Next big feature for iOS 5? Newsstand. Think of it as iBookstore for periodicals.

“We’ve now created a single place in the App Store that combines these newspapers and magazines,” says Forstall.

Unlike in-app subscriptions. Newsstand is a direct line between magazines and newspapers to your iOS device.

If a new issue comes out of a newspaper while you’re sleeping, when you wake up, that new newspaper is already there for you to read it. You can even read it offline.

Looks like you no longer have to download each magazine’s app. Apple’s brought them all together in one place for you now. Will Apple save periodical publishing?

And here comes iOS 5, “an incredible leap for developers and customers alike,” says Scott Forstall.

“For devs, more than 1500 APIs and tools. Users get more than 200 new features.”

Apple wants to highlight ten features today. First up, though, is the biggie we’ve heard rumored: notifications.

iOS 5 is getting revamped notifications support with annoying pop ups and push notifications. They serve 100 billion push notifications a year.

The new method of dealing with notifications is called Notification Center. You can access your notifications anywhere, without interruption, by swiping your finger down from the top of the display. This is a direct swipe from Android.

Any notification that comes from apps now pops up at the top of the screen, and Apple’s added it to Stocks and Weather.

It all looks almost exactly like Mobile Notififer, and what do you know? Peter Hajas went to work at Apple.

Notifications also go to the lock screen, and allow you to see what’s going on at a glance.

Wow. Mobile Notifier was basically bought wholesale by Apple, huh? This is a big step up for iOS.

Wow! That’s a bombshell. We expected Lion would be available on DVD, USB stick and on the Mac App Store, but Phil Schiller says that it’s a Mac App Store exclusive… and he says it’ll be the easiest upgrade you’ve ever seen.

This should kill Hackintoshing and piracy of Lion, by the way.

“You need about 4GB in storage. And because it’s part of the Mac App Store it follows the rules… you can use it on all of your authorized devices,” says Schiller.

Price: $29.99, just like Snow Leopard.

And the developer preview? It’s available today.

As for widescale release? July.

The final Lion feature Apple wants to talk about today is the new Mail.app.

• Two or three column view, similar to iOS Mail.

• Smart new search suggestions. “It prompts you, when you select one, it becomes a search token, and you can have more than one,” says Phil Schiller.

• Conversation view, completely compatible with people who don’t have Lion.

It’s nice to finally see Lion’s default Mail.app catch up with the likes of Postbox, don’t you think? Hate the new logo though. Apple’s really embracing brushed steel again with Lion.

Next up in the Lion demo? AirDrop.

“The easiest way to share files between computers has been the old sneakernet… a flash drive,” says Phil Schiller.

Now there’s AirDrop, though, a peer-to-peer file utlility that allows you to easily send files to Mac on your network, with fully encrypted interface.

Wow. Just look how great that interface is!

Next up, Apple’s showing off its new feature in Lion, Resume.

Now when you launch an app in Lion, it brings you back to where you were when you quit. It remembers palettes, windows, etc, and works system wide.

Working in conjunction with Auto Save, this could be a game changer. OS X Lion will now automatically save your documents in the background without you having to do anything.

If you zoom in on the title bar of your document, the name of your document is now a menu that you can tap on. A menu pops up that lets you Lock, Duplicate, Revert to Last Opened, or Browser All Versions.

Autosave works in conjunction with Versioning in Lion, which means all together, you never have to worry about losing your work, or overwriting it with something inferior. Just browse the versions and you get a Time Machine like interface of all the past changes, which you can even cut and paste between.

Now Phil Schiller wants to talk about the Mac App Store.

“We launched the Mac App Store in January and users have already found it’s the best way to purchase and discover new software apps. It has become the #1 PC software channel for buying software in the last six months, and the developers who have come aboard have found some great success: four times the revenue they had before.”

What’s new in Lion? Well, Mac App Store is built right in, and not such a huge surprise, but in-app purchases will be coming. As well as push notifications, sandboxing, and Delta Updates.

This is a small detail, but a good one: with Lion, it appears that Photo Booth will now do facial tracking. Awesome!

[image via This Is My Next]

As Phil Schiller takes the stage to talk about Lion, one thing’s for sure: OS X is doing better as a platform than it ever has.

As an install base, there’s now over 54 million users around the world. In fact, it’s doing better than ever. The last quarter, the PC market actually shrank 1 percent while the Mac went up 28%

The Mac has outgrown the industry every quarter for the past half decade.

Most of those sales are notebooks. 73% of all Mac sales are MacBooks.

Why are MacBooks so popular? It’s because OS X is the heart of Mac, and it’s ten years old today, and has evolved to become refined, powerful and beautiful.

Today, OS X evolves again into a Lion, with over 250 new features. But we’re only going to talk about a few of them.

“If the hardware is the brain and the sinew of our products, the software is their soul,” says Steve Jobs. “This year, we’re here to talk about the soul across three separate products.”

Those three things? Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud.

“Let’s start with Lion,” says Jobs, making way for Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi to take the stage.