My Top 5 iOS 5 Features

Apple unveiled iOS 5 at WWDC last week. It won't be coming to your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch until this fall, but I thought I'd tout the 5 features I'm most looking forward to:

1) New Camera Features - Apple has improved the photo taking experience in iOS 5 tremendously. The Camera app can now be accessed from the lock screen, saving a lot of time and swiping and tapping. They have also sped up the "time-to-shoot". Throw in that you can now use the volume up button as a shutter release and an exposure & focus lock tapping on screen controls, and the camera application has probably seen the most improvement of any app in iOS 5.

2) iCloud Documents - Syncing documents to the iPad and iPhone right now is a mess. It is not easy or intuitive, and trying to explain to someone how it works is painstaking. With iCloud documents, your docs are up-to-date on every device with no effort on your part. Plus Apple created an API for it so other developers can utilize it as well. Hopefully they take advantage of it quickly.

3) Safari Reading List - If you are familiar with Instapaper, then this one will be logical. Safari's Reading List feature will save an article online for you to read offline at a later time. Better still, they will sync across devices. There are always a ton of articles that I'd love to read at some point, and I usually either bookmark them or Favorite them in Twitter. All these extra bookmarks and favorites clog things up, and I usually forget why they are there. Hopefully Reading List will take care of this problem.

4) Newsstand - I love magazines. I'm not a huge reader, but I love the shortness of the articles, they great photos, and the ease of taking one with you wherever. What I don't like is the HUGE pile of magazines that form mountains on my floor. Hopefully Newsstand will make it easy for publishers to provide us with great magazines (interactivity please - not just pdf versions of your print version) and make it easy for us to download and manage our subscriptions.

5) AirPlay Mirroring for iPad 2 - This will be huge for a lot of people. I look forward to playing games and surfing the web on my TV, while using the iPad as a control. It won't be the preferred way for a lot of things, but sure beats having to find an adapter and cable and then being tethered to the TV.

So those are my top 5 things that I can't wait to have on my iPhone. Really there wasn't anything I didn't like in the announcement. There are so many good things coming down the line, it's going to once again make my iPhone feel revolutionary.