On Monday Apple announced the newest version of the iOS operating system for iPhones and iPads along with a new online service called iCloud. The new features in iOS 5 sound great. Here is a summery of them...

iOS5 adds 200 new features to your iPhone or iPad but lets face it, they change a box from squared corners to rounded and they call it a new “feature”. There are just a few (but nice) improvements. Here are the big ones.

Airplay
If you have an Apple TV ($99) you could watch online content like YouTube, buy and rent movies from iTunes, but now you can also mirror you iPad. This means whatever you have on the screen on your iPad will appear wirelessly on your TV. Play a movie through NetFlix, Hulu or another app and watch it on your TV. Even more exciting is using your apps on your large HD TV. Play a game and it appears right on the screen. Very Cool.

Notifications
Until now, when there was a notification (a message from a game, an upcoming appointment, etc.) it simply popped up on your screen in the middle of whatever you were doing. Apple has copied (that's fine...its a big improvement) the Android method of notifications. They appear unobtrusively at the top of the screen and you can drop down a menu to view all notifications.
See More http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/features.html#notification

PC Free
If you went to the store and bought an iPad or iPhone and ran to your car to unpack and play with it you may have been very annoyed to find it would not work until you connected it to a computer to activate it. (Apples way of tracking whats going on with it and who you are). No Longer. You can now get your device and it no longer requires a PC. Nice of them to listen to their customers on this one. They will also be updating your devices with new software versions over the air, not requiring you to connect it to iTunes to download an update.

Reminders
A cool app that keeps track of your lists but also does much more. They can be location based. Using the GPS in your iPhone, you can set a reminder to pop up when you leave your home. So you get outside and it alerts you something like “Don’t forget the report for work” or your on your way home and since it knows your not at the office anymore it alerts you “Your wife said to bring home milk”. The reminders app looks nice and clean and easy to use.

Newsstand
Magazine subscriptions just got much easier. Lets face it, we all would like to be able to read all our books and magazines on our device, but it just hasn't worked out that way. Until now each magazine you might want to subscribe to on your device had its own app to install and there was no consistence. That will all change with Newsstand. You can go to one app that will have all your magazine subscriptions and they will automatically update in the background each time a new issue is available. That’s the way it should be. Turn on your iPad and its all just there!

Safari
There have always been many alternative browsers you can buy for the iPad and you should have bought one because the Safari browser left a lot to be desired. They are finally updating it to have tabbed browsing and be more functional like on your computer.

Camera
No longer will you have to try to find the screen button to take a picture when holding the camera, tapping in the wrong place, missing that picture and getting annoyed. Hold your camera sideways and press the volume up button to snap the picture, just like with a real digital camera. It should have always been that way! They say they have also made it faster and easier to get to.

Mail
Did you ever realize that you could not BOLD, ITALIC, or UNDERLINE in emails before? Well soon you can. There are other nice features finally being added too.

WiFi Sync
Well its about time! No more connecting your iPad or iPhone to the computer to sync videos, pictures, music or anything else. It can be done all wirelessly with iOS5. Again, the way it should have been.

Multitasking Gestures
Just like you can use two fingers to pinch and zoom pictures, there is a host of new multi finger gestures. Swipe left or right to switch between apps. Swipe up to bring up the multitasking bar, no more double clicking the button and doing it too slowly so you get thrown back to your main app screen then having to go back into the app then...whatever...its getting easier.

Well that is the list of features that 99% of the people will use the most. You can see more at Apple’s website at http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/

iCloud
Yes its just another online cloud storage service like Dropbox or Amazon Cloud Storage but since its Apple, it will be very seem less and provide some other nice features across your apple devices. If your a big apple user, someone who uses an iPad, iPhone and Mac then this is great. If you use just an iPad or iPhone its nice but not as big a deal.
iCloud can keep your email, contacts, calendar and more and automatically provides the same information across your apple devices so you always have access to that information. You can also store your iTunes purchased music for streaming, so you don’t need to keep all that stuff on your iPhone or iPad taking up space. Being that its Apple and they already have the largest music store in the world (iTunes) has also worked it out so you can let them scan your computer hard drive for music you already own and they will make those songs available online through iCloud as well. You get 5Gigs of data, which does not sound like much, but your purchased music, apps, books and photo stream don’t count towards that space. That 5Gigs can be used just for your documents, camera photos and other data.. Its Free for the 5Gigs and we suspect you can purchase more space if needed.

You can always find out more at www.apple.com