Δ My favorite features of iOS5

I’ve had the good fortune to play with the latest release of iOS for the past few days, and I have only good things to report back. Even if you’re keeping your current device and not anticipating a new iPhone this week, iOS5 makes your current iPhone a better phone. Here’s the things that I’m really liking so far:

• Better battery life. My iPhone 3GS is definitely feeling it’s almost two and a half years of life in the battery department. Unlike when I first got it, I need to charge it every single day without fail, and it’s frequently been near death by the time I get home from work. Since I switched to iOS5, I’ve had a little more juice at the end of the day.

• iCloud. Everything on my phone backs up over the air and just works? Yes please. I had constant problems trying to get over the air calendar syncing to work with my Google Calendar, but everything works fast and flawlessly over iCloud. If I need to restore my phone, I don’t need to be at my home computer any more, since it all backs up to the cloud. Apps that store things in iCloud are starting to drop now. GoodReader updated today, and Apple’s apps are updating tomorrow. Expect an avalanche of updates over the next couple weeks.
• Wireless syncing. If you’re still storing stuff on your computer, you can now have the iDevice in question sync over wifi. This feature will be hugely useful for classroom teachers with small classroom sets of devices (2-5 devices, say).
• Twitter integration. Easy sharing to Twitter from any app. Of course I’m going to like that.

• Notification Center. I always hated how notifications took over my screen in iOS. Now they don’t, they sit nicely and wait for me to act on them.
• iMessages. Thanks to my school building and my wife’s hospital both being built as bomb shelters, we get terrible cell phone reception at work. Now we send texts through Apple, so they work over WiFi. Bonus: No need for me to upgrade my texting plan any time soon.