Table Of Contents

Notifications | Game Center and iCloud Gaming | Twitter Integration | iCloud | Siri, Dictation & Wireless iTunes Syncing | iMessage | Camera and Photos | Settings | Safari | Mail | Calendar & Contacts | Reminders | Newsstand | Text Editing | iPad Only & Conclusion

If you were in the audience at WWDC this June when Apple, along with then-CEO Steve Jobs, introduced iOS 5 to the audience of developers and journalists, you would have felt how stunned many of the attendees were at the sheer breadth of changes brought by iOS 5. This was no minor update to Apple’s mobile OS, this felt like years worth of work compressed into the 12 months since the release of iOS 4.

At the clear center of the changes was the new Apple product personally announced by Steve Jobs: iCloud. The culmination of a decade’s worth of work converting the ‘digital hub’ from the Mac to a cloud-based seamless syncing service, you could sense right away that iCloud was obviously intertwined deeply with the future of Apple’s products.

Nearly every changed part of iOS 5 is touched in some way by iCloud and very few bits of iOS have remained unchanged this time around. A deep and staggering array of changes, some 250+ in all, have made this the most exciting release of iOS since the App Store and native developer API’s were introduced. It’s truly an exciting product for iOS device users and developers and should propel the ecosystem forward by leaps and bounds.

If you’ve been with the iPhone from the beginning then you will be absolutely stunned by how fresh and agressive the changes in iOS 5 feel to you. If you’re a newcomer, then this is the perfect jumping off point as Apple embarks on its iCloud-enabled future.

The work that has gone into iOS 5 is frankly staggering. Walking out of the WWDC keynote, I just couldn’t imagine how so much got added and whether it would be as polished as it looked in the presentations. After living with it day in and day out for several months, I can tell you that I am still stunned.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by how much is different here so lets dig into the major changes in iOS 5 and its iCloud integration to see whether it lives up to the last 5 paragraph’s—and the last 5 month’s worth—of hype.

A caveat, before we begin, is that I will only be covering Apple’s newly announced Siri voice service and Dictation feature here as an overview as I have not been able to test it personally and we don’t review what we can’t test. Look for separate reviews of those in the coming days as we review the iPhone 4S.