iOS 5 Review

Apple showed off iOS 5 during WWDC 2011. They announced in October, that the operating system would come to users later in October. iOS 5 came with quite a bit of excitement, as it had plenty of great features, and the servers were also very slow when trying to install the operating system onto your device. We were lucky, and got hands-on with it on day 1. Probably the biggest improvement is notification center. It's a quick way to take a look at all of your notifications by simply swiping your finger down from the top of the screen. You can easily view and clear your notifications and can also take a look at Stocks and Weather, with their respective widgets. We are hoping that Apple will allow developers to make widgets for notification center in later versions of iOS. Another great feature is iCloud. iCloud has not appealed to many online reviewers, however we really like it because of its PC-Free features. Keeping your iDevice and PC separate was always quite hard, but now with iCloud, its become much easier. Backing up was our favourite iCloud feature, followed by Automatic downloads, and http://icloud.com web features. Airplay mirroring for the iPad is absolutely amazing, and it greatly improves games and other such iPad features. The only catch is, you require an Apple TV and Wi-Fi. Multi-touch gestures is a nice feature for the iPad, and after trying it, the only problem we found was that it takes some time to get used to. New Twitter integration is quite nice, with apps being able to interact with Twitter more easily. You can also easily tweet from some of the apps including with iOS. Some smaller improvements include- iMessage for iPad and iPod Touch, Camera improvements, Reminder, mail formatting, and wi-fi sync. Something that we really disliked was Newsstand. We don't really like reading news, other than in Safari, so the app was just another app that we had to move because we couldn't delete it. However, you can't put it in a folder, so it was even more annoying (actually, you can-check out this post on our QandA Blog). Overall, its a great operating system for your iDevice and is worth the upgrade.

Pros:

• Twitter integration-has no problems
• New GameCenter has nice features
• iCloud backup works great-provided you have good internet
• Reminders is easy-to-use
• all your apps are associated with your Apple ID
• multi-touch gestures on the iPad works nicely
• iPad mirroring with Apple TV is amazing
• New private browsing feature in Safari

Cons:

• newsstand can't go in a folder
• Apple TV is needed for iPad mirroring
• still-you don't have full customization of your device
• notification center is limited to the 2 included widgets
• some apps stopped working after the update