Report: iOS 5 Will Leverage Apple’s Cloud, Maps and Voice Acquisitions

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ios5-feature

It may have taken Apple three years, but iOS is finally in a state that there aren’t a lot of perceived criticisms when it comes to its feature-set. The niggling criticisms of naysayers like copy-pasted and multitasking have been addressed. What’s next for iOS 5, then?

9to5Mac has put up an interesting overview of what they think is coming in 2011 to iOS. With the operating system itself pretty robust, they believe that Apple will focus more on apps and services this year by leveraging many of their recent acquisitions in maps, voice control and cloud technology.

Back in 2008, Apple purchased a company called PlaceBase with the aim of building their own maps application, ending their reliance upon Google Maps and allowing Apple to build more robust mapping and geolocation features into the OS.

In addition, the acquisition of Siri has yet to see fruits. There’s obviously a lot can be done with Siri’s technology, which marries instantaneous voice recognition with some powerful search tools.

Finally, there’s the cloud. It’s still unknown exactly how grandiose Apple’s cloud aspirations are, but with their massive $1 billion data center sitting like some massive secret fortress in North Carolina, it’s easy to guess that Apple has a big announcement planned for later this year in regards to the cloud. 9to5Mac’s guess is Apple will start smaller and leverage their Lala acquisition towards building a cloud locker for music.

All in all, it should be an exciting year for iOS, don’t you think?

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