What Apple presented on monday is really huge. I followed the keynote via the TechCrunch live blog, but am sure I missed a ton of good stuff and already forgot another ton. iMessages, new notification system, iCloud and the deeeeep Twitter integration1 alone sound so awesome I can’t wait for iOS 5 to ship, nay: to be delivered over the air onto my iDevices.
iMessage enables every iDevice’s SMS app to send messages to another iDevice via wifi or 3G. Even more: You can’t even send an SMS to another person’s iPhone over your carrier’s network if you wanted to. As Marco Arment points out in the latest Build & Analyze:
As a result, people are just gonna see their text message bills declining. […] It’s like a massive middle finger to the carriers, I love it. I absolutely love it.
That’s right on, especially considering that the carriers apparently also found out about iMessage during the Keynote. Oh, one more thing: We’re killing half your business. Finally! Someone had to do it, somebody had to take today’s 3G coverage and the idea of simple and short messages. I like Twitter DMs, but sadly people need a Twitter account and enable Push to use them. So the barrier was too high for most people and DMs became an instrument for nerds only.
Almost as much as I love iMessage because it spits into the carriers’ face, I love it because it will kill ‘WhatsApp’. This app is very popular with some smartphone-equipped folks around me, and I hate it. It did and sadly still does what iMessage heads out for: It sends messages over a data connection. But in an ugly and inconvenient way. Even the dumbest son of a bitch on the train who has the loudest and worst music coming out of his iPhone uses ‘WhatsApp’. It really is the descendant of MSN messenger. Lately, it was available for free so I checked it out, but could only stand it for half a day. Then I freed my iPhone from this hell-sent app.
Oh, and iMessage syncs between your iDevices, exactly what Twitter DMs didn’t. Hopefully, Apple now enables the Twitter app to do the same for your timeline.
Well, the old ones sucked. The new ones look great, usability-wise. I can enable far more notifications and still get less disturbed by them.
It’s funny, just as I wrote about how independent my iDevices are from the iTunes that’s buried deep in the Windows partition on my desktop machine, Apple addresses that. Melikey. The contact and calendar stuff probably works like Google’s services and like Mobile Me should have. The free mail address is nice, though. Note to myself: got to get my hands on iOS 5 Beta to save my favorite address/iCloud username.
But the all-your-music-sucking-in ‘iTunes match’, that’s really huge. Just as backup and sync over the air.
The new reminder’s location function, luckily, is as awesome as it’s creepy. I wonder how you can manage your mistress’s and wife’s address - via address book or maybe via foursquare, so that everyone…? No, I’m kidding, I see ‘Wunderlist’ going into the trash as my ToDo app.
The only thing that really made me sad was to see how Steve Jobs’s condition obviously gets worse. He appeared much weaker than during the last keynote. I sincerely hope the iPhone 52 doesn’t get developed under the same circumstances regarding Jobs’s health condition as the Knight 2000 was to Wilton Knight’s.
*3As John Gruber points out in the latest Talk Show, maybe iCloud is the biggest thing in the long run. The feature Apple cut the cable with and made all the iDevices more independent and seamlessly integrating with your workflow, as long as you’re using a Mac.