Apple IOS 5 now available through iTunes

Today, Apple have made available for download the eagerly anticipated iOS 5, two days before their new smartphone (the iPhone 4S for those that have been living in a cave) hits the shelves.

You can get your hands on the new iOS by plugging your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch in to your PC/Mac and opening up iTunes. You may have to download the latest version of iTunes first but once you have done that you just update your device as normal. The first piece of good news iOS 5 brings is that this will be the last time you will be made to use iTunes for downloads/updates as iOS goes PC free from this point forward via iCloud!

So what else is new?

Apple has said that “iOS 5 includes more than 200 new features for your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch” making it a pretty significant upgrade. Below are a few of our favourites:

Notification Centre – This is a feature that should have been available a long, long time ago, nevertheless it is great news that is has finally arrived with iOS 5. Receiving a new message, E-mail, update used to result in a pop-up which you would have to deal with regardless of what you were doing. So if you were playing a game for example, the game would automatically be paused so that you could deal with the new notification. With iOS 5 the notification centre is available by swiping down from the top of the screen and a new notification will no longer be a disturbance, not particularly original as Android have been doing something similar for a while, but good news none the less.

iMessage- Very similar to the BBM system that Blackberry have done a timely job of screwing up over the last few days, iMessage allows iOS 5 users to send unlimited text messages, photos, videos, locations and contacts to other iOS 5 users. If you want to be really fancy you can start a conversation on your iPhone and pick up the same conversation at a later date using another of your iOS 5 enabled devices.

Camera- Not exactly a huge update, and again, one that should have really been implemented a while ago, the iPhone camera can now be accessed straight from the lock screen and the volume + button can be used to control the shutter. It is also possible to do some basic editing using the standard camera app and if you have other iOS 5 devices such as an iPad or iPod Touch, you can automatically download your photos to them using Photo Stream via the iCloud.