First Look: iOS 5 Another Big Milestone In The Mobile Revolution

Staring at software update boxes for several hours won’t make you feel like you’re sitting in the middle of a revolution, but the upgrade to iOS 5 on Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iPod touch devices is one more sweeping move to that end.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based Mac and iPhone giant dropped its iOS 5 software upgrade Wednesday, and at first blush new features were mostly subtle, yet stunning in their ability to make using iPhones and iPads a more efficient, useful experience than ever.

That’s not to say there were not the typical upgrade-day hiccups for those attempting to reach Apple’s servers to get the new software. And Apple’s iCloud service for storing data online, including music, e-mail, contacts and photos, appeared to be so swamped that making account changes to initiate expanded storage capacity was thwarted at times. (To upgrade one iPhone could have meant six hours of mind-numbing waiting while watching Apple’s progress bar tell you how much longer the installation would need.)

But Apple’s iOS 5 software itself -- which is available as a free upgrade to those devices -- is geared toward streamlining our personal information, work data and personal lives into easier-to-use streams of detail that can guide us through our day, our objectives and our relationships.

Think of it like this: Smart phone devices first hit the market in 2007 to bring together all of these streams into a single piece of handheld hardware. With iOS 5, it’s the software that ties those streams even tighter together inside the device itself. Here are a few examples and highlights:

• Twitter isn’t now just an iPhone app that sits as the iPhone’s front end into the social networking service. With the tap of a button in iOS 5, your Contacts app will synchronize with your Twitter account and pull the Twitter handle of all of your tweeting contacts into their data alongside their phone numbers and email addresses;

• Two new features include the iPhone Notification Center and Reminders; they are simply outstanding. You can add reminders on the fly, and when the specified time arrives, the phone will post a reminder on your main device screen in as urgent or subtle a way as you like. (In two days, the new iPhone 4S devices will allow Reminders to be added by voice through Apple’s Siri Beta app;)

• All notifications, not just reminders, will show up on the main screen as they generate. This includes any reminders from your individual apps, whether the app is Facebook, ETrade, e-mail, text messages or messages from the new iMessage app that was built in to iOS 5;

• The calendaring app, Calendar, now has the same look and feel across iOS devices and Mac OS X Lion machines, with color-coding for events now included in iPads and iPhones.

If one focuses on the fact that it took several hours to go through the upgrade process, including downloading the software, backup up the content on the device, seeing the backup fail, installing iOS 5 and then restoring your data from iTunes, it’s easy to miss the important aspects of the software itself. (All of that happened in this case.)

Next: The Jewel of iOS 5

And if one focuses on the fact that iCloud appeared to choke under the weight of the surge of new Day One account signups, you’d miss those points as well. (We won’t ignore this issue, but will explain it further elsewhere on CRN.com.)

For many, the jewel of iOS 5 will be the Notification Center, which brings all of your important daily milestones and updates onto one screen at one time. After personalizing what information you want updated in real time in the Notification Center, you simply swipe your thumb or finger in a downward motion from the top of the screen and your own personal life control center appears on the screen.

This is simple, yet revolutionary; with Notification Center, Apple has achieved what Microsoft, through software like Outlook, has been trying to achieve for years.

With iOS 5, your apps and your data are like nerves that all connect to one brain. And, remember, this is only Part One of this chapter of the mobile revolution. Part Two arrives Friday when iPhone 4S greets the world with Siri, 8 megapixels for its camera, and dual-core processing. That won’t involve long waits in front of an installation progress bar, either.