We’ve talked about other awesome features that got glossed over in the keynote already like Wi-Fi syncing, advanced gestures and dictionary everywhere, but we think other features are going to be just as awesome:
• iPad Split Keyboard: The keyboard will be able to be ‘broken in half’ so it’ll be easier to type with your thumbs. This makes a ton of sense in portrait mode, as the current keyboard is too wide to effectively type with your thumbs and too small to comfortable type with the rest of your fingers.
• LED Flash on incoming calls and alerts: I’m not sure if this is going to be useful or ridiculously annoying but it’s definitely going to grab your attention. Imagine receiving a call in the dead of night, that flash will be blaring for you to pick up the call.
• Custom vibration patterns: There’s fewer joys than feeling a vibration in your pants and knowing exactly what that vibration meant. Ideally, you’ll be able to differentiate between the different alerts with custom patterns. I will definitely use this.
• Hourly weather forecasts: Oh my god. Did Apple finally update the weather app? Given how bare bones the weather app is, hourly weather forecasts are going to be a god send. It’ll definitely make the stock weather app ‘good enough’ for most people.
• Swipe to delete songs and playlists: You mean, I can finally delete a song from my phone without using iTunes? I’M NOT WORTHY.
• Restore from iCloud: Makes sense, as we’re finally untying iPhones and iPads from computers that iOS devices can restore itself from the cloud by itself. This cloud thing is going to be quite cool.
• Improved FaceTime quality: These are one of those slight updates that I probably won’t notice but given how good FaceTime looks already, it’ll be even nicer to get it even clearer.
• Emoji emoticons: Life is happier with Emoji. That’s a verifiable fact.
There’s going to be a ton more little features that we’ll find when using iOS 5 so stay tuned (or let us know)!
Image credit: MacLife
Warren
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 10:33 AMI’m really not that excited about many of the features coming to iOS. There is nothing “revolutionary” and hasn’t been since the first iPhone and things that should be easy to implement that would make a world of difference are missing.
Notification Center is going to be a huge improvement, OTA updates and wireless syncing it’s about time, but where are:
1) Widgets. Especially for iPad. It would be awesome to see one screen with a summary of weather, mail, SMS, news, calendar etc.
1a) Lock screen widgets.
2) Scheduler. At least for notifications. Nothing more infuriating than going to bed, just falling asleep and a barrage of email notifications coming in. I use my phone as my alarm so it can’t be muted or in another room. This feature has been in Nokia and Blackberry’s for years.
3) Native Face Dialling.
4) Custom gestures.
5) Changeable email notification tones!
6) Ringtone or notification tones from your iPod library!!
Sam
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 10:49 AMWarren, do what I do, flip the switch to silent when you go to bed. The alarm goes off just fine regardless.
damo
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 11:15 AMIndeed.
Jason
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 11:30 AMyou can even turn vibration off when on silent so that nothing will disturb your sleep. alarms will go off as per usual.
Warren
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 11:32 AMThere are a couple of issues with that.
Firstly, the phone still vibrates and creates noise.
Secondly, and more importantly, when the phone is on silent you don’t hear it ring either. An emergency call from a family member or close friend or would go unheard.
If you want to jailbreak, the iScheduler does this. It’s not that hard.
pilot
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 11:37 PM‘Airplane Mode’ – game changer.
Patrick
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 11:30 AMI was looking forward to reading about 200 new features in this article… 8 features pretty boring. Why not write one article about the new iOS update rather than 20 – oh that’s right advertising.
Andrew
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 12:37 PMI too only followed the link as it said 200 Unsung Features. This story is a waste of bandwidth.
Ben Thomas
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 12:49 PMMe three. Where are the other 192 new features?
Corey
Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 8:55 AMMe four. That’s just slack gizmodo =\
Mr Biggles
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 11:38 AMAwesome – Time to dump my SGS2 for the iPhone5…
It’s about time Android picked up their game and brought out some of these features too!
…oh, wait a sec…
wsDK_II
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 1:23 PMnice!
apple will always be behind in the game, because it does take a bit longer to wait for someone else to make it, then you have to steal it, make it ‘pretty’ (fag it up) and then market it to the minions.
ahh, i cant wait till they call it magical again.
seriously Apple you are f*cked up
Penmonicus
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 11:38 AMYeah, but can I get a freakin’ custom SMS tone yet?!
Elly Hart
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 11:40 AMyes!
BenDTU
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 11:40 AM“LED Flash on incoming calls and alerts”
Damn that is clever! Never change, Apple.
olearymo
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 2:23 PMare… are you being sarcastic, dude?
Sam
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 12:08 PMBiggest unsung feature I’m looking forward to is being able to organise photo galleries on my phone. It’s annoying to have to sync them all on the computer.
jigar
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 12:33 PMthe variable flash is great for the hard of hearing/deaf
Barry
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 12:39 PMIs it just me or does an OS really mean a few pretty screen updates these days? It all started with Windows Vista. Anyhow my point is, is this update different enough at the kernel level that we can call it a backward compatible new OS?
It seems too many manufacturers are in this practice these days. A new OS is NOT additional apps & few more pretty screens. It is more kernel level capability.. or at least it used to be.
JT...
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 12:43 PMSo out of 200 these are the ones that stand out? Even out of those 8 only 2 are actually useful.
“Hourly weather forecasts” come on why are you wetting your pants over this, unless you’re a weather junky.
Ben Evans
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 1:16 PMAm I the only person that wants to see a local time on the weather app? I’m always calling overseas (US, UK etc) and would like to be able to open the weather app and have a local time in addition to the local weather. I know there are other apps for this, but would it really be that hard?
Matt
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 2:02 PMWow… I love watching all the Mac haters come out to play…
wsDK_II
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 2:28 PMI love watching Mac lovers waste their money!
DonkeyKong
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 3:42 PMI agree Matt I love how fandroids just have to put down anything Apple.
It’s like being back in high school when the jocks would put down the geeks because of their own insecurities/small p*nis.
“Oh Apple copied this and that. Android had this first.” Then why didn’t they do it right in the first place? If you’re gonna make something, do it right the first time. Then you wouldn’t have companies like Apple coming along and making them better for you. Can’t even get your scroll bar scrolling properly. Scrolls like a stuttering imbecile on a gravel road.
Get over it fandroids. Windows did and look at the original interface they came up with.
Ha
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 10:12 PMWhy isn’t Apple doing it right in the first place? Why hasn’t Apple copied it sooner?
My Nokia has grid lines, my Nokia can edit photos without quitting camera, my Nokia can do reminders, delete songs without syncing, LED flash on SMS, weather including temperature and rainfall as a graph, free maps and navigation with voice, custom backgrounds and ringtones (and therefore vibration patterns), video call, dedicated camera button, multitasking, working bluetooth and accessing memory card directly on computer.
So why didn’t Apple make their OS do all these things in the first place? Sure symbian doesn’t do it very well, by why hasn’t Apple done it better?
Also note… Nothing about Android here, how you going to work Nokia into a clever derogatory wordplay?
wade
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 9:03 AMNokia? dont make me laugh. I had nokias for years and they fell of the wagon a long time ago. I quit nokia after the N82, moved to iphone and love it. (still not perfect but no phone is)
DonkeyKong
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 3:52 PMNokia couldn’t hold the ball that was glued to their hands. Now they’ve sold their soul to Microsoft just to stay in the game. <- how's that for word play?
Ha
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 11:13 PMFair enough!
Wasn’t saying Nokia was great, “symbian doesn’t do it very well”… Just saying that Apple didn’t even HAVE those features while Nokia did. Shouldn’t they have been a part of the original iPhone?
olearymo
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 2:23 PM“Swipe to delete”
Good to see their acquired (human) resource from Palm is earning his keep.
Todd
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 2:44 PMLED flashing hey…. I really hope that in the next iPhone they chuck a status LED in the front for things such as this, I really miss being able to glance at my phone and see an amber light flashing telling me I’ve missed something. But I guess having my camera flash go nuts every time I get a call will have to do…