If you didn’t know this yet, WWDC is the Worldwide Developer Conference held by Apple every ear around the beginning of June. During this conference, Apple Inc. usually releases the new iPhone and iOS updates. Today, they announced major software updates: Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud. Here’s my opinion and a quick summary of the updates.

This is pretty long, so I’m going to go through them quickly.
-Lion is basically iOS 5 for mac. Scroll is reversed so that it feels more iOS-y, Mail looks a lot like the iPad version, full screen apps look like they were built for iOS… And the scrollbar is removed.

-Lion auto-saves information and versions of documents. Hello, Google Docs for Mac! (this comment means that google docs has auto-save, and you can easily see an older version of your file)

-Swiping four fingers down to show all open applications (expose) is now Mission Control. Fancier and nicer design, but apple has to “reinvent multitasking”. Oh well…

-Twitter is now integrated in iOS. You can tweet a picture and share a website or a video with very few taps. Don’t get over excited: Android integrated Facebook, Twitter and any other social network you could think of in it’s OS a long time ago. Contacts always had Facebook profile pictures on Android, and the “share” button exists almost everywhere in Android, proposing sharing on every social network that has a respective app on your phone.

-The Notification bar is an Android rip-off… Seriously, Apple? You “re-designed” the notification system? moving on…

-iOS is updated and synced Over The Air (OTA), without any chords! Which means you don’t need a laptop to actually activate or sync your phone. Apple is actually late at doing this! When I got my nexus S, all it asked me for was my gmail account, and all my contacts, e-mails, calendars and docs were synced! I wonder how this will affect the “activation” process and the jail-breaking community…

-Apple got sick of Whatsapp and BBM, so created “iMessage” for iPhone, iPad and iPod, which is a re-invention of the messaging system. It’s BBM between iOS users. Stick to Whatsapp if you want to include blackberry, Nokia, Android and iOS users in one messaging application.

-The keyboard on the iPad is separable, which makes it easier to type with thumbs… I guess…
There’s a camera shortcut on the lock-screen… I have that on Android, thanks to “Widget Lock” something. I can add a lot of shortcuts on my lock-screen.

-You can now take pictures with the volume up button! That’s cool if you sometimes miss the touch button.

-Apple reminder is good-looking! it’s also a checklist taking app that syncs with iCal and Outlook (super-market list?). The reminder can be location based (remind me to tell Joe at the bar about the job proposal), which is pretty cool.

-Bold, Underline, Italic and Indenting come to Mail and text editing on iOS… cool!

-Major Camera updates, with auto-exposure and auto-focus lock and pinch to zoom.

-iCloud syncs a lot of files OTA between all your devices, and you have 5GB of Cloud Storage for mail, documents and backups, excluding photos, music and apps. Basically, all devices are synced all the time through “the cloud”. All bought songs on iTunes are synced wirelessly, same for Apps, contacts and whatnot. The contact part of iCloud, I think, is is very Google of them. It’s been available since forever on Android… This also took a lot of time for Apple.

-The “most inventive part of iCloud” was “Documents in the Cloud”… GOOGLE DOCS RIP-OFF! I hope you realize how Google is 5 years ahead of Apple.

-Photo Stream is cool… Picasa (Google) does it… it’s copying photos between all devices…

-iTunes in the cloud seems nice! Google music rival? I hope so! Cheaper (legal) music!

- iTunes match seems to be an amazing product! for ~25$, you can get all the songs you have as a higher quality, so that the cloud thing works! I can’t describe this, I’ve never seen it, but I guess you’ll have all the songs you have downloadable from the iTunes Store. “You can benefit of all the advantages of iCloud without buying the music from iTunes”. Nice! Google has something similar, let’s see what they’ll counter with!

I’m under the impression Apple is trying to take Google completely out of their products.

Apple fan boys who thought Apple was always original and revolutionary, think again. I’m not saying their products aren’t stable or safe, and i’m not saying that other phone manufacturers didn’t get inspired by the iPhone. The market is so tough, you have to implement your competitor’s ideas and improve them! The cloud is the future, it was an inevitable move by Apple. Better now than later!