Apple WWDC: iOS 5, Lion, iCloud

Steve Jobs was on hand today to kick off Apple's WWDC keynote. Lion took the lead, with no surprises except a $29.99 pricetag and a July ship date. iOS is getting a new "Notification Center"; Twitter is being integrated; he announced a split thumbable keyboard for iPads; wireless syncing; and a native IM system for iOS devices, shipping in the Fall. iCloud will be free, syncing apps (Mail, Calendar, Contacts and iWork apps) across devices. Photostream is iCloud for pictures. iTunes iCloud will let you re-download your tracks at last, and iTunes Match will let you match your ripped CDs to Apple's copies.

Comments

In other words...

[Admodieus]

...he introduced the Apple community to Android, Windows Phone 7, Linux, Windows, and OS X Snow Leopard.

Re:In other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has always been more about making things actually "just work" instead of introducing new things. Before the iPhone you could do all those things and more on Windows Mobile and Symbian phones. Before the iPod there were MP3 players with far more features than the iPod had.
The difference is that Apple takes some existing features, and does them _really_ well. You could browse the web on Windows Mobile, but the experience was pretty painful. The iPhone was the first to make that feature actually useful enough to use all the time. Same with the iPod. I have a little MP3 player from Samsung and I can't for the life of me remember how to use it. It just isn't intuitive.

It is changing a little though. For example the notification system was taken exactly from Android without significantly improving it. And I'm disappointed that there were no changes to the home screen to be more dynamic to allow quick access to certain features (like turning Wifi/bluetooth on/off).
I still think the user experience is better on iOS than Android, but the gap is much smaller than it was just 6 months ago. Apple will have to be a bit more creative to maintain that lead there.

Re:Give us the betas!

[TobyRush]

Steve himself pointed out that MobileMe was a misstep. As someone who has cobbled together a cable-based home iTunes network, Gmail (via both a desktop/laptop web browser but also through iPhone's Mail app for notifications, etc.), Flickr & iPhoto, AppleTVs, a 60GB iPod, my wife's iPod Touch, Things for to do lists, etc., etc., etc., the only thing that is not encouraging to me about this is the thought of redoing everything again. But if Apple is actually putting some energy into this (and from the data center pictures, it looks like they are), it's might be too tempting to refuse.

And iTunes Match? Does anyone else find it baffling how they are getting away with this? I mean, for $25 I get legal versions of every single—ahem, questionably procured, shall we say— tracks in my gigantic iTunes library? Did the record companies read the fine print on this? I mean, as a voracious music consumer, I'm NOT complaining... we've all known for a long time that things were going to have to change in regard to digital media and copyright. And say what you will about them, I could see Apple being the company to make it happen. But really... how did they get away with this?