OS FOR MOBILE DEVICES

                                        

Apple CEO Steve Jobs came out of his medical leave again on Monday to announce the company's latest operating system Lion, which will make Mac feel a lot like the company's iconic tablet, the iPad.

The company also announced its pioneering iCloud cloud computing offering, besides new OS for mobile devices — iOS 5 for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

The new iOS has integrated a Twitter client with camera, pictures, browser Safari, and even maps. It even has a bookmarks feature called Reading List which can sync your bookmarks across your different Apple devices.

iPhone and iPad users will now be able to edit their pictures within the device itself thanks to iOS 5.

But the most revolutionary change to Apple device users will be felt with iCloud. Jobs said iCloud will replace the company's existing service called MobileMe that allowed users to sync their contacts, calendar, and mail with a virtual harddisk for anywhere, anytime access.

Unlike MobileMe, iCloud will also allow users to sync their apps, documents, music and photos along with contacts, calendar and mails. This means that users will be able to use apps purchased using iPhone on iPad as well as restore them using the cloud service if something goes wrong.

The iCloud will allow users to sync their iTunes music library across several devices running. "This is the first time you've seen this in the music industry. Multiple (music) downloads to different devices for no charge," said Jobs while announcing iTunes in Cloud. Earlier, Google and Amazon had announced music services based on cloud-computing.

Apple has also included a new iMessage service for its devices, akin to BlackBerry Messenger service that Research in Motion offers and which has been a bone of contention on security apprehensions in countries like India.

Jobs has been on medical leave since February this year but had made a surprise appearance to announce Apple's iPad 2 on March 3 this year. However, today's appearance at WWDC (Apple's global annual developers' conference) in San Francisco was a planned and well attended affair with over 5200 attendees in the Moscone Centre on Howard Street.

The conference began with Philip Schiller announcing Apple's newest operating system Lion. Schiller, a member of Apple's executive team, is senior vice-president of Worldwide Product Marketing and reports to Jobs.

The Lion OS X for Apple's Mac computers has multi-touch gestures built into all trackpads just like the iOS that runs iPhone and iPad. It can also support full screen apps which matters on notebooks.

It will have a pioneering resume function which will let users instantly get their windows and apps back to exactly how they were even after rebooting. Another feature is Launchpad, an iOS like creation of folders using various app icons.

Mac OS X Lion is the eighth major release of the OS with over 250 new features and 3,000 new developer APIs, which will be available to customers in July as a download from the Mac App Store for £20.99.

"The Mac has outpaced the PC industry every quarter for five years running and with OS X Lion we plan to keep extending our lead," said Philip Schiller.

"The best version of OS X yet, Lion is packed with innovative features such as new Multi-Touch gestures, system-wide support for full screen apps, and Mission Control for instantly accessing everything running on your Mac," he added.

Apple also announced in-app purchases which will be available in the built-in Lion Mac App Store. Other features include Mac App Store adding push notification; auto save for everything; sandboxing for security and delta updates to reduce download size of updates.

Yet another feature of Lion would be file-sharing service called AirDrop whereas a user in a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi network can easily drag-and-drop the files for sharing. There is improved search function and conversation like thread view in the email client.

There are over 54 million Mac users worldwide whereas iPad has sold 25 million units since it was launched 14 months ago. However, the company did not give the exact breakup of sales of iPad 2 which continues to be out of stock in many US stores.

About 15 billion songs have been sold by Apple through iTunes, making it world's number 1 music retailer, claimed Scott Forstall, Apple's senior VP for iPhone software development, who too reports to Jobs.

According to Forstall, there are 200 million iOS devices in the world put together, including iPads and iPhones.

The features of the new iOS include News Stand, using which the user can collate new issues of subscribed magazines and newspapers automatically. It has a new Notification Center, which can be accessed by swiping down from the top and includes stocks and weather notifications.

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