iOS 6 Features – What’s New

At WWDC 2012, Apple would announce the next iteration of the mobile OS for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch: iOS 6.

iOS 6 will continue to improve the iOS experience just like iOS 5 where we saw more love for Social networking and multitasking gestures.

WWDC will be held in San Francisco on June 11th where the company would be facelifting the native apps with couple of improvements. LEts go over the new features in iOS 6 one by one.

1. New 3D Maps: Apple will ditch Google Maps in favor of more innovative 3D maps. To make the dream come true, Apple picked up various mapping service providers with C3 Technologies being the most prioritized of them. C3 Technology firm was reportedly working on 3D Maps when Apple acquired it in late 2011. Another 3D maps specialist Poly9 was acquired in 2010, while Placebag was picked back in 2009.

2. Superb Siri integration to almost everything: Siri would get a significant facelift where it not only gets smarter but also integrates well with 3rd party apps from App Store. “We have a lot of people working on (Siri). You’ll be really pleased with the things you’ll see over the coming months. The breadth that you’re talking about – we’ve got some cool ideas about what Siri can do. We have a lot going on this,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview at D10 on Tuesday, hinting that the popular virtual assistant Siri is also getting updated in the upcoming version of iOS.

Siri APIs (for developers) would be getting a significant update.

3. Deep Facebook Integration: iOS 5 bought a good integration with Twitter, and as per Tim Cook, iOS 6 would see the first collaboration with Facebook in the social front.  Apple’s CEO has never really made a secret about his admiration for the way Facebook has grown as a company and once again chose not to hide his respect for Mark Zuckerberg’s empire by stating during his recent attendance at the D10 event that “Facebook is a great company and the relationship is solid”.

4. New Integrated Search: This is skeptive but here goes. Apple acquired Chomp in February of this year, a company that was dedicated to developing an app search and discovery platform. It was thought at the time that the acquisition had been made to allow Apple to introduce Chomp’s technologies into their own iOS software, enabling users to interact in a more positive fashion with the App Store. While that is still likely to be the case, it would seem that time has caught up with Apple and the App Store overhaul as part of iOS 6 will not feature that technology.

5.  New Native Apps: Apple would be revamping all of its native apps to improve the experience with Siri and overall features. Among the apps that will be upgraded significantly would be Mail, App Store, iBookstore

6. New Widgets for Notification Center: Well, Jailbreakers already have custom widgets in Notification Center. However, this will become as a native feature in iOS 6 where users will be able to download and install new widgets from the App Store.

7. AirDrop for iOS: The cloud drive would arrive on iOS after making its way to desktops, laptops.

8. New Gestures: Multitasking and more.

9. Better Homescreen customizations: Little is known in this area but we could see widgets on Springboard (homescreen) like we do on Android.

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