Apple iOS 5 review

Twitter is now integrated, so you can tweet from Safari, Maps and choose photos to upload from your camera roll. Photos can now be edited: you can crop, rotate and remove red-eye. Emails now support rich text, including bold and italic and underlined fonts. The Calendar has been given new views: a year view on the iPad and week view on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The Weather app hasn’t been forgotten – there’s now a Local Weather tab which gives you a forecast based on your location, and it also provides an hourly forecast.

A less obvious change is the ability to show everything on your iPhone or iPad’s screen on your TV via AirPlay Mirroring. Previously you were limited to photos and videos in Apple’s own apps. Now, you can see any app on the big screen, and it also supports screen rotation and zooming.

There are a few enhancements specifically for the iPad, including a system-wide split-screen keyboard. To enable it, simply drag the keyboard with two fingers to the opposite sides of the screen. An update to Safari puts web pages in draggable tabs, just like in a desktop web browser. This is much faster than tapping a button to show thumbnails of all the open pages. Yet another addition is new gestures, including four and five-finger swipes, swipe up to reveal the multitasking bar, pinch to return to the Home screen, and even swiping left and right to switch apps.

All in all, the number of updates is impressive and really makes iOS a better operating system. The smaller details such as being able to use the volume button on the iPhone to take photos make a big difference, while bigger changes such as Notifications bring iOS in line with Android. Given that the only feature not available to older hardware is Siri, it gives iPhone 4 owners even less reason to upgrade to a 4S.