Apple announcements are the Monday night football for nerds and today Apple is scheduling a huge announcement about the next generation iPhone. Getting excited yet?
I sure am because I’ve been working with iOS 5 (the operating system for iPhone 5) and there are tons of new features that I’m ready to use for myself, my students and in my apps. Here are the things I most excited about:
iCloud
For developers, iCloud falls a bit short and we won’t be able to rely on iCloud services exclusively for a lot of reasons. But, as a consumer I’m happy to have my iPhone backed up on the cloud, have access to all my purchased content and to have my music library on the cloud. The last is the one I want most because I want those high quality tracks with the correct meta data in them. I’ll be paying for that.
Wireless Backup & Syncing
Finally, I hate plugging my iPhone into my computer all the time to backup and update. We’ll see how good this works in practice and in particular I want to see how this works with iPhoto. With a young daughter in the house I take hundreds of pictures and need to save them to my Mac as often as I need to backup and sync my devices.
General UI Tweaks
There are a few UI features that overall will be a nice addition to the iPhone but aren’t all that interesting to talk about: the lock screen will behave differently, the camera is easier to get to and the pull down will help organize notifications. All these are welcome for sure.
iMessage
Even though I’ve been testing iOS 5 on my own iPhone I’m quite sure how this is going to work. But, the promise is that if you happen to be near wifi you will be able to send text messages through the cloud and these will stay synced with your normal text messaging. This excites me primarily because my AT&T signal sucks in my home and I use text messaging all the time.
Developers can now easily add Twitter to their apps without the annoying workarounds we need to use before. This will provide a better user experience for you and you can expect to see Twitter integration practically as a standard feature soon. Personally, what I would like to see is the same treatment done with Facebook since that is the real nexus of online social activity.
The Secret
All this stuff is nice and we can expect to see a major hardware upgrade but you know that Apple will be announcing one more thing. What do you think it’s going to be?