Apple’s senior vice president of iOS software Scott Forstall followed up this morning’s iOS market figures and announcement of a new Cards app by revealing that iOS 5 will be released to the world in just over a week -- Wednesday, October 12.
iOS 5 is finally coming, and Apple now has set the date: You can download it for your current device free of charge next Wednesday, October 12. Apple’s senior vice president of iOS software Scott Forstall announced the new iOS has been seeded to more than 100,000 developers prior to a recap of the 10 biggest new features.
iOS 5 will have a new Notifications Center for seeing all of your notifications on the lock screen, easily swiping to go directly to the app.
iMessage promises to connect iOS users with text, photos and video, pushed to all of your devices and sent over either 3G or Wi-Fi connections.
Reminders “allows you to create reminders like pick up dry cleaning... and they can be location based,” Forstall reminds us. (Pun intended.)
Twitter integration will now be OS-wide for quickly tweeting from any of the built-in apps such as Photos.
Newsstand promises to “make it easier to read publications on your iOS device” while downloading new issues in the background.
Camera gets a major overhaul with iOS 5, including the ability to edit photos right on the device without the need for third party apps and a new lock screen shortcut so you won’t miss a single shot by quickly jumping into camera mode. The volume up button on the iPhone can also now be used as a camera shutter. (Finally!)
Game Center gets a boost with achievement points and photos, including photos of your friends and friend recommendations. There are now 67 million Game Center accounts, so the chances are good someone you know is already there.
Mobile Safari gains a new Reader function first introduced with the Mac and Windows version for being able to read websites without distraction. The new Reading List feature will allow you to save a web page on one device and have it sync to all of your others, while tabbed browsing on the iPad will make web surfing easier than ever.
The Mail app now includes rich text formatting, indentation, the ability to move addresses around as well as flagging emails.
Finally, the new “PC Free” initiative will let you activate and use your iOS device without having to plug in and sync via iTunes -- including wireless updates.
iOS 5 will be available for the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 2, iPad and third or fourth generation iPod touch models on Wednesday, October 12. The final gold master release was just pushed to iOS developers in advance of the release.
Apple’s “Let’s talk iPhone” event wrapped up this morning with announcements of a refreshed iPod nano and iPod touch, iOS 5 and iCloud arriving on October 12 and the new iPhone 4S hitting stores on October 14, with Sprint added as a third U.S. carrier and a 64GB model available for the first time at $399 with two-year agreement.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
