TNW Review: A complete guide to Apple’s iOS 5 with iCloud, an OS 14 years in the making

Calendar, Contacts, Maps & Weather

In the interest of enhancing your ability to use all of its apps from the devices themselves, rather than requiring a computer, Apple has added the ability to create and rename calendars on any iOS device. You can also delete old ones that you don’t use any more.

Tapping and holding, or double-tapping, on a day and time will create a new event. You can now drag appointments around the calendar once you’ve created them instead of having to change the time manually and duration can be adjusted with handles that appear on either side of a selected event. This makes tweaking start times and lengths very easy and much more touch friendly.

On the iPad there is a nice new yearly view that allows you to see the entire year at a glance with days that you are busier color coded in yellow and orange. You can also swipe to change the months in the monthly view.

There is also an iCloud-based invite system that allows you to create an event and invite any of your contacts by email. If they are also on iOS 5, they will get reminder alerts from iCloud when the event nears. You access this by tapping on the Invitees field inside an event.

Contacts, however, still lack one major feature that would allow them to break the cord completely: the ability to add and remove groups and to edit their members. I don’t understand why this is still a non-feature as it effectively requires you to connect your iPhone to a computer to create and edit the groups in Address Book or whatever application you use to manage your contacts on a Windows PC.

Aside from the lack of group editing though, Contacts has been enhanced with a few more fields, including additions for Twitter and for relationships. This Relationship field will enable applications like Reminders and Siri voice assistant to incorporate your family into their programming. Reminders even asks you to specify relationships when you fire up your first reminder.

This way you can say things like “remind me to call my Mom” and these apps will search your contacts for the item with ‘Mom’ in the relationship field.

The Weather app is largely unchanged, although you can now tap on the daily display to get an hourly forecast for your given day. This forecast is scrollable. In addition, Location Services will now give you your local weather automatically.

The Maps app has also only gotten a couple of tweaks. You can now print your Maps and directions using AirPrint, in an option that appears with the traffic and map display choices.

Maps will also provide you with up to 3 alternate routes to a location, which will appear as faint blue lines on the map after you’ve asked it for directions. You can choose between these directions by tapping on each route, allowing you to switch between highways and city streets, for instance. This can be especially useful for biking or walking directions as it allows you to get a route that avoids busy streets.

Reminders

Reminders is another particularly useful tool that doesn’t just serve as a way to keep you on top of tasking by listing them ready for you to complete them, it can also be set to display your tasks with due dates but also be reminded to perform a task or complete something when you physically arrive at a location,

Apple has made sure to make it easy to remember the things you shouldn’t forget. Before, you would have to take out your phone, write down a note and hope you remember it or set an alarm, but with the new app and Apple’s new Siri functionality, you can either enter a reminder in your to-do list or tell Siri to add it.

If you own an iPhone 4S, you could theoretically ask Siri to remind you to feed your neighbour’s cat as soon as you get home. When you do this, the assistant will bring up the Reminders app, add in the task and then set a location flag, meaning that when you arrive home, the app will immediately notify you of the task you need to complete – in this case feed the cat.

There is one annoying bug in Reminders in that you cannot set an address other than your current location or one attached to a contact. It would be nice to be able to choose from a location with the Maps dialog or simply to punch in one as well. I’m not sure if this was intended, but it seems silly.

All reminders can be synced with iCal, Outlook, and iCloud, ensuring changes you make are updated automatically on all your devices, but also your calendars on different machines.

Gone are the days are being moaned at by your significant other, boss or friend. Fire up Reminders and enter your tasks and locations, or if you have an iPhone 4S tell it what you need to do, and never forget another important reminder.

Newsstand

As part of the iOS 5 update, Newsstand comes as another native iOS application in iOS 5 that cannot be deleted, even if you don’t think you will use it. The app itself is an extension of the App Store, providing a way to subscribe, read and manage your magazine and newspaper app subscriptions in one place.

To utilise the new Newsstand application, simply launch the app from your homescreen and if you have already subscribed to any publications via the App Store, they will all be listed within the virtual bookshelf in the app itself – if you are new to these subscriptions, hit the ‘Store’ link and you will be whisked away to the App Store to choose from the long list of publications offering iOS versions of their newspaper or magazine.

When you make a purchase, it will automatically be added to your Newsstand app. Every time a publication pushes a new issue, the app will update them in the background, delivering you the latest news and information as soon as it becomes available.

If a publication issues updates to that issue after it Newsstand has done its ‘once daily’ pushed update, you will still get the updates, but only if you launch the publication itself. Newsstand is limited to a single daily release for each publication in order to keep data transfer rates down.

One irritating issue is the fact that, as it is effectively a folder itself, you cannot place Newsstand inside any other folder. This means that you cannot tuck it away if you plan on not using it. I’ve resigned myself to shoving it on the last page of my iOS devices as I rarely use them to read magazines, but if you’re a regular reader that has been looking for a way to collate your various subscriptions, this should be a nice addition.

Newsstand is a bid by Apple to bolster the popularity of periodicals on iOS devices by collating them together in one place in a similar fashion to the iBookstore. It remains to be seen whether this will be successful, although the fact that it will be present on the home screen of every iOS 5 updated device and every new one sold from now on probably doesn’t hurt its chances.

Text Editing

Text editors who use the iPad and iPhone to type large volumes of text should rejoice as you’ve gotten a couple of nice features here.

One is the new Shortcuts option that is tucked away in Settings>General>Keyboard. This is basically a TextExpander feature for iOS that allows you to assign short text strings that trigger longer phrases. This way you can type ‘adr.’ and have Shortcuts fill out your address or, as the example is given, type ‘omw’ and have ‘On my way!’ appear. This is obviously a feature that is aimed at texting, but if you do a significant amount of text editing on iDevices, this could become a valuable tool for entering strings of frequently used text.

There are also some enhancements to the text editing popup that you get when you select a bit of text. The size of each of the sections has been slightly enlarged and the touch-targets are bigger, making it easier to choose from the editing options.

Unfortunately there is no support for rich text editing outside of mail at this point so no options for italics, bold or underlining here.

The Replace option is gone, and ‘Suggest…’ has taken its place, offering you a selection of word options for unknown text entries. You can also now tap the right arrow to reveal a Define option that allows you to grab the definition of a given word, which appears in a popup.

AirPlay Mirroring

Apple has added the ability to mirror the iPad’s entire display to an HDTV with iOS 5. This AirPlay Mirroring was previously thought to be limited to the iPad 2 but Apple announced last week that it would also be on the iPhone 4S.

This feature requires that you have an iPad 2 or an iPhone 4S and an Apple TV all running their latest versions of iOS.

In any app, iOS wide, you can now double-tap the home button to bring up the multitasking bar. Once you do, you can swipe over to the left to reveal the AirPlay button. Tap the button and choose the Apple TV from the list of options.

AirPlay Mirroring is another stealth feature of iOS 5 that I think will have a wide spread impact on the way that people use their TV’s to game and video chat from their living rooms. It effectively turns the iPad and iPhone into gaming consoles and remote teleconferencing systems. I can’t stress enough how cool of a feature this is for those that own an Apple TV.

Music and Videos

The ‘iPod’ app has been split into two separate apps in iOS 5, the Music and Videos apps. Not much has been changed about the way that they operate though so there’s not much to talk about but there are a couple of tweaks worth mentioning.

The Music app now has access to iTunes in the Cloud downloads of your songs, as the Video app does your TV shows. These are accessed by tapping the cloud icon next to each item in the list as we mentioned earlier in the iTunes in the Cloud section.

Long song names now scroll by while you listen, rather than just getting truncated with an ellipsis and you can also now hold down on a song’s name to get a popup that shows you the name of the track and artist.

The iPad’s version of the Music app has also been redesigned with a clean and simple layout.

Accessibility

Apple has added a feature called AssistiveTouch its already extensive arsenal of accessibility features in iOS 5. This is a system that allows you to turn on a touch based panel which activates the hardware features of the device.

You can use AssistiveTouch to activate the home button or lock the screen, or change the volume, for instance. There is also a provision for creating custom gestures that you can assign to actions. These gestures can be activated using 3, 4 or even 5 fingers.

While these are designed for use by those who need a primarily gesture-based interface for one reason or another, there is also some potential here to create some shortcuts that anyone who prefers a touch-based device to be ‘only touch’ could use to make that happen. There are also some applications for times when the hardware controls are obscured, as when locked down in brackets at a school, museum or in another industrial application.

Whatever the use, it just goes to show that Apple is always thinking when it comes to making its devices more usable for more people.

There is also a new ‘Speak Selection’ option that allows you to select a chunk of text and use an option in the contextual popup to have your iPhone speak that text out loud to you. Pretty cool, and should help those with impaired vision, especially on the smaller screen of the iPhone.

iPad Only

A few of the tweaks made to iOS 5 are limited to just the iPad alone. Some of these, like the tabbed browsing in Safari, are integrated into certain apps. But some stand alone as part of the system and make the iPad iOS experience that much better.

Two of these changes make using the iPad so much better than it has ever been. First, iOS 5 introduces a split keyboard for the iPad. This allows you to pull up the regular keyboard and pinch it apart in the middle, splitting it into two smaller thumb-sized panels that sit on the sides of the iPad. This revolutionizes typing while holding the iPad in portrait, effectively turning the huge ‘regular’ keyboard into a comfortable thumb typing keyboard.

You can also tap the small keyboard butto in the bottom right corner of the screen and choose to simply un-dock the keyboard, floating it up to the lower third of the screen. This is less useful but perhaps still nice for people with larger thumbs. To re-join the split keyboard you can pinch it back together or use the button. This feature makes typing while holding the iPad comfortably a huge joy, rather than a huge pain.

The other major change is the official addition of the ‘Multitasking gestures’ introduced to developers in the beta of iOS 4.3. These gestures, which you can enable via the Settings>General menu, allow you to pinch out of an app to the home screen with 4 fingers, swipe up to reveal the multitasking bar and swipe left or right while inside an app to switch back and forth.

Since beginning to use the gestures earlier this year, I have grown completely addicted to the quickness and slickness of their use. I rarely ever touch my home button besides waking the device now and it truly feels great to be able to jam around between apps and access the multitasking bar with just a swipe of your fingers. It makes using the iPad feel fresh and truly makes you feel like you’re living in the future.

There are a scattering of other items that are different on the iPad, like the ability to pick a particular event while using the iPad as a digital picture frame, but these are the two major ones.

These concessions to the iPad as a much larger device that has room for more fingers and that may be a bit too large for thumbs to type on are a good sign. I hope to see more enhancements to iOS in the future that take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen real estate.

Conclusion

Should you upgrade? Yes. Absolutely with no hesitation do it now. My devices have been almost completely stable on iOS 5 since beta 7 and the GM seed, which is apparently nearly identical to the release version of iOS 5, is top notch. There hasn’t been a jump forward like this in many versions of iOS and it literally makes your device feel brand new it’s so good.

Yes, there are bugs and quirks, but that doesn’t surprise me as so much work has been done on this release. Overall I found any issues to be so minor as to be unnoticeable by most users.

What we’re seeing with iOS 5 and iCloud is the culmination years worth of blood, sweat and tears expended chasing the vision of Steve Jobs. This vision was set out 14 years ago by Jobs himself in a Q&A session shortly after returning to Apple as CEO in 1997. This wasn’t even a prepared presentation, Jobs’ statement was in response to a question from the audience, but in that detailed answer, he laid out the seeds of what would become iCloud, Apple’s array of connected devices and the future of the Mac as just another device, rather than the collect-all “digital hub”.

Apple may have taken a detour in 2001 in describing the iMac as that hub, but the vision was clear. That vision has begun to be realized with iOS 5 and iCloud.

I say ‘begun’ because the elements that are in place do feel great, but it is up to developers to adopt and expand on the themes and uses of iCloud to truly make it successful. Only then will we see whether iCloud can not only bear up under the logistical strain of millions of users, but also whether it can deliver on the promise of a connected hub in the cloud that allows us a seamless client-based experience across all of our devices.

It is also up to Apple to ensure that the service runs smoothly and that it drives forward with plans to integrate iCloud into every aspect of the iDevice and Mac experience.

That being said, it works very well now and the addition of a host of upgrades and tweaks like Notification Center, the Camera upgrades and more, this is easily the best version of iOS yet and makes the iPhone and iPad feel less static and more like the part of a living, breathing service. Go get it now, you won’t be sorry.