iThoughtso
Steve Jobs has just completed his opening keynote at the worldwide developer conference (WWDC). As preannounced, he unveiled Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud. Here's the long and short of it, in bullet form, as derived from press releases, Twitter and following the live blog on This Is My Next.
- OSX Lion has a thing called launchpad that replicates the iOS experience with app icons.
- Seems to be a big emphasis on touch too, maybe a convergence of the two OSs, Windows 8 style.
- Lion coming in July.
- iOS 5 - coming this autumn
- Sold 200 million iOS devices, 25 million iPads sold, 14 billion apps downloaded from app store
- Newsstand - magazines - background downloads so you can read them offline
- Notification Center seems a bit like the bar at the top of Android.
- Twitter integration
- PC free - wireless syncing. Can activate iPhone straight away, no need to connect to PC, software updates OTA, a bit like many Android OEMs have been doing for a while.
- Messaging service - like BBM - iMessage - no OSX integration?
- iCloud - automatic syncing of stuff from your mobile device into cloud storage and automatic pushing from the cloud to all devices.
- Admitted Mobile Me was rubbish - scrapped and replaced by iCloud. No ads. Free.
- All Mobile Me apps included in iCloud, plus these:
- Sharing apps, books and docs across devices
- Daily backups
- Cloud storage APIs for apps - works on Macs and PCs too
- Photo Stream - cloud photos - built into pre-existing apps - only remotely stores for 30 days
- iTunes in the Cloud
- A little cloud button shows all the songs you own, you press it to download to said device.
- Seems to automatically download to all devices once a purchase is made. Up to 10 devices.
- iCloud running in iOS 4.3 from today as a beta. Free.
- iTunes Match - enables you to replicate all the music you've ripped (What about stuff you've ripped off!?) in the iTunes cloud in order to then consume it on multiple devices.
- This is the bit that costs - Match costs $25 per year - presumably to compensate rights-holders
- Showed some photos of a great big datacenter - apparently cost half a billion dollars. Pocket change.
On the whole this was more or less what was expected. The BBM thing will be another blow for RIM, while iOS5 and iCloud will make iOS an even more desirable platform. But there were no gasp-inducing surprises out of left-field, and iTunes Match was pretty much what we expected it to be. Having said that, it looks better than the Amazon and Google equivalents in their current forms.
P.S. Here's what Ben Drury, CEO of 7Digital had to say on iCloud.
"We've always supported the concept of making consumers' personal music collections accessible on all their devices - indeed we've allowed customers to re-download their purchases for several years. As consumers use more and more connected devices in their daily lives, accessing all their content easily and instantly on all their devices has become a compelling need.
"The new services from Apple are a step in the right direction but only if all your devices are Apple devices. Their platform is essentially closed and proprietary - customers are forced into choosing Apple for all their devices. 7digital's approach, through our open APIs and partnerships, is to offer cloud functionality that is independent of device - you can use our service on Android, BlackBerry, PC, Mac, Linux, Safari, Chrome etc."
