iOS Gets Fifth Upgrade

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Apple is rather bullish at WWDC 2011-- not only stating its admittedly impressive sales statistics, but getting Steve Jobs to announce iOS 5, its latest mobile OS iteration.

ios5First off, the numbers. iDevices now reach 200m WW, with over 44% market share-- making iOS the top mobile OS IF one counts the iPod Touch (so take that as you will). Meanwhile iPad sales reach 25m (after 14 months), and Apple's app store currently has 425000 apps available (with 14Bn app downloads in 3 years, meaning $2.5Bn in revenue to developers). 

The big news, as mentioned earlier, is iOS 5-- more of an evolution than an complete overhaul, even if one with 1500 new APIs. The first noticeable change is to notifications, now taking place with an Android-style swipe-down menu on the top of the screen. Twitter now also comes backed into the OS. 

Arguably the biggest feature is (finally) getting rid of the need to sync an iDevice with a PC-- iOS 5 handles syncing over the cloud, alongside over-the-air updates.

There are also plenty of other new features and tweaks (Apple says there's over 200 of them), including compatibility with Apple's MobileMe replacement, the iCloud, whose release will predictably coincide with iOS 5's. 

Go Apple iOS 5