iOS 5!

so its been like... 1.5 -2 days of using iOS 5 now. ok, not very long... but i discovered more new stuff among the 200+ things apple said they added to iOS 5. darn you apple, why can't u just nicely release a change log like ppl normally do? (ok, i'm assuming they do anyway...)

its IS quite fun to discover what's changed in the new OS tho. As for those who have jailbroken their phones or are planning to jailbreak ur phones... well if u've jailbroken already they u probably shd just wait till the new jailbreak for iOS 5 is out to continue using whatever u jailbroke ur phone for... if you're planning to jailbreak... heck it, just update to the new iOS  5 and jailbreak when it's out... the jailbreak shouldn’t take too long to come out right? right? i've not jailbroken my phone so i seriously have no clue... ><
EDIT: FYI, i found out that redsn0w jailbreak already works with iOS 5. so go ahead and enjoy all the new features of iOS 5. unless u prefer a diff jail breaking program... but that shdnt take very long either.

When you text message someone,  your messages are in green. 

You can see when someone else is typing in iMessage, so its pretty much like MSN now XD.  When you can send thru iMessage, everything is in blue. 

Finally understood what iMessage is about today. Well i read earlier that it'll be incorporated into the SMS system, but i only saw exactly how it works today. When you text someone who isnt using iOS 5, your send message button and sent message dialogue will be in GREEN. However, when you are texting someone with iMessage, the message field will not only show 'iMessage' instead of 'Text Message', the send button and dialogue text will be in BLUE. (See pics above, i censored the names with the touchup tool in iPhoto... really cool, didn’t expect it to work so well LOL). At 1st i just tot the changing of the send button from blue to green was just another one of their small aesthetic changes.... but now i know better! The great thing about iMessage is that it's all intergrated into the OS, so i don't have to open up a separate app like Whatsapp to sms ppl... and i DON'T have a habit of using Whatsapp... so i sms my friends normally rather than doing it the free way unless i'm texting my friend overseas. Some (or rather, one) of my friends don't have the habit of checking her Whatsapp either... since i'm don't SMS a lot to have a habit of using Whatsapp, iMessage is just the perfect solution to make use of the free wifi or 3G connection (my 12 GB data plan like never, ever runs out!). Yeah, i don't SMS much so i wont use up the free SMS either, but the good thing is that now i can MMS for free too. It'll be particularly nice if say my dad gets his iPhone and we can MMS each other or smthing... or if my sis gets an iPhone too... (my dad says she'll have to wait till she's 21 tho... aw...)

Another plus is if you have an iPod or iPad, you can use iMessage too... probably useful to contact some of my friends who own iPods but not iPhones, tho i'll have to get their email address or smthing to add their iDevice as a contact 1st.

iMessage is turned on on the iPhone by default, you can choose to turn it on or off under Settings > Messages
(ok, using iMessage now, its pretty cool, like MSN but in sms style... yeah its like whatsapp, but now its INTEGRATED. i kinda feel sorry for the devs of whatsapp and other similar apps... Gosh, i finally squeezed out a precious reply from ash after sending her a pic of her idol... now i know how to get a reply from ash tsk tsk!)

Now you can also swipe down to hide the keyboard in the messages app. Previously i tried a bunch of stuff to hide the keyboard when viewing my smses (so that i can have more space to see the SMS!) but the keyboard wont go down. I'm not sure if i was doing the wrong thing previously or smthing though...

Now you can swipe to delete songs!

Loads of small stuff that they have changed... like for example, now you can DELETE SONGS from the music player. YES, FINALLY! Previously i've searched the iPod high and low, videos can be deleted, but no way to delete songs! Which is rather stupid if you were to ask me... finally we can delete songs from the iPhone too.

Also, previously when i take photos of my games which run the landscape mode, the photos are not rotated when saved in the photo album - you have to rotate them manually later on. In iOS 5, the phone will help you rotate the picture on the correct orientation. A good improvement since i do take quite a lot of SSes of my games which run in landscape mode.

The notification centre shows widgets like stocks and weather... and of cos ur notifications. Go to Settings>Notifications to pick which app you want to see banner notifications with, which u want to show in the notification centre etc... a bit more complicated, but you get more control over what you see.

The notification centre is pretty neat. You can choose which apps are able to send notifications, and you can choose whether to show the weather widget. I'm wondering if it's possible to add in some custom widgets (like how we can download widgets in the dash board on mac?)... shall search ard and see if it's possible. Currently the default one is just Yahoo weather and Yahoo stocks... pretty boring isnt it? The thing about notifications though... is that if you want to delete them from the notification centre (w/o visiting the app), you can only delete the whole chunk of notifications from the same app at a go... you can't delete em one by one. Not too sure if this really affects things much though... Oh yes, in case you cannot figure out, swipe down from the home screen to see the notification centre

Press and hold the home button to activate. Voice control takes a few seconds to start up, you can only start speaking when there's a wavy line going across the screen... the phone will play a tone + vibrate once its ready to listen to yor commands (well its doesn’t take very long for the app to get ready, don't worry)

Tried the voice control a bit more last night. It seems like all we non iPhone 4S users can do is:
call [insert contact], play [insert album name], play song by [insert artist name], stop music, play music, pause music, next track, previous track, play more songs like this (haven tried this command though)

The problem with using voice control to call ppl is that... the program don't pronounce names the same way we do, so unless it’s a relatively simple name, the phone might get it wrong. Particularly for Chinese names... Things like 'Mummy' or 'Home' is not a problem though. Still, i find it weird to talk to my phone in public.... Oh yes, have i mentioned this before? Press and hold the home button to activate voice control (just like how you press and hold the home button to activate Siri in iPhone 4S)

Siri will definitely be more useful though, you'll be able to ask Siri what the weather is like and it'll do a search and read the results to you... you can get Siri to text message, or set reminders/alarms for you... oh well, i wont be getting Siri any soon though. I believe Siri has artificial intelligence so it'll learn your preferences as you use it too?

The home screen of the Vlingo app. One thing that might be a bit irritating though, is that you have to manually hit the stop button once you have finished saying your command. The app will not auto detect when you've stopped speaking.

The various applications Vlingo works with.  Unlike the android counterpart, there is no speak to memo/notes feature here :(

For non-iPhone 4S users, you can try the free app Vlingo (download it from the iTunes store nowXD). Downloaded it previously but didn’t use voice control and so i deleted it... since we were messing around with the iPhone and samsung galaxy S2 voice control yesterday... i went to re-dl it. Lets you use voice control to send sms, emails, google search, and even update ur fb or twitter status. In fact, if you look at the samsung voice recognition program closely, there's a small 'powered by Vlingo' wording at the bottom left of the app.... so yeah... Voice control would be useful when you are say, driving for example. Or maybe you wish to dictate a long text into the app. Typing on the iPhone is still quite slow compared to typing on the computer.... Otherwise, i think directly searching your phonebook to call XXX would be faster than attempting to get voice control to recognise the person you intend to call. (unless its simple names like mentioned earlier).

iCloud is cool, the photos get uploaded to photo stream really fast, and than it'll download them to iPhotos equally quickly. It works on the windows too, but i think it'll be something like dropbox... you'll get a folder on your desktop which shows all the pictures from photo stream. I've not gone to xp to try this yet though... not even sure if that's compatible with the XP. Unlike things like your contacts or documents, you cannot view your photo stream from the iCloud website... you need to use the folder thing in windows, or iPhoto (or Aperture) in the mac to view you photo stream (or you could use say, the Apple TV, or any of your other iDevices... basically its just that photo stream is not available on the web browser).

From the iCloud website, you can see your contacts, your documents, your calender, and activate the 'Find my phone' features (send a message to your phone/mac, remotely lock your device, or securely wipe out the data on your device).

The iCloud website has a pretty minimalist feel to it... yes... the iWork is basically Apple's version of Office... and since i picked msoft office previously over the Apple iWork suite... i'm kind of regretting it now. Well the iOS versions of the iWork (Keynote, Numbers and Pages - i.e. Apple's Power Point, Excel and Word) don't come cheap at USD $9.99 each, (the mac version isnt very cheap either...) but the auto sync ah... its really very useful! Started writing some stories/fanfics, and i really want to edit or re-read my writing on the bus or MRT sometimes...! I got the compositions app last time, but it’s a minimalist writing software (some writers prefer it that way, but i don't ><) that don't even allow you to bold or italics your text. When writing stories i try to express what the characters are thinking and i want to put those in italics to differentiate between normal conversation and their thoughts so... also since it uses dropbox, the syncing is not automatic and there was once when a conflict arose that did not get resolved properly - i ended up losing a big chunk of my text :(. Main problem still, is that 1) the syncing is not automatic and 2) the writing app isnt powerful enough.

Sighz... such a shopping maniac... iCloud is really really tempting me to buy iWork. Dad - go buy a Macbook pro... and an iPad (rather than a samsung galaxy tab) and buy iWork please... i want the darn syncing feature!!!! Sad thing too that i bought the Office^2 app only to see Apple bring out its own Keynote, Numbers and Pages to the iOS later on... those 3 combined are a ton more expensive than the Office^2 though... hopefully other devs will come up with ways to properly utilise iCloud... still, things are most likely better when its by Apple since they are the manufacturers of the Mac and the iDevices afterall...

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See that small cute wireless icon there? it shows that those photos are online... Those photos in the 'Oct 11 Photo Stream' Event don't have this icon.

Oh yes, photo stream and iPhoto... the default setting in iPhoto will be to automatically dl any new photos from your photo stream. You can turn this off under Preferences > Photo Stream. When downloaded the photos will be automatically kept in an event called 'Oct 11 Photo Stream' (well they'll make a new event every month i guess). At 1st i was wondering if the photos in that new event are really stored on the computer (mostly i was worried cos of the way they auto named the event, plus, i'm still a newbie iPhoto user)... than i realised there's a small wireless icon at the bottom left hand corner of each picture when you are viewing the photo stream, indicating that those pictures are viewed wirelessly... and that icon is not there when you are in the XX Photo Stream event... ok, so my worries have been resolved XD. The photo stream update and download happens really fast. Like... within the minute it'll download the new photos... not like some programs where the auto download only check if there are new updates every 5 or 10minutes... this one is really almost instantaneous... oh another note, you cannot edit photos in the photo stream, you have to download and save it locally 1st. you also can upload photos you take with other cameras (or even photos you took off the net etc) into photo stream. All you have to do is to add it into your photo album in the iDevice, or upload it into Aperture or iPhoto, or put it into the Photo stream folder on your desktop if u're using a windows. (yeah, you can find this info on their help pages)

Some other features i noticed:
Last time you have to wait till the 1st app is downloaded and installed finish before it moves on to work on the next app. Now it continues to download the next app even when the previous one is installing, potentially saving a lot of time when installing tons of apps.

When you go to Settings>General>Usage, it shows how much space you have left on your phone (and how much is used up). Also breaks down the information to show you how much storage space each app uses. Previously you can only see this info from iTunes. (i guess w/o this feature, you can't really call the iOS 5 mac/pc free right?)

Yeah... i think i'll get back to the fanfic writing now... i'll update the post or make a new post when i discover more stuff/think of more stuff to write XD Edit: yeah right, in the end i'm still editing this post!

Edit: ok, i'll be hardworking and update the post with some pictures/screenshots... since photo stream makes things much more convenient now... XD

okay, i think that's all the pics i'll be uploading in this post... opps... could have picked a larger size when i was exporting the pics from iPhoto to photobucket... i'll try and remember that the next time round :P