Apple iOS 5 review

In order to use iCloud on a PC or laptop, you’ll need to download the iCloud Control Panel for Windows from Apple’s website. Without this add-on, you won’t see photos and videos from the new Photo Stream on your computer, nor calendars and contacts. For calendars, Outlook 2007 or later is required.

Siri
One of the main new features – albeit one that’s only available on the iPhone 4S – is Siri. This improves immensely on the capabilities of the iPhone 4’s voice command facility, which wasn’t very accurate, or useful. In combination with other new features in iOS 5 this ‘intelligent assistant’ can set reminders, send emails and text messages, make calls, wake you up in the morning, answer maths problems and more. Siri works with almost all the built-in apps (not Twitter, though), so you can ask it to find a weather forecast, read out a text message, find information on the internet and start a timer. It’s particularly useful for the blind and visually impaired, but also a time saver for everyone. For example, you can say to Siri, “Send a message to my brother” and it will ask which contact details you want to use after bringing up your brother’s name on the screen. Equally, you can say, “Set a reminder for Dad’s birthday on 29th February”, and it will put this in your calendar.

Unfortunately, it’s currently in Beta, which means it can’t answer certain questions in the UK. For instance, it can only look for businesses, maps and traffic information in the US at the moment. Until Apple strikes a deal with a UK-based information provider, British owners will have to wait. In our tests Siri struggled with regional accents, only working reliably for people speaking the Queen’s English. It could cope with slight accents, but proved hit and miss.

As with Dragon Dictation, a free app that’s been available for a while on the iPhone, Siri has to send data to Apple’s servers for processing. The transcription isn’t carried out on the iPhone 4S’s dual-core processor. This will eat into your data allowance, and means that Siri will not function if you don’t have a Wi-Fi or data connection via your mobile provider.

Siri, in our tests, was able to discern punctuation in our speech, so was able to send texts and emails with neatly formatted sentences. It doesn’t work out where the punctuation should go – you have to include the words “comma” and “full stop” where they should appear in the sentence.

Siri’s voice has also got a long way to go before it sounds natural. We can see a big market in offering celebrity voices, just as with TomTom’s satnavs.