Apple iPhone announcement: the important bits.

Image credit: The Verge

In typical Apple style, the event this morning started with sales figures. While interesting to some, statistics can be crafted to effectively say what you want. What you’re really after the juicy new details.. so here they are.

iOS5

Developers have been flushing out the bugs in iOS5 for months now.. it’s now ready for prime time. The iOS5 Gold Master will be available to developers today and shortly after for the public.

Apple also showed off a new ‘Cards’ app. This allows you to snap a photo with your phone and send it as a physical printed card to your friends and family. The originator will receive a push notification when the card is delivered.

Another new Reminders app will in iOS will be location aware, providing you with prompts when your near a certain location. This should actually be really useful for groceries,

Safari Mobile will get a new feature that comes from desktop browsers, Tabbed Browsing.

The iPod Nano will also get iOS5, this makes it the 3rd skew of the operating system. iPhone, iPad and now iPod Nano. The Nano will also track your runs using the Nike technology without an additional sensor in your shoes.

iCloud

Available to App Developers, iCloud syncs documents, photos, books and apps to be synced between devices via iCloud.

Find My Friends is a new feature that allows iOS users to discover the location of their friends. Naturally there would need to be privacy controls to ensure that you can be off the grid when you want to be. This will be competition for Facebook’s Check-in feature.

iTunes Match will cost US $25 per year, will launch at the end of October, but is a US only feature. Add it to the list.

iPhone

Apple have announced an iPhone 4S featuring an upgraded A5 dual-core processor. The iPhone 4S will achieve 7x the GPU capabilities of our existing iPhone 4. The physical dimensions are the same as the current model, same screen, good news for developers.

Apple have have modified the antenna in the 4S, despite it really being a non-issue.

Image credit: The Verge

The iPhone 4S is being labelled as a World Phone.. and will support HSDPA or data speeds up to 14.4 Mbps. Not exactly the 4G LTE support (Telstra) hoped for.

The camera gets an upgrade with an 8 Megapixel sensor, auto white balancing, faster load times and only 0.5 seconds between shots. In video mode, it also supports 1080p recording, and real time image stabilisation. Unfortunately the front camera has still been left at VGA quality.

Image credit: Engadget

Voice controls will now be enhanced with the help of Siri, a company Apple acquired. Surprisingly the name has survived the acquisition with the natural voice translation on the iPhone called ‘Siri’. The live demo showed examples of “What’s the weather like today” and “Find me a great Greek restaurant in Palo Alto”. Siri is also able to create travel path on Google Maps, or set an alarm on your phone.

Siri is only available on iPhone 4S and will launch under the beta label. It also supports dictation. There will be a new microphone icon on the keyboard just like Google’s Android. Application developers can use a new API to integrate Siri support into their apps.

The great news for Australians is that Siri explicitly supports the Aussie accent.

Image credit: Engadget

Pricing and availability

The US will launch in United States, Canada, Australia, UK, France, Germany and Japan on October 14th. Pre-orders start on October 7th. There’s no local pricing, what we do know is the US prices – 16GB for $199 32GB for $299 and new 64GB model for $399.

Update
iPhone 4S starts at AUD $799. iPhone 4 $679. iPhone 3GS $449.

More info @ Apple.