You may or may not have known that yesterday Apple released it’s newest iteration of it’s highly popular iOS operating system for iDevices–5.0. As you may imagine it’s a pretty big update. To find out full details, visit the Apple site.

I’ve highlighted just a few of my personal top favorites. Of course, there are many many others, but these are the ones that really stick out to me.

Notifications

Notifications

Notification Center

Now, instead of getting those pesky popups interrupting your important Angry Birds time, there’s simply a very discreet dropdown from the top of the screen that just says you have something there (image #1). Whether it’s a text, a reminder, a push notification from a sports app, or anything that used to pop up right in the middle of the screen now comes quietly from the top so you don’t accidentally tap buttons anymore.

Even better is the new Notification Center (image #2). This is where all of your notifications, reminders, calendar events, and even a stock ticker and current local weather reside. From any screen anywhere, just flick your finger from top down to ‘pull down the curtain’. It’s really sweet!

Shortcuts – Keyboard extension

Keyboard Shortcuts Menu

Shortcut In Action

Long sought after, but not at all advertised is the new keyboard shortcut feature. It goes along the lines with autofill–as you begin to type a word, iOS will give you it’s suggestion so you don’t have to continue typing the rest of the word. Now, you can customize and make your own! Just go to Settings>General>Keyboard and at the bottom of the page is the ‘Shortcuts’ section. Tap ‘Add New Shortcut…’ to type the phrase and shortcut you’d like. Some popular ones are address, email, and phone, but there are many others. If you find you use the same phrases over and over, this feature is surely for you. Oh, and it works anywhere you can type anything, not just in texts or emails!

iCloud

iCloud Settings Menu

iCloud Online

In my opinion the best of all, iCloud is the new MobileMe (which doesn’t exist anymore). The main focus of iCloud is to be able to have your Address Book, Calendars, Documents (from Numbers and Pages, etc), Photos, and email (@me.com account only) all in one place–in the cloud. Let’s say you have just 1 Apple device–a laptop for example–you store all your contacts in Address Book, you use your Calendar religiously, and maybe even you have some presentations and Docs you’d like to store. It can all be done through iCloud automatically–you don’t have to manually sync anything. If that wasn’t good enough, where this service really shines is if you have multiple Apple devices–say an iPhone, iPad, and a laptop. Storing everything in the cloud allows you to access all of this information anywhere you are from any device. And better yet, when you add a contact on your phone for example, it will automatically sync to the cloud AND to all your other devices almost instantaneously. Setup is easy–once you install iOS 5, the new welcome screen will walk you through–in fact, you even use your current Apple ID. Oh and did I forget to mention: THIS IS ALL FREE!! How awesome!

Other ‘Yays’ & ‘Nays’

Yay – Uninterrupted iTunes syncing. Your iDevices will now sync in the background so you can still use them during the process.

Yay – Camera access from the Lock screen and ‘shutter release’ using volume buttons.

Yay – ‘Reminders’ is a great to-do list that syncs with iCloud but also allows you to make location specific reminders–like the next time you drive by the food store to ‘get milk’.

Yay – Photo editing – auto-enhance and cropping right in the ‘Photos’ app.

Nay – WiFi iTunes syncing. Cool idea, but the device needs to be plugged into power for this feature to work….kind of defeats the purpose of wireless right?

Nay – no Siri for anything other than iPhone 4s – not cool.

Hope this all helps! Let me know if you have any questions!