WWDC 2011: iOS 5 revealed...

Apple revealed the long-awaited refresh of iOS tonight - iOS 5 - which introduces “200 new features”.

Fortunately for all concerned, only ten of the new features were demonstrated on stage at the keynote speech of the WWDC.

Of most importance to gamers were the changes laid out for Game Center and app updates, with the former boasting a ton of new features to bring it more in line with Microsoft's Xbox Live service, and the latter no longer requiring full downloads of entire apps to update.

One of the headline features is that iOS 5 is 'PC Free', in the sense that it no longer requires a computer to set up or update your device.

Notification Center, meanwhile, does away with the current push messaging system, gathering all notifications into an animation at the top, like cubes rolling down.

These can then be individually accessed by swiping on the lock screen, which itself has been improved to show more information about what is asking for your attention, rather than the current basic screen.

News Stand, on the other hand, is the newspaper and magazine equivalent of iBooks (it looks similar, too), allowing you to store subbed publications and other materials offline to read away from a wi-fi or 3G connection.

It also allows for background downloading, which managed to get a cheer from the assembled crowd.

There’s been a major change as to how Twitter works within iOS. Currently, you need to download a seperate app to access the popular social site, but iOS 5 integrates Twitter access directly into the OS.

That means you can take a shot with the camera and send to Twitter straight away, as well as tweet directly from Safari, YouTube, and Maps.

Similar to how Windows Phone integrates with FaceBook, iOS 5 can also pull photos of your contacts from Twitter directly, meaning you don’t have to go through the hassle of manually taking them yourself.

It isn’t just completely new features that are getting a workover. Much like the desktop version of Apple's browser, Safari on iOS now comes with Safari Reader - an Instapaper-like webpage viewer that strips out adverts and allows for saving sites offline for viewing later.

Both Mail and Camera have seen a facelift, with the former now allowing you to search inside a message, while the latter has been sped up thanks to the ability to access the camera from the lock screen.

Also of note is that photo editing like rotate or crop can now be performed on the iPhone, as well as the option to display gridlines for lining up shots in the first place.

Even some more mundane parts of iOS like the On Screen Keyboard have been sharpened up in iOS 5, with the ability to split the keyboard up into parts or dragged to another part of the screen.

iOS 5 will be out in the fall and supports all iPhones from 3GS upwards, iPod touch 3rd and 4th gen, and the iPad 1 and 2.