A closer look at iOS 5

New notifications

Say goodbye to the obtrusive pop-up alerts that interrupt your app and what you're doing. The new face of iOS notifications is an animation that appears as a horizontal strip at the top of the screen.

Notifications centre

Apple has heeded the calls of the annoyed multitude by bundling notifications in a single place. As with Android's notification bar, you can swipe down to see your alerts. You can also see a rundown of all of your messages in the lock screen, including missed calls and app updates. Sliding your finger over the app opens it, and you can clear notifications by tapping the "X" button. It also includes weather and stock widgets.

Slide to see

Slide your finger across any notice to jump right to it.

Twitter integration

At long last, iOS 5 will integrate Twitter as a sharing option from the camera and photos. You can also shoot out a tweet from there, or from YouTube, Safari or Maps. Twitter will also integrate with your contacts list, so you can view photos from your buddies' Twitter accounts.

Newsstand

A kind of iBooks for magazines and newspapers, Newsstand acts like a home screen folder. If you buy a subscription, you'll automatically receive new issues in the background, so you won't need to manually download issues yourself.

iPhone, too

Although digital editions look their most lush on the iPad's large screen, you can subscribe to magazines on the small screen, as well.

Reading list

Safari is going to make reading easier on the eyes with a new feature that gives you a stripped down view of any badly formatted article; it'll look more like an RSS feed that way. With iOS 5, you'll be able to email the meat of a story, and not just the link, from Safari. The Reading List itself lets you bookmark a story for reading later, much like other browser apps that we've seen for other platforms and in other mobile apps. If you use Safari on other Apple devices, you'll have a single, united reading list.

Reminder list

Another new feature, the Reminders app will let you create and store multiple lists, and assign a date and a location for each event. Reminders sync on iCal on the Mac with CalDAV, and on Windows with MS Exchange. Though reminders are useful, the app is like many third party to-do apps that already exist for iOS.

Mail app

Apple's bare bones emailing app will get rich text formatting, indentations and the ability to drag addresses among all the "to" fields. You'll also be able to flag messages and search message content, not just the sender, recipient and subjects.

Text editing

Underline, bold, italics and indentations are new text-editing tools.

Close-up

Here's a closer look at the new thumb-friendly split keyboard, which you can separate using multi-touch hand gestures.

Take a photo with a locked screen

To take a photo with a locked screen, you used to have to unlock the screen first, and chance losing your shot. Apple's iOS 5 provides a workaround through the auspices of a screen control and the volume rocker. A camera icon shows up directly to the right of the unlock slider, which will snap open the camera app, even if you have a passcode. Pressing the volume "up" will trigger the camera shutter button. The crowd goes wild.

Photo editing is also onboard now. One-click enhancing and iPhoto are coming to the photos app, and so is speedy colour correction. Editing options include cropping and rotating, and red-eye reduction. The app itself includes grid lines, pinch to zoom and changing the exposure by pressing and holding the screen.

Over-the-air updates

Another long-awaited feature will let you cut the USB cord. Going forward, you won't need to tether the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to your primary computer to receive major and minor iOS updates. In the future, Apple will serve them over the air, updating only the changes, rather than the entire OS anew, so updates should also be shorter. iOS 5 will back itself up before syncing, as well.

Other things that you'll be able to achieve wirelessly include: editing photos; creating and deleting calendars; and managing email folders.

iMessage

This is the BlackBerry Messenger killer that we heard about a few hours before the event. You'll be able to send text, photos, videos and contacts to anyone else who's using an iOS device, and it supports group messaging, as well.

iMessage on the iPhone and iPad

iMessage will deliver conversations to all of your available devices — if, for example, you have an iPad and an iPhone.

iMessage details

iMessage can send receipts so that you know if your message has been delivered and read. You'll also be able to see in real-time if someone's typing a note for you. iMessage works over 3G and Wi-Fi, and will encrypt your messages.

Air Play mirroring

Apple TV owners can display the contents of their Apple mobile device on the TV using a setting called Air Play mirroring — as long as all devices are on the same Wi-Fi network.

Photo editing

The photo app gets a keener eye with some basic, built-in editing tools, like red eye-reduction and cropping.

Game Center

An update to the Game Center adds turn-based games and new ways to engage with other players.