Well, that didn’t take as long as some of us feared. Apple just released iOS 5.0.1 to the public, fixing the well publicized iPhone 4S battery life issues.
Here’s what is new:
This update contains improvements and other bug fixes including:
– Fixes bugs affecting battery life
– Adds Multitasking Gestures for original iPad
– Resolves bugs with Documents in the Cloud
– Improves voice recognition for Australian users using dictation
The update is available through iTunes or Over The Air using Settings > General > Software Update.
It seems that panoramic camera feature isn’t the only thing Apple is hiding inside its latest iOS 5 software. There’s also an autocorrect keyboard feature just like that found on Android devices, which suggests words as you type making it quicker and easier than ever to type on an iOS device.
A couple of days ago, security researcher Charlie Miller discovered a doozy of a bug in iOS 5’s Nitro Javascript engine that allowed any app to remotely download and execute malicious, system-level code on an iPhone.
While most of the aspects of this bug may seem pretty dire for users of Apple devices, especially those who can’t even trust App Store apps anymore, it is great news for jailbreakers. In fact, Miller’s bug may lead to a proper, untethered iOS 5 jailbreak for all iDevices, including the iPad 2 and new iPhone 4S.
We recently told you about the hidden panorama mode in the iOS 5 Camera app that could be enabled by editing a .plist file. Since then, a jailbreak tweak called “Firebreak” has been released that automatically enables the feature on any jailbroken iOS 5 device.
Panorama mode in the iOS Camera actually works, and you can get it on your own device right now without jailbreaking.
The iPhone 4S’s mysterious battery drain issues under iOS 5 are notorious, and now Apple is seeding a beta version of iOS 5.0.1 to customers who have complained about battery life as part of its AppleSeed program.
In addition, Apple has also told its Genius Bar employees that any customers who come in reporting battery life issues should be told to wait patiently until iOS 5.0.1 is released in a “few weeks” if no hardware issues are found.
“A few weeks” sounds like an official iOS 5.0.1 release time table to me, but “suck it up and wait” is still pretty hard guidance to hear for the many people with new iPhones that bleed out their full charge every few hours.
There’s an easter egg in iOS 5: a new panorama mode that lets you stitch together multiple shots you take with your iPhone’s camera into a gorgeous 180+ degree image. Unfortunately, while Apple clearly spent some time putting this together, there’s no way to access it as a consumer unless you jailbreak your iPhone. Here’s how to get Apple’s panorama mode working on your iPhone 4, iPhone 4S or iPad 2.
Hackers have been hard at work attempting to port Apple’s new Siri assistant to older devices, but according to one report, their efforts may be wasted, because Apple is doing the same thing. The Cupertino company has reportedly issued a “special build” of iOS 5 to its staff, which introduces Siri to the iPhone 4 for testing.
When Apple seeded its first iOS 5 beta to registered developers back in June, it was discovered the company’s next-generation mobile platform eliminated untethered jailbreaking and meant that hackers must connect their device to their computer every time they wanted to boot it up if they hoped to maintain their jailbreak.
Since then, however, reports surrounding an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5 have surfaced. The latest glimmer of hope comes from the Chronic Dev Team member Pod2g, who claims to have discovered a bug in the latest iOS 5 software that could lead to an untethered jailbreak.
Apple pushed out an iOS 5.0.1 update to registered developers yesterday, which fixes a number of bugs and addresses an issue with poor battery life on a number of its devices. However, it also fixes another glitch that Apple didn’t mention: the iPad 2’s Smart Cover hack, which allowed anyone to gain access to your passcode protected device using only its Smart Cover.
In iOS 5 Apple implemented a handy feature that lets you mark multiple emails as read. In the stock Mail app, multiple emails can be selected and marked quickly to save you the time and hassle of having to go through each individual message one by one.
For those of us that have something to hide, you’ll be happy to know that in iOS 5 Safari offers a private internet browsing mode. Once it is toggled on it prevents Safari from compiling a history of your browser activity.
While Apple’s latest gadgets are a must-have for some, they’re not all that useful for iOS jailbreakers. The company’s new iPhone 4S, along with the iPad 2, cannot be jailbroken when running iOS 5. But thanks to the iPhone Dev-Team, it won’t be long before you’re using Cydia on them.
One of iOS 5’s hidden gems is the ability to create custom keyboard shortcuts, a feature that works like TextExpander on the Mac. In this video, I’ll show you how to create and manage keyboard shortcuts from any iOS 5 device.
If you received a video file via email or stumbled across a clip in Safari that you wanted to save under iOS 4, it just wasn’t possible. You could watch it, but you couldn’t save it. However, one feature you may not yet have noticed in iOS 5 is that you can now download videos to your camera roll.
William Joye, who originally reported the problem about iOS 5 updates bricking first generation iPads, has reported back that the prescribed fix using Redsn0w fixed the problem with his iPad.
Here are the steps he used to bring his first generation iPad back to life.
Cult of Mac reader, William Joye, brought an interesting problem to our attention. According to William there is “an issue concerning upgrading first generation iPad 3G to iOS 5. A number of owners, including myself, now have disabled iPads after attempting to upgrade to iOS 5.”
This is the first we’ve heard about this problem and by far the worst after iOS 5 was released last week. Sadly, it seems that Apple isn’t showing a lot of concern about the problem and may not be helping users resolve the problem.
iCloud is Apple’s biggest new service to roll out in a long time, and with it comes a huge feature set. There’s quite a few settings and toggles, and it can be rather easy to get lost in. In this video, I’ll show you how to sort out backing up to iCloud, as well as iOS 5’s Wi-Fi sync feature.
Siri is one of the iPhone 4S’ biggest selling points, and I think anyone who’s had chance to try out the feature would agree that’s it’s pretty exceptional. For the time being, it’s exclusive to Apple’s latest iPhone, but one hacker claims to have it running on any device running iOS 5, and says a jailbroken device is not necessary.
If you’ve already updated to iOS 5, I’m sure one of the features you’re enjoying most is the new Notification Center. It’s a fantastic addition to iOS, and something we were begging for from Apple for some time. However, there are a number of ways in which Notification Center can be improved… and one of them is to install IntelliScreenX.
So, that device that nobody wanted, which looks just like the iPhone 4 with a couple of internal improvements, actually did pretty well for itself during its launch weekend. Apple has just announced that it sold a whopping 4 million iPhone 4S handsets this weekend, which is considerably more than the 1.7 million iPhone 4 units sold during its debut weekend last year.
iOS 5 includes a handy new feature that allows you to create your own custom multi-touch gestures. Although dubbed as an accessibility feature, it serves a larger function that that. In this video, I’ll show you how to create custom gestures, and use them to your benefit.
Apple’s release of iOS5 caused “the highest ever traffic” over the UK broadband network, BT has confirmed.
We reported yesterday that demand for iOS5 caused “unprecendented” broadband traffic for some UK internet service providers – but today, BT (which manages the entire national broadband network as well as running its own ISP business, BT Retail) sent the following statement to Cult of Mac:
Over the last two nights, BT has experienced the highest ever traffic levels over the UK broadband network.
Apple released Newsstand as one of the many new features in iOS 5 yesterday. Newsstand delivers subscription content from publications that have partnered with Apple in the App Store.
You can learn more about Newsstand here, but this time around we’re going to learn how to put Newsstand in a folder on iOS 5.
Back in March, at the next to last Apple keynote he would ever attend, Steve Jobs coined the phrase “post-PC world.” The usual cynics tittered at the time, and perhaps are still tittering, but as he often was, Steve was right: day by day, the iPhone in our back pockets or the iPad in our messenger bags are the most important computers in our lives.
For iOS 5, Apple put their money where Steve’s mouth was. Apple was going to prove to everyone that the umbilical between iOS and a Mac or PC could be cut.
Apple’s strategy was simple. They would go through iOS, identify every feature that assumed or required a PC, and radically retool it so that it relied on the cloud instead. With iOS 5, Apple stores all of your data — your mail, your calendar, your address book, your photos, your music, your ebooks, even your Doodle Jump save games — in the iCloud. iTunes Match hurls your complete music collection onto Apple’s servers, available to download anywhere and anytime without pulling out your Apple Connector cable. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi Syncing makes sure that if your iPhone or iPad does need to talk to your PC, it can do so just by being plugged into a wall socket and within stone’s throw of your PC.
All of this would be ambitious enough, but Apple didn’t stop there. They added major new features to almost every core iOS app: Mail, Safari, Camera, Calendar and more. They integrated Twitter sharing into the core of the operating system. They made a serious play for the hearts of magazine publishers with Newsstand. They totally overhauled the way iOS handles notifications. They introduced over the air updates. And then they introduced their own new iOS device messaging system that threatens the bottom line of every wireless carrier’s extortionate, hopelessly overpriced SMS texting plans.
So now iOS 5 is here, and the question is: has Apple severed iOS’s innate tether to the PC, or will iOS 5 be remembered as a smaller interim step towards the post-PC world Steve so presciently envisioned?
We’ve been playing with iOS 5 for months. Here’s what we think: by gum, Apple’s done it.
Demand for yesterday’s iOS 5 release combined with all the associated updates for OS X and other apps caused “unprecedented levels” of traffic over one UK broadband network.
Writing on their own network status alerts site, engineers at UK ISP AAISP reported that “something was up” at 8.48pm UK time last night.
