mobile operating system will not be available until some unspecified date “this fall,” which of course could mean any time from late September to four days before Christmas. As for the iPhone 5, I was not surprised that there were no hardware announcements in today’s keynote, and the nebulous date for the iOS 5 rollout leaves even a September iPhone hardware update in question. With Apple just releasing a beta version of iOS 5 to Developer Program members, it wouldn’t be advisable to be holding one’s breath. The iOS 5 itself, however, sounds like it will be worth a bit of waiting. The beta release today includes over 200 new features that will support iPhone, iPad and iPod touch including: • Notification Center, an innovative way to easily view and manage notifications in one place without interruption • iMessage, a new messaging service that lets you easily send text messages, photos and videos between all iOS devices • Newsstand, a new way to purchase and organize your newspaper and magazine subscriptions • With the new PC Free feature, iOS 5 users can activate and set up their iOS device right out of the box and get software updates over the air with no computer required ‘iOS 5 has some great new features, such as Notification Center, iMessage and Newsstand and we cant wait to see what our developers do with its 1,500 new APIs,” commented Steve Jobs. “Perhaps iOS 5s paramount feature is that its built to seamlessly work with iCloud in the Post PC revolution that Apple is leading.” Hmmmm. Post PC again. With iOS 5 and Apple’s new iCloud online service, also officially announced today, you’ll just enter your Apple ID and password and iCloud will seamlessly integrate with your apps to automatically and wirelessly keep all of your mail, contacts, calendars, photos, apps, books, music, etcetera, up-to-date across all your devices without having to connect to a computer. Notification Center provides easy access to all notifications text messages, missed calls, calendar alerts, app alerts and more, in one place, from anywhere in iOS 5. When they arrive, notifications appear briefly at the top of the screen without interrupting what youre doing. With one swipe you can see all your notifications, and a simple tap will take you to its app for more detail. Notifications also appear on the lock screen, with the ability to be taken to the notifying app with just one swipe. Newsstand is described as an easy-to-organize bookshelf displaying covers of all your newspaper and magazine subscriptions in one place. A new section of the App Store features just subscription titles, and allows users to quickly find the most popular newspapers and magazines. If subscribed to, new issues appear in the Newsstand and are updated automatically in the background so you’ll always have the latest issue and the most recent cover art. Mobile Safari also gets an upgrade in iOS 5, including the Safari Reader that’s proved popular in OS X Safari. Reader gets ads and heavy page formatting out of the way and sets the right font size on a web page, so you can easily scroll and read through a story undistracted, while Reading List lets you save articles to read later and automatically show up on all your iOS devices. plus (finally) Tabbed Browsing, which is the only civilized way to browse and makes easy to switch between multiple web pages on the iPad. iOS 5 also includes built-in Twitter integration, so you can sign in once and then tweet directly from all your Twitter-enabled apps, including Photos, Camera, Safari, YouTube and Maps with a single tap. New APIs give third party developers the ability to take advantage of the single sign-on capability for their own iOS 5 apps. iMessage in iOS 5 brings the functionality of iPhone messaging to all of your iOS devicesiPhone, iPad and iPod touch. This one is built right into the Messages app, and allows you to easily send text messages, photos, videos or contact information to a person or a group on other iOS 5 devices over Wi-Fi or 3G. iMessages are automatically pushed to all your iOS 5 devices, making it easy to maintain one conversation across your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. iMessage also features delivery and read receipts, typing indication and secure end-to-end encryption. The new Reminders app helps you manage your tasks; create and group related tasks together; and set time or location-based reminder alerts, priorities and due dates, so you can be reminded of a task as its deadline approaches, or when you arrive or depart a given location. Reminders can also be viewed in iCal and Outlook and are updated automatically. New features in the Camera and Photos apps give you instant access to the camera directly from the lock screen, and you can use the volume-up button to quickly snap a photo. Optional grid lines help line up your shot to avoid things like tiltedhorizons andd a simple tap locks focus and exposure on one subject. The new Photos app lets you crop, rotate, enhance and remove red-eye, and organize your photos into albums right on your idevice to share them on the go. With the new PC Free feature, iOS 5 users can activate and set up their iOS device out of the box with no computer required, and iOS software updates are delivered over the air and installed with tap. Wi-Fi Sync in iOS 5 transfers and backs up your content securely over SSL and wirelessly syncs purchased content from your device to your iTunes library. Additional new features in iOS 5 include: * Game Center, now with the ability to add photos to your profile, purchase new games from within the Game Center app and easier ways to find friends and new games; * Mail enhancements which include the ability to compose messages using draggable addresses, and a new formatting bar with bold, italics, underline and indention controls; * AirPlay Mirroring to wirelessly display everything you do on your iPad 2 right on your HDTV through Apple TV; and * a system-wide split keyboard to make it even easier to type on your iPad. The iOS 5 beta software and SDK are available immediately for iOS Developer Program members at developer.apple.com. iOS 5 will be available as a free software update for iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 2, iPad, iPod touch (fourth generation) and iPod touch (third generation) this fall. Some features may not be available on all products. A solid, but strongly iCloud-oriented update. I was sorry there was nothing mentioned about better multitasking support and improved cut&paste. We’ll have more to say as this news digests. Speaking of iCloud, it will also be available this fall, concurrent with the iOS 5 release. Users can sign up for iCloud for free on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running iOS 5 or a Mac running Mac OS X Lion (the latter scheduled to be available in July) with a valid Apple ID. iCloud includes 5GB of free cloud storage for Mail, Document Storage and Backup. Purchased music, apps, books and Photo Stream will not count against the storage limit. The free iCloud services include: * The former MobileMe services Contacts, Calendar and Mail all completely re-architected and rewritten to work seamlessly with iCloud. Users can share calendars with friends and family, and the ad-free push Mail account is hosted at me.com. Your inbox and mailboxes are kept up-to-date across all your iOS devices and computers. * The App Store and iBookstore now download purchased iOS apps and books to all your devices, not just the device they were purchased on. In addition, the App Store and iBookstore now let you see your purchase history, and simply tapping the iCloud icon will download any apps and books to any iOS device (up to 10 devices) at no additional cost. * iCloud Backup automatically and securely backs up your iOS devices to iCloud daily over Wi-Fi when you charge your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Backed up content includes purchased music, apps and books, Camera Roll (photos and videos), device settings and app data. If you replace your iOS device, just enter your Apple ID and password during setup and iCloud restores your new device. * iCloud Storage seamlessly stores all documents created using iCloud Storage APIs, and automatically pushes them to all your devices. When you change a document on any device, iCloud automatically pushes the changes to all your devices. Apples Pages, Numbers and Keynote apps already take advantage of iCloud Storage. Users get up to 5GB of free storage for their mail, documents and backupwhich is more amazing since the storage for music, apps and books purchased from Apple, and the storage required by Photo Stream doesnt count towards this 5GB total. Users will be able to buy even more storage, with details announced when iCloud ships this fall. * iClouds new Photo Stream service automatically uploads the photos you take or import on any of your devices and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices and computers. So you can use your iPhone to take a dozen photos of your friends during the afternoon baseball game, and they will be ready to share with the entire group on your iPad (or even Apple TV) when you return home. Photo Stream is built into the photo apps on all iOS devices, iPhoto on Macs, and saved to the Pictures folder on a PC. To save space, the last 1,000 photos are stored on each device so they can be viewed or moved to an album to save forever. Macs and PCs will store all photos from the Photo Stream, since they have more storage. iCloud will store each photo in the cloud for 30 days, which is plenty of time to connect your devices to iCloud and automatically download the latest photos from Photo Stream via Wi-Fi. * iTunes in the Cloud lets you download your previously purchased iTunes music to all your iOS devices at no additional cost, and new music purchases can be downloaded automatically to all your devices. In addition, music not purchased from iTunes can gain the same benefits by using iTunes Match, a service that replaces your music with a 256 kbps AAC DRM-free version if we can match it to the over 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, it makes the matched music available in minutes (instead of weeks to upload your entire music library), and uploads only the small percentage of unmatched music. iTunes Match will be available this fall for a $24.99 annual fee. Apple today is releasing a free beta version of iTunes in the Cloud, without iTunes Match, for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users running iOS 4.3. iTunes in the Cloud will support all iPhones that iOS 5 supports this fall. |
| AT&T Looking To Dump Obsolete iPhone 3Gs Ahead of iOS 5 at WWDC? Posted: 06 Jun 2011 07:18 AM PDT
 AT&T is pushing the 3Gs on their homepage this week. But where's the 4?
There has been a great deal of late-breaking excitement over AT&T’s weekend marketing move to pivot the spotlight from the iPhone 4 onto their value-priced iPhone 3Gs on the feature section of their website, suggesting to some that AT&T is clearing the decks and preparing for the imminent announcement of the iPhone 5 at this week’s WWDC. To be sure, anytime the big iPhone retailers make dramatic marketing moves like this, particularly so close to a major Apple press event like the WWDC, it gives pause as to whether or not AT&T and others know something that we do not, and are reacting accordingly. But while the iPhone 5 rumor mill churns up the excitement over this late-breaking development, there is another possibility: AT&T may be looking simply to dump their iPhone 3Gs stock in anticipation of an iOS 5 that will not feature compatibility for the 3Gs. The iPhone 5 News Blog recently reported in another article that there are strong suggestions that iOS 5 will not support the iPhone 3Gs, and as a result, Apple will be phasing it out once the 2011 iPhone is released. If the next iPhone is indeed branded the “iPhone 5,” that will leave the iPhone 4 as the value-priced alternative. If this rumor about iOS 5 and the iPhone 3Gs proves to be correct, then AT&T’s move over the weekend to highlight the iPhone 3Gs and downplay the iPhone 4 would make total sense. After all, this is exactly what any other retailer does when they know a new product update is forthcoming — they don’t want to be stuck with a glut of outdated merchandise. It is clear that AT&T has a warehouse or two filled with iPhone 3Gs’s, and if iOS 5 turns out to be incompatible with the 3Gs, Apple users will no longer see the 3Gs as an attractive option, even at its dirt-cheap price of $49. This will be especially true if iOS 5 turns out to be so cool and feature-rich that it motivates many people to invest in it ahead of a later-date iPhone 5 release. This rationale explains why the iPhone 3Gs may have given such a high-profile spot on the AT&T website this week. But how does one explain the absence of the iPhone 4, which at this moment still represents Apple’s flagship smartphone? The answer to that question may also be linked to iOS 5 — and the eventual release of te iPhone 5 at a later date. We have talked at length here on the blog about how it seems Apple looks to on-board legacy iPhone users every other year. Some statistics have shown that a plurality of iPhone 4 “upgraders” upgraded from the iPhone 3G, with many of the iPhone 3Gs users deciding to wait for the iPhone 5. If this rationale has any merit, then it is possible that AT&T fears that current 3Gs users, upon seeing the benefits of iOs 5, may look to upgrade to the iPhone 4 now in order to have the opportunity to use the new operating system, which would turn make it less likely that the 3Gs generation of users may pass over the iPhone 5, should it be released later in 2011. In this way, AT&T may be trying to manipulate the buying trends of current and prospective iPhone users alike this week. Could it be that AT&T really is paving the way for an iPhone 5 announcement at the WWDC this week? It certainly s possible. But this alternative explanation could also be the case — nothing more than AT&T and others taking evasive action ahead of in store with iOS 5. |
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