Especially the demos by Chris Crummey showed a lot about the great mobile offerings being available especially for Connections … and yes, one more time to realize that Connections is a central part of the IBM social business strategy. Like it or not - it’s a fact!
Being a huge fan of Zite I absolutely loved the magazine style dashboard Chris showed in the last part of this session!
No, I didn’t get the new iPhone 4S … although “Siri” sounds superinteresting. But of course I upgraded my devices (iPhone 4 & iPad2) to iOS 5.
I started with my iPhone minutes after iOS 5 was available (I had updated iTunes to 10.5 the day before) and it turned out to be a mistake. As I should have expected a lot of people tried the same and the whole process of upgrading took over 4 hours (including the infamous 3200 error). So there wasn’t much time to play with the new OS that evening.
As I started to explore iOS 5 in detail the next day the first visual impression was a bit disappointing. As with the 4S the new OS looks almost the same from the outside but if you look inside it’s a huge change. Of course there’s the notification center and all the stuff you can read about everywere … but there’s also a great number of small improvements that some but not all people may find very useful: e.g. the new shortcuts, iTunes WLAN Sync, readerlis, flagging emailst and other stuff.
Next was the iPad and it took much less time then. I ran into the “Can’t turn on iCloud Backup” error but that resolved itself too somewhat later. The iPad has some special improvements too: e.g. Tabbed browsing for Safari.
In regards of iCloud - the iCloud is currently great for Backup. Nice to see in the morning that your stuff was backuped overnight. For apps time will show. There are not too many apps available at this time that fully support iCloud. “Keynote” is one of those I use that is supporting iCloud and it works great.
I find it a bit disappointing that IBM Lotus Traveler (Active Sync based email, calendar and contacts) isn’t supported by iCloud. But I can live with that. On the other hand syncing bookmarks via iCloud Control Center on a Windows PC is cool stuff too.
So after playing around with iOS 5 I am sure I will love it. So many things that improve mobile life and make it easier. The only thing I am not sure that I will like is the new music center on the iPad. It’s totally re-designed and I am not used to it for now.
As I said it’s a new feeling of mobile live and it will put to a test this week: first during a two day conference in Frankfurt and then during the weekend on a poker trip to Dublin. Of course I will let you know how iOS 5 performs in the wild ;-)
