Apple has just completed its keynote presentation at its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, and the firm’s VP of iOS software, Scott Forstall, has been talking about iOS 5, the latest version of its mobile OS. He told delegates that the software update will ship to customers in the autumn, and that developers attending the conference could pick up SDKs today.
Forstall started his presentation with some numbers. Among the notable ones, more than 200m iOS devices, and more than 25m iPads have been sold to date. More than 14bn apps from have been downloaded from the App Store, and Apple has paid out more than $2.5bn to iOS app developers. There are 90,000 iPad-specific apps. Oh and the iTunes music store has sold over 15bn songs.
There are 200 updates in total to iOS 5. Key ones announced just now include: 
- A notification centre where users get updates on text messages, missed calls, calendar alerts, app alerts and more, in one place. When they arrive, notifications appear briefly at the top of the screen without interrupting what you’re doing. With one swipe you can see all your notifications, and a tap will take you to its app for more detail. Notifications also appear on the lock screen, with the ability to be taken to the notifying app with just one swipe.
- A location-based reminders feature that you can set to alert you when you enter or leave given locations. Neat.
- Newsstand, a bookshelf displaying the covers of all your newspaper and magazine subscriptions in one place.
- Better Twitter integration.
- A split keyboard feature that enables you split the keyboard in two on the left and right sides of your iOS devices for two-handed (or thumbed) typing.
- Over the air updating, rather than having to plug the iOS device into a PC to activate and update it. Updates will also only updates will only require a download of the things that have changed, rather than the entire OS.
- An iOS messaging service called iMessage, enabling iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users to message each other via a cellular or wi-fi connection. iMessages are automatically pushed to all your iOS 5 devices, making it easy to maintain one conversation across your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. iMessage also features delivery and read receipts, typing indication and secure end-to-end encryption.
- AirPlay mirroring, which puts iPad 2 content on a TV, wirelessly, through Apple TV.
- Tabbed browsing on the iPad.
- Here’s the one the mobile marketing community will be most interested in/appalled at. Safari Reader, which strips out graphics – which we believe to include ads – from a website viewed on an iOS 5-enabled devices. If that’s correct, that’s not going to go down at all well with the mobile advertising community. We are currently seeking clarification from Apple on this, and on whether this functionality would also apply to sites that have already been optimised for display on a mobile device.
After Forstall’s session, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was back on stage to launch iCloud, which offers access to your photos, calendar, contacts, documents etc., via the web, on whatever Apple device you’re using.
Jobs offers a rationale for the development of the service, saying that the daily task of keeping all our device in sync is “driving us crazy”. Apple’s solution is to promote the PC and Mac to being “just a device” and moving everything to the cloud. iCloud stores the content in the cloud and pushes it wirelessly to the user’s Apple devices, with daily back-ups over wi-fi. Jobs confirms that the service will be free, and ad-free.
