Apple has announced that iOS 5 will be available for download on Wednesday, October 12th. The company has been offering beta versions of the operating system to developers for the past few months, and starting today anyone with a $99 Apple developer account can download the “gold master” version of Apple’s next-generation operating system.
Among other new features, iOS 5 will include:
- An improved notification system
- iCloud service which lets you synchronize your media, apps, and documents over the cloud
- A new messaging service called iMessage
- Twitter integration
- The ability to snap photos with the camera without first unlocking your device
- A digital Newsstand for subscribing to magazines and newspapers
There’s also a new “find My Friends” feature that allows users to optionally share their locations so that other friends an locate them.
The iOS 5 update will be available for free to existing iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad, iPad 2, and 3rd and 4th generation iPod touch devices.
As usual, if you have a jailbroken iOS device you may want to wait a little while before downloading the update, since it will remove your jailbreak. but the folks at the iPhone Dev Team have been doing a pretty great job of launching tethered jailbreak tools shortly after each iOS 5 beta update. I doubt we’ll have to wait long until you can jailbreak the full version of iOS 5.