Thoughts on iOS5/Lion/iCloud

On June 6th, Steve Jobs gave the WWDC 2011 keynote address and announced Lion, iOS5 and iCloud (the replacement for the stillborn MobileMe).

I am looking forward to iOS5 (due sometime in the Fall) more than Lion (due in July, upgrade from Snow Leopard for $30). iCloud is interesting, but I don't know if Apple can pull it off this time, given the past failures.

The biggest and most welcome surprise was the un-tethering of the iDevices from the PC. iDevices with iOS5 will "work" out-of-the-box without first being required to be connected to a PC. I can give a child an iDevice and it will work after a minimal setup.

The un-tethering also means freedom from being held hostage by that pig of an application called iTunes, which surprisingly was the original reason I joyfully switched to a Mac after using iTunes on Windows/XP, but which became a tiresome annoyance since it was co-opted (via the AppStore) to do more than its share of heavy lifting. Sub-textually, I look forward to iCloud as a replacement for iTunes.

The second surprise was iMessage (instant messaging including video and photos via Wifi or 3G between iOS5 devices securely (?) through Apple's servers) which aims to destroy the BlackBerry Messaging system, the last feature that RIM could claim as a distinguishing feature of its devices and kills the SMS cash-cow that mobile carriers have been milking. (I get the distinct impression that Apple (and Google) want to bypass the carriers entirely. I can see Google becoming/spinning-off a network carrier company.)

Unfortunately, iMessage also creates a walled garden of iOS devices. (Update: AppleInsider reports that iMessage is built on the open-standards XMPP. Update 2: iMessage can be used for group SMS) I am certain that Google will have a similar solution soon, but the lack of interoperability between everyone's messaging systems disappoints me.

Aside: Microsoft recently purchased Skype, to compete with Apple's Facetime and Google's WebRTC. If the past is any indication, Skype will be dead in 2 years (there were two major uncheduled outages (no doubt due to infrastructure re-configuration)  after the purchase. Even though Facetime is an open standard, Google has chosen an alternative solution.

I would like to predict that in the near future, there will be a start-up that will magically allow iOS devices to message Androids and Facetime users to chat with Android users.