10 of the best iOS 5 iPhone features

If you're an iPhone user but not ready to rush out and buy the new 4S quite yet, there was still plenty in the recent launch announcement to interest you. At the same event, Apple confirmed what the rest of us were being offered in their latest software update: iOS 5.

 

Among the 200+ iOS5 updates and enhancements are quite a few which are worth a closer look for just about every iPhone and iPad user.  Here’s 10 of the most interesting:

 

A double-press of the home button when your iPhone is locked will now offer you a camera button. It’s a nice shortcut when you need to take a quick pic.

 

Among a whole raft of camera improvements is another simple addition - you can now take a shot by pressing the volume up button. If you grab your phone and check out what it’s like to take a photo like that, you’ll see it’s a much more natural setup.

 

Quite a number of the iOS5 updates fix things which iPhone users had been complaining about for some time. One of the biggest gripes was that there was no week view on the calendar app, but that’s now sorted - just turn the phone on its side when using the calendar and there it is.

 

This is an excellent new feature and something which we’ve used all the time since installing the update. You can now view and manage all your main notifications from the lock screen, so when you get an email, text, tweet or any message service from your apps, that’s where they appear. You can choose what to allow on there from the phone settings, and by sweeping left to right over the message in question do something with it.

 

Also, drawing your finger down the screen from the very top at any time other than from the lock screen will bring all your latest notifications back again. Very handy.

 

You can use the autocorrect feature on your iOS5 phone to create useful typing shortcuts. For example, I’ve set up the code ‘KRKD’, which when I type into a message allows me to insert ‘Kind Regards, Karl Doody’ without having to type the whole thing. There’s an excellent detailed guide of the full scope of this feature on the GigaOm website, which also shows how you can make use of it to create typing shortcuts for email addresses.

 

Apple has upgraded their weather app to provide hourly updates for the following 12 hours - draw your finger down the screen when using the weather app to reveal them. It’s turned an average app into something much better.

 

It seems to have taken Apple an age to get this issue sorted but you can now create additional photo albums on the phone itself to organise all your images and videos, rather than having to keep them in one giant camera roll. Hit the ‘edit’ button at the top right of the photos app to add new albums.

 

Press and hold your finger on  a word when using the web or on email and you’ll now be offered a ‘define’ option. Select it and you get an instant dictionary definition.

 

iCloud pretty much does what it says on the tin - it allows you to store music, photos, documents, books, etc courtesy of Apple - which are then available across all the Apple devices you own. The iOS5 update provides 5gb of free storage space. If you’ve got a lot of content you may fill that quite quickly, but it’s always useful to have free storage space. You can buy extra capacity direct from your phone but it’s not cheap. There’s a comprehensive guide to managing your iCloud storage here.

 

If you’re a Twitter user, adding items to your timeline just became easier as Apple has built Twitter into the phone in a much more comprehensive way. What this means is that you don’t have to sign-in to Twitter every time you want to tweet from a Twitter-enabled app, and you can also tweet your own content (photos, camera, Safari, YouTube, contacts and maps) directly - so no more copying and pasting.