Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello everyone, welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Polette and I am an editor at how stuff works dot com. Sitting across from me as usual as senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Operator. Could you help me place this call? Very nice? Thank you. Today we are going to talk about an operator, uh in a way, a small time operator, in a way, a big time operator, depending on how you look at it. It's an operating system for a portable set of portable devices from Apple called Io S five. You may have heard of it. I know some of you have, because you've written in to ask us to talk about it a lot. Yes, yes, so I O S five. The the as of the recording of this podcast, latest generation of Apple's mobile operating system for devices such as the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the iPad. Mm hm m m uh yeah. There there are a lot of a lot of changes in this operating system. Um. We'll probably have to do one on the the latest generation of Android operating systems coming up for ice Cream sandwich before you write in and say ice creams and it's I know, you know, we record this sort of right before lunch, you know, and then in not like an hour and a half before lunchtime, and didn't have breakfast either. So so talking about iOS five doesn't make me hungry, but we might have to do something about ice cream sandwich comes up to bring some in. Um that's what tech News today does. They bring in ice cream sandwiches when they talk about it. I know because I was a guest on the show and I skyped in and they did not mail me an ice cream sandwich. You know, it should be like one of the like the Captain Kangaroo where you know, where you can't do that on TV, where they just dropped stuff from the ceiling. I would cream sandwich. I would have I would have loved that. But let's get to the actual iOS five and what the updates are to the system. And now, you know, we don't tend to talk about operating systems that much on this show, although we've we've done a few. We did Windows eight, we didn't Mac os ten Lion, we did Windows seven, and we did snow Leopard before that. Yeah, and we've also talked about and we talked about Linux before. I guess we do talk about operating systems a lot. It just seems a lot. It seems weird to talk about the updates, right, But you know, this is a big deal because the uh, you know, when when the iPhone four S was announced, UM, the initial reaction to the iPhone for S from what I saw online. Now, granted this is a a just a sliver of the population of iPhone users was one of is that all? But I think the iOS five was in some ways even more important than the iPhone for S. And there are some elements the iPhone for S that are pretty darn cool that that tie into iOS five, and it's you can only find it on the iPhone for S as a matter of fact, that there's some there's some tie in there. UM. Keeping in mind that up until then, we we actually heard about iOS five at the Worldwide Developer Conference earlier in two thousand eleven, in June. Yeah, that's around yeah, And basically that's Apple's big Developer UM conference where they talk to people who are writing software for UM generally both the operating system for these mobile devices and the Macintosh computer itself and sometimes for other devices like Apple TV. Yeah yeah, um, and you know, for for people who are not really following that uh, that world, it can be kind of dry. I think the same thing could probably be said for uh, for the Windows developer conferences in Google io. Um, you know, this is not really a general This is not generally where you expect to hear this kind news. People. Occasionally you'll have crazies like like myself or Chris log in and try and find a live blog and follow line by line as announcements are made. Because we actually find the stuff really fascinating. Yeah. Well, I mean eventually it will become fascinating for the consumer who's really into tech, but you know, finding out about application programming interfaces APIs and things like. Yeah, I mean, it will eventually become relevant to the average person, but not necessarily. But um, they announced quite a bit about iOS five at that point. That's when we learned a lot about it. In the meantime, we heard a lot from the tech media about because frankly, listeners sort of asked us to speculate on the new iPhone five and as it turned out, there wasn't one. Um, but we did find out a lot about about iOS five and a lot of the features, some of which had been out on other operating systems such as Google's Android UM and others which are sort of innovative. Now, one of the ones we've actually developed dedicated an entire podcast too, because uh iicloud ties into iOS five as well as UH mac OS ten lion as well as other elements. But we've already done a full episode on i Cloud, so I don't think we really need to touch on i Cloud that much other than to say it's a cloud storage solution that allows you to put files into the cloud and access them across all your various Apple devices. Yeah, now it's not it's not for everyone, I should point out, UM and the iOS five is not for everyone. As a matter of fact. If you're running a Macintosh UM and you're you want to use i cloud, uh, you have to be using the new the newest version macOS ten point seven, which is which is lion UM. But you can use on anything that will run iOS five. You can do that, which is the last few iPhones UM, the last couple iOS or I'm sorry, the iPod Touch and both versions of the iPad UM and you can. You can actually see that as soon as you update your device to iOS five. My iPod Touch is a first generation so it is not eligible. But I did update my iPad software to iOS five, and the first thing that happens right after you updated is it starts to ask you questions about setting up the device. UM. You know, it wants to know what your Apple I D is and whether or not you want to sink to I Cloud. Um it will continue to uh if you do agree to do that. Uh, it will sink your address book, your calendars, UM, and a lot of of other information to I Cloud so that um it can sink across Say I did have an iPod Touch or an iPhone UM, and I had updated my Mac to iOS lion UM or I'm sorry OS ten lion, I would be able to sink all that information without having to worry about, you know, plugging stuff in and and sinking a device to device. It would sink at all from I Cloud. Yeah. And actually, uh, we can touch on this just very briefly. There there's been some criticisms about iOS five and I Cloud and uh, and I thought I'd just go and and pipe up on one of them. Since we're talking about the subject already. I heard that apparently when you take photos and it uploads to I Cloud, there's no way to delete them. Oh so if you were to take a photo using your iPod Touch, let's say, okay, so you've got an iPod. iPod touches have cameras, right ones. Okay, so you can tell that I have an iPod Classic people, so I am well behind, although I've got lots of music on it. So you take a photo of your iPod Touch and it's got the eye cloud feature in there, and it's not you're on WiFi, and it uploads to your eye Cloud. Now that photo is visible to all the other devices that are on that So let's say that you're sharing devices with oh, I don't know, um, your your spouse, Um that could you know? You could end up having some problems there if you're taking photos of like you think this one one thing that you're seeing is really funny, and you want to send a photo to your best buddy, but your your your spouse might not find it as amusing as you do. Well, if you take the photo and it goes to the eye Cloud and you can't delete it, your spouse has access to that too. So I'm being really delicate while I'm walking around this. I'm just saying that if there are a lot of people using the same sort of eye cloud, like like a family or whatever, there could be potential problems. I'm sure that that will be addressed if it hasn't been addressed already. But it's a problem that I was alerted to. But let's talk about some of them. The features of iOS five. I want to talk about this notification center. It sounds really interesting to me. So this notification center actually has a little thing of notifications when when new technology, new information is coming into your your iPhone. And I mean, this is something that's really really phenomenal. I mean I've only had this since two thousand seven on my Android phone. I do smell snark. Um yeah, yeah, well, and it's one of the things that I like on my Android phone. Um. Now, on iOS five, if you have a device capable of doing that, you can pull down from the top of the screen. And when I say pull down, uh, you know, we're talking about putting your finger at the very edge of the screen where the menu bar is swiping down and you can actually see the notifications and it looks a little different. I'm showing Jonathan on my iPad. Now, it looks a little different. They have the the gray linen background behind it. Um, but it works very much like the Android operating systems exact same feature. Well, you could kind of expect that at this point, you know, they all kind of know you could have kind of expected it back in two thousand seven or two thousand eight, but Apple just implemented. That's what I'm saying is they they all kind of pick each other's good features and will add them to subsequent releases. What it reminds me of really is and you know, and I'm picking on Apple a little bit about this, about being so late to the game and implementing something like this in their operating system. I'm picking on them. I mean, I'm glad that they've done it because it is a useful feature, and I'm glad that iPhone users and iPad users and ipont touch users were be able to to take advantage of it. That's the feature a lot. Yeah. Uh, the reason why I'm picking on them is it's reminding me a lot of how Apple was really slow to implement copy and paste like or multitasking or multitasking, and these are very basic features that you see in other smartphones, and you wonder, like the people who are Apple fans will say, I love Apple's products, I just don't understand why they have not done something similar to this other operating system that's been doing this for years, and you would think that would be a fairly simple solution. Now, we don't know everything that's going on behind the scene. Are the motivations behind implementing versus not implementing certain features there may be and in fact, I wager there are very good reasons for the rollout being the way it has been. But still from a from an outside perspective, it just seems a little a little ludicrous. So I couldn't help but poke just a touch of fun at Apple for that. Well, a lot of the Android UH fans like to poke fun at Apple for for doing that. Um. That being said, Apple's got a lot of features that Android does not support. Yeah, so I'm fully aware of that Apple fans, So you know, UM, I've also heard a lot of hooting about some of the bugs. There have been some problems installing iOS five. Excuse me, Um, I would I would actually add that I had trouble installing iOS five at first. That just me a couple of tries before I actually got it to work. I think there may have been some some attempts to sync with Apple servers and I tried to install it in the first a and I think that may have been part of it. So it might have been a bandwidth this year. It might have just been that a lot of people are flooding Apple with requests to to up update the iOS. Is that what you're saying, But that that seems fair with bugs and and concerns like this, I feel that's kind of unfair anyway. It's a day zero thing that's gonna happen with any major roll out. Yeah, any operating system, and especially an operating system as popular as iOS five, as as iOS I should say, any operating system as popular as iOS that seems to be magnified because you've got so many people trying to hit it at once, that little problems that for for a quote unquote regular operating system would you know, be noticed by a few people, But because the adoption rate wouldn't be so fast, it wouldn't be concentrated on day zero so much. Uh, the company would have an opportunity to patch problems on a regular basis, and so the average consumer might not ever be aware that there were problems because you know, there wasn't a rush to try and adopt the operating system as soon as it became available Apple. Apple's a rock star company. There are people who were staying awake until the wee hours of the morning the first few hours of October twelve eleven, which is when iOS five became available, uh, just so that they could try and get the operating system as fast as possible. So I've heard about people like I know some guys in Texas who are up till almost three am trying to get it. So well, Frankly, you know, I have an Android based smartphone and I would like to have Gingerbread on it. I still have fro you, but I am waiting for my phone carrier to push that to me. I can't go get it. If I could go get it, I would have already had it well. And and before anyone writes in, yes, we know that if you could take it to the store and have them force it, or you could root your phone get a rom But you know, Chris and I we both like our phones to work. We're funny that way. Well, and that's the thing is, I don't mind tinkering with it, but not to the point where I break it and then I have to go, well, I wanted it to work, which I mean, the nice thing is that it's really hard to truly break it, although you can. UM. But anyway, let's get back to iOS five and talk some more. You were talking about, you know, did you have any other problems once you got through? Was the Was the installation process smooth for you? Um? Basically, the first step in doing this, uh, if you are running iOS four, UM, you plug it into your computer and use iTunes to upgrade the system software. And it says, lay, I see there's an update available. Would you like to do this now? UM? You say yeah, sure, And it takes a while for it to download from from Apple servers. And then what it tries to do is it's going to offer to sink your your device UM with the computer first to make sure that you don't lose anything that's gonna come up again too. UM. And uh, once it goes to that process, UM, it attempts to write the software onto there. And I actually got stuck a couple of times um to the point where it said there's a there's an error. I cannot actually uh install this software on here at this time. Um, you know, give it a give it a shot. And it actually said that it was having trouble sinking uh once or twice two. Um. It was one of those things where I think, uh, it may have been a bandwidth thing. Um. It also may have been a watched pot sort of thing, because I actually told it to go ahead and try it again, and then I went off to do something else, going well, you know, hopefully it'll do it this time, and I came back and it was almost done. Um. Once it actually does install the software, then it reinstalls most, if not all, of your your stuff. I didn't have any problems with it, uh uh installing everything that I had on there. But I understand that there are people who have had apps missing and music missing. Yeah. Tom Merritt of tech News Today and this Weekend tech Um But was on his show. He mentioned that when he was updating to iOS five, about half of his apps were missing. When the installation was complete and he was able to you know, get the apps again, but he had to redownload them to his phone so uh, and he had to do it I guess manually, because it just it didn't do it automatically. And all of his playlists were missing. So he had created playlists on and they were missing not just from his phone but from iTunes, like they were going, yeah the song, the music was still there, it just wasn't arranged in the playlists. So yeah, so he had that those issues, and we've heard of other issues as well through the installation process. But again, this is a day zero thing, and you know, those kind of problems can can occur. Uh, it's just that you know, normally we wouldn't hear so much about it if it weren't for the fact that everyone's obsessed with getting it. Uh. Do you want to talk about some of the other features that iOS five has. I mean, I made fun of notifications just because I wanted to get that out of the way. But the notifications do look a lot nicer than they used to, and you have a lot more control over them there. If you go into um your devices uh system settings, UM, you can actually control how your notifications show up UM, which is nice. Again that's sort of a behind the scenes type of thing. UM, but you know, you can you could sort the notifications um by time or or manually if you prefer um. And uh, I mean, there are a lot of other things that are are sort of behind the scenes to like the Twitter um the Twitter integration. And this is not very exciting if you are already a Twitter usier, you already have Twitter on your iPhone or your iPad or your iPod. But um, we're talking about a p I S again. This is going to enable people. The integration is going to enable people to build apps that will allow you to tweet directly from those apps. Like the the integration is much more fluid now than it will as before. Well, it's kind of like if you take a photo, now there's a one you're one touch away from sharing that photo on Twitter instead of having to you know, maybe go through a couple of commands. It's it's really streamlined that which seems kind of it may seem trivial, but it does make a big difference when you're actually using these and uh as I can attest because I've I've had that where you know, I had to go through and upload a photo from my phone to Twitter, and then eventually I had Twitter integration where I could I could take a photo and then choose at that moment to upgrade upload it to Twitter, and it makes a huge difference. Um. Also, I always five supports I Message across devices besides just the iPhone. Yes, you can have I Message on the iPod Touch and the iPad. So now and that's my message of course. Is Apple's instant Messaging service, Yeah, I know it only works with those eye devices, Um, but it's sort of People have likened it to the BlackBerry Messenger service, where people who have Blackberries can message people with other Blackberries. Um. I would say that people who complain about Apple's closed offness are probably going to complain about this feature too. Um. But it does give you the opportunity to send text messages to other people who are using those devices, even if they're on a different network. Um, you know, without without a penalty. So uh, I say you have three friends and all of you have iPhones. Um, you don't have to pay for text messaging in addition to your data plan. If you just want to send text messages to those three or four friends, as long as they're on an eye device, they can. You could you could share those messages without having to worry about that. Um. There's also the Reminder's feature, which is sort of a built in to do list. Um. I've got a couple to do programs on there. One of the two do is a personal bug bear for me. I have trouble getting myself to write stuff down in a particular place. So I've tried several different ask managers trying to get me to develop a pattern and then make a habit out of writing stuff down. Um. The Reminder's feature is pretty pretty nice built in to do list that I haven't really tried yet. As as we're speaking, iOS five has only been out for actually less than forty eight hours, UM, so I still haven't really gotten to see whether that one's a lot better. It seems to be kind of a low end. Uh. You know, it's not. It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, um, but it is. It is built into the operating system now. iOS five also supports some new functionality with the cameras involved in various uh Apple products that run on iOS. Yes, so now you can do things like with the iPhone, you can uh you can activate the camera from the lock screen. Yeah, which is nice. Although I imagine that also means we will ultimately end up with a lot more photos of the inside of people's pockets. Um, it is possible. One nice thing about this is you might say, what's the big deal. Uh, you could hand your phone to a friend and they don't have to know your pass code to take a photo. Hey wait, wait, wait wait, I'm gonna jump up here and and take a photo of his statue, you know. And you could just take the photo and uh, if somebody else gets hold of your phone, they might be able to take a photo, but they can't look at all the other photos on the phone. It's also nice and that if you are in a situation where something is um, there's a cool photo opportunity that's not gonna last very long. It removes some of the time that it would take you to unlock your phone and go to the camera app and and started up. But it also has other features they're going to have, you know, use gridlines that you can align photos properly, because you know, if you're a photographer, you know there's certain tricks like you can align a photo to make it more attractive as opposed to the way I take photos where the subject of the photo is always dead center in the middle of the picture. And there's nothing interesting going on. Ever, because I am not a photographer, and that is abundantly clear, or when you look at the photos I've taken, well, they've they've also incorporated the ability to use some of the other buttons. The volume up button now becomes the the shutter release, so you can use that rather than having to tap the screen. Um. And uh, you know you can you can pinch to zoom or pinch to shrink as you prefer. Um on the screen. Yeah, because you move your fingers out. It's a reverse pinch to zoom. It doesn't pinch to zoom doesn't make sense. I just my brain's breaking right now. It just mean if it were pinched to zoom to be opposite what you would I need a break? You can um. You can also do red eye removal, do some some basic photo editing like that, and crop and rotation, um, and organized photos into albums. Um. Again these are these are not uh, this is not necessarily exciting, but it's nice functionality to add. Yeah, stuff that you know it may it's the stuff that just makes the features that much more uh easy to use and and really you know, it may not be something that's evident necessarily to a new iPhone owner or iPod touch owner iPad owner, but it's those those little things that just make those features much more useful. Um. There's also did you are you aware of the PC free feature? Yes? Yes, And I tried to go get a PC free and they said I had to pay for it. Yeah. It doesn't mean that you clearly did not read the description. You just thought that you were going to get a free computer, Sad Trombone. No. PC free is a feature where you don't have to have a computer to use an iPad, iPhone, iPod touch because you know, traditionally you would sink that device to a computer, but this is a feature that removes that that step. You can also sink your device wirelessly. Now, um, if you are sinking to a computer, Uh, the only trick is it's got to be plugged in. So once you uh you know, get your your charger and plug it into the wall. Um, then it should be able to sink wirelessly with a hub. So you have a computer that you are specifically using as your your eye hub, Um, then it will will do that. You no longer have to plug it directly in to make that work, which is a feature. There was a neat feature that I was telling Chris about that I had learned about just this morning, because not all the features are the ones that are being touted on Apple's page for iPhone iOS five, but one of them, which I thought was pretty interesting, was to create a custom vibration for particular contacts. So in other words, you know, most phones just have a standard vibration setting so that they're going to vibrate in a particular pattern whenever notification comes in. But with iOS five you can actually this is particularly for iPhones, um, because I don't think anything else vibrates. But you've got an iPhone and you want to set up a specific notification, you can go into your contacts and you can choose a context. So let's say that I want to set up a contact where whenever Chris calls me, um, it's my phone's going to vibrate in a particular pattern. I can go in to my settings on contacts and create a new vibration and it creates a screen where I can just tap on the screen and the rhythm of the taps becomes the pattern of vibrations. So you know I might do shaven a haircut, and then I know it's Chris calling me automatically. I don't have to even look at my phone. I just feel d D D d D. I'm like, oh, that's Chris. I'll just let I go to voicemail. So the that's the cool thing is like I was like, wow, that's I never would have thought of that, you know, that never, And it's probably a feature that very few people are necessarily going to use, but it's one of those when I heard about it was like, Okay, that's kind of cool in a dorky way. Yeah. Yeah. Well another kind of cool uh feature is the location based Reminders UM, because you can tell the device to uh, say, remember to feed the cat when you get home, and it will when you get home send you a reminder at that time, rather than just sending it at you know, five o'clock, because you know, what if you get there, what if what if you're stuck in traffic and so you don't get home until five thirty five o'clock, you get the notice, oh yeah, I'm when I get home, I need to feed the cat. And then you get there at five thirty and you've forgotten about it until your cat wakes up sniffing your uh, your ear, like, oh, that smells good, I can eat that since he's not gonna feed me. You wake up and your spouse is gone and your cat is purring, and you're thinking, oh, there's a spouse shaped uh cat spot spot in the cat's belly. Huh, that was mistake. Look at that to do list one more time. So yeah, I mean, that's that's a nice feature. Um. And then again, it's not glamorous when I would consider a glamorous feature, but it's it's nice. Let's let's talk about a feature that is pretty darn awesome because we're racking up some minutes here, so let's let's talk about Sirie. Okay, I was I was gonna mention newsstand, which is another sort of less than exciting one. Now all right, let's let's let's uh let's be a series not available on all devices. That's it for last. Okay, news stand. Uh. If you'll remember back a couple of years ago now or a year and a half ago now, and one of the things that the the iPad was supposed to help with was uh single handedly saving the magazine industry, um, which may or may not have happened, depending on who you talk to. Mostly not UM. However, a lot of magazines have embraced the iPad, and I've now that I've got a couple electronic magazines on it, I could say it is pretty useful for that. UM. The thing is a lot of publishers have individual apps for their magazines UM. So you know you might have one for Wired and one for Esquire, and you have all these different magazine applications UM, each with its own subscription and all these things. Well, new Stand is designed to sort of look like eyebooks. It's got a faux wooden shelf UM environment, and basically new news Stand is supposed to display all of these Now again, this is an ap I that the developers for these apps can embrace and say, okay, well, as soon as a new issue comes up, we will display it in newsstands. So Newstand will launch the appropriate application UM for an individual magazine, and it will it will display the cover of the most recent UM issue of all those magazines and bring them all into one place, which I imagine will encourage more publishers to embrace the iPad, which is I'm sure what Apple is trying to do, but it is useful. Now. Um, one of the applications that I use from for e magazines still hasn't embraced the the API yet. So the most recent issue I have in that one is not showing up. But I do see wired in there um, which is which is pretty neat. And I think once more people begin to use that or embrace that API, it will be more useful tool. Now can we talk about Siria? Okay, go ahead and talk about series. Siri is pretty freaking awesome. Um, Siri is really an uh you know, I I used an Android phone, as we have mentioned several times in this podcast. Chris, you have one as well. Yeah, and and and people again, the Android people were saying voice recognition. Well I've had that, Yeah, but it's more than't just voice recognition. Mine doesn't work like this. Yeah, voice recognition is awesome. I mean I can do things like call people, I can navigate to places, I can search the web, I can do voice to text messages. I can do all those sort of things. But it generally requires me to open up an application that already has that that technology incorporated into it. So it's you know, using Google's voice recognition software. In whatever the application is, most of them happened to be made by Google, not a big surprise. Siri is a little different. SII is voice recognition, but it also has a natural language recognition element to it. Natural language recognition is tough. It's very difficult, especially when you're talking about people with accents. Yeah, well accents or are they use idiomatic speech or whatever? You know, it's it can be tricky trying to figure out the way. You know, a machine can have problems figuring out what a human wants just based upon natural speech. SIRIE is this, um, this this technology that will listen to you and then take whatever it is you said and come up with a solution based on what it thinks you want. So you might say something like, uh. You might you might hold down the home button, which is the way you activate SIRIE on an iPhone Forest it's the only device right now as of the recording of this podcast. Uh. And you might say, Siri, UM, I'm hungry, Are there any good seafood restaurants nearby? And it might pull up a map and show you the location of seafood restaurants in relation to your location. Or you could say things like Siri, do I need a jacket today? And it's going to look and see what the weather report is and come back and tell you whether or not you're gonna need a jacket. Um. And it's kind of neat. And it does this for all sorts of different applications. So you you might ask it a question and it will bring back the relevant information or it will initiate a search based upon that topic. So you might say something like, uh, Sirie, how many kilometers are in twenty seven miles and it'll pull that information directly from uh from Wolf from Alpha. Yeah, so you'll get that information there. Uh. And it's this is pretty neat stuff. You know. You might think on the surface of it, well that that sounds interesting, but how useful is it? It's actually incredibly useful. I mean. And and depending on how robust this device is, this technology is uh, it could be truly revolutionary. Um and Uh. And my favorite thing is that apparently the people who incorporated Siri into the iPhone for ESTs have a real sense of humor. Yes, very much like speaking of Wolf from Alpha, there are easter eggs in the theory and people have been, um have been investigating that for the past few days. I would encourage you, if you haven't already, uh, to look up some of these UM series. By the way I spelled s I R I if you're looking for that, UM and uh there are I know that somebody has asked it to open the pod bay doors, and there are several different answers to that, including I'm sorry, but I can't do that right now. Also, it uses your name. Yeah, yeah, since you're just a little creepy, yes, since you read. Since the device is registered to a person, Siri will respond to requests with that person's name. UM. But here are some other uh queries and responses. What are you wearing aluminous silicate glass and stainless steel? Nice? Huh. There's a do you know how nine thousand? Everyone knows what happened to how I'd rather not talk about it. Um, there's a there's of course, what's the meaning of life? And one of the answers that it will give is forty um and uh there's another one that's uh uh knock knock. Have you seen that one? Knock knock? And this is a series response knock knock? Who's there? Joshua? Joshua? Who Joshua, I don't do not not jokes. Uh there's uh, there's another one where if you ask what's the meaning of life? Since I don't know, but I think there's an app for that, there's another ones. I can't answer that now, but give me some time to write a very long play in which nothing happens. But as an English major, that was my favorite. Um there's a let's see if I can find the one. Will you marry me? My end user licensing agreement does not cover marriage? My apologies. Uh so Yeah, the people who who designed this created some really fun ones. How much would would a wood Chuck chuck? If a Woodchuck uld Chuck would? It depends on whether you are talking about African or European Woodchuck's money Python reference there's yeah, it's um. The the personality that they have sort of given Siri is kind of fun. It's almost a little GLaDOS from Bordle. In fact, I really hope there's some way for you to get Siri to say the cake is a lie uh or initiated series suddenly starts singing uh still alive. That would be awesome. But uh, yeah, I love that. Not only is it a useful feature, and it has some really cool implications for everything from voice recognition to artificial intelligence to a semantic web. I mean, these are all ideas that are are tied up with the serie application, but it also has a sense of humor. It's fantastic. Well, it's it's uh, it's obvious that as time wears on, the mobile operating systems are becoming much more functional, and they're turning the smartphone and another portable devices into tools that are are just that much more useful for uh, for different people. I definitely want to get into ice cream Sandwich in an upcoming podcast because especially because it's it's going to be useful for both the smartphone and the tablet running the operating system, the Android operating system. So because people were very um outspoken about Google splendoring off Androids so that you had a tablet version and a smartphone version. Yeah, I mean, and Androids had a lot of a lot of criticisms directed its way about fragmentation because there's so many devices on the market and many of them are running various versions of Android and are incapable of running later versions, or the carriers just haven't pushed out the later version to the devices, and so you've got all these different versions of Android out there. Um, so when if you're developing applications for the Android platform, you have to you have to make decisions like well, how far down the Android path do I allow support or do I just aim for the top tier? And UH iOS is a little easier. And that's not to say that there aren't people out there who have older devices that can't run iOS five. That's I mean people do, Chris does. But but it tends to be that with the Apple fans, they tend to upgrade more frequently I think than other device owners. Usually, I Android is a little different. It's it's hard to be an Android owner in a way because three months after you get your phone, there may be a new Android phone from a different carrier or even the same one that is has more features. Right. But with Apple it's a little more predictable. It's usually every twelve eighteen months, right right. Plus, UM, you know each individual carrier is different to UM. Some carriers will pushing an Android update more quickly than others, if at all. UM, and you have with the Android operating systems like UM, you know I have an HDC based phone, So I have HTC Sense as uh you know these they the overlay on my phone and not everyone else does. So my flavor of Android is different from other people's flavor of Android. And I think that's also sort of part of what's behind these glitches too, is you know, once you've taken a device and personalized it, um, you know, it makes it more difficult for the people releasing the operating system to know that it's going to work with that particular cocktail of applications and configurations, which is why it's a little more predictable for Apple products, and it is for uh when machines running Windows or you know, Android, because there are more variations in those. Um. Anyway, Well, I think this was a good you know discussion about iOS five. Will definitely keep our eyes on further updates because uh, you know it's five point one, will be will fix some of these problems and may introduce more of their own. I mean it's pretty common. Yeah, it's not for U, So we'll keep our eyes on it. If you guys want us to cover other specific topics, let's know, shoot us an email our address as tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or drop us A line on Twitter or Facebook are handled there as Tech Stuff hs W and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join How Stuffwork staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you

Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello everyone, welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Polette and I am an editor at how stuff works dot com. Sitting across from me as usual as senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Operator. Could you help me place this call? Very nice? Thank you. Today we are going to talk about an operator, uh in a way, a small time operator, in a way, a big time operator, depending on how you look at it. It's an operating system for a portable set of portable devices from Apple called Io S five. You may have heard of it. I know some of you have, because you've written in to ask us to talk about it a lot. Yes, yes, so I O S five. The the as of the recording of this podcast, latest generation of Apple's mobile operating system for devices such as the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the iPad. Mm hm m m uh yeah. There there are a lot of a lot of changes in this operating system. Um. We'll probably have to do one on the the latest generation of Android operating systems coming up for ice Cream sandwich before you write in and say ice creams and it's I know, you know, we record this sort of right before lunch, you know, and then in not like an hour and a half before lunchtime, and didn't have breakfast either. So so talking about iOS five doesn't make me hungry, but we might have to do something about ice cream sandwich comes up to bring some in. Um that's what tech News today does. They bring in ice cream sandwiches when they talk about it. I know because I was a guest on the show and I skyped in and they did not mail me an ice cream sandwich. You know, it should be like one of the like the Captain Kangaroo where you know, where you can't do that on TV, where they just dropped stuff from the ceiling. I would cream sandwich. I would have I would have loved that. But let's get to the actual iOS five and what the updates are to the system. And now, you know, we don't tend to talk about operating systems that much on this show, although we've we've done a few. We did Windows eight, we didn't Mac os ten Lion, we did Windows seven, and we did snow Leopard before that. Yeah, and we've also talked about and we talked about Linux before. I guess we do talk about operating systems a lot. It just seems a lot. It seems weird to talk about the updates, right, But you know, this is a big deal because the uh, you know, when when the iPhone four S was announced, UM, the initial reaction to the iPhone for S from what I saw online. Now, granted this is a a just a sliver of the population of iPhone users was one of is that all? But I think the iOS five was in some ways even more important than the iPhone for S. And there are some elements the iPhone for S that are pretty darn cool that that tie into iOS five, and it's you can only find it on the iPhone for S as a matter of fact, that there's some there's some tie in there. UM. Keeping in mind that up until then, we we actually heard about iOS five at the Worldwide Developer Conference earlier in two thousand eleven, in June. Yeah, that's around yeah, And basically that's Apple's big Developer UM conference where they talk to people who are writing software for UM generally both the operating system for these mobile devices and the Macintosh computer itself and sometimes for other devices like Apple TV. Yeah yeah, um, and you know, for for people who are not really following that uh, that world, it can be kind of dry. I think the same thing could probably be said for uh, for the Windows developer conferences in Google io. Um, you know, this is not really a general This is not generally where you expect to hear this kind news. People. Occasionally you'll have crazies like like myself or Chris log in and try and find a live blog and follow line by line as announcements are made. Because we actually find the stuff really fascinating. Yeah. Well, I mean eventually it will become fascinating for the consumer who's really into tech, but you know, finding out about application programming interfaces APIs and things like. Yeah, I mean, it will eventually become relevant to the average person, but not necessarily. But um, they announced quite a bit about iOS five at that point. That's when we learned a lot about it. In the meantime, we heard a lot from the tech media about because frankly, listeners sort of asked us to speculate on the new iPhone five and as it turned out, there wasn't one. Um, but we did find out a lot about about iOS five and a lot of the features, some of which had been out on other operating systems such as Google's Android UM and others which are sort of innovative. Now, one of the ones we've actually developed dedicated an entire podcast too, because uh iicloud ties into iOS five as well as UH mac OS ten lion as well as other elements. But we've already done a full episode on i Cloud, so I don't think we really need to touch on i Cloud that much other than to say it's a cloud storage solution that allows you to put files into the cloud and access them across all your various Apple devices. Yeah, now it's not it's not for everyone, I should point out, UM and the iOS five is not for everyone. As a matter of fact. If you're running a Macintosh UM and you're you want to use i cloud, uh, you have to be using the new the newest version macOS ten point seven, which is which is lion UM. But you can use on anything that will run iOS five. You can do that, which is the last few iPhones UM, the last couple iOS or I'm sorry, the iPod Touch and both versions of the iPad UM and you can. You can actually see that as soon as you update your device to iOS five. My iPod Touch is a first generation so it is not eligible. But I did update my iPad software to iOS five, and the first thing that happens right after you updated is it starts to ask you questions about setting up the device. UM. You know, it wants to know what your Apple I D is and whether or not you want to sink to I Cloud. Um it will continue to uh if you do agree to do that. Uh, it will sink your address book, your calendars, UM, and a lot of of other information to I Cloud so that um it can sink across Say I did have an iPod Touch or an iPhone UM, and I had updated my Mac to iOS lion UM or I'm sorry OS ten lion, I would be able to sink all that information without having to worry about, you know, plugging stuff in and and sinking a device to device. It would sink at all from I Cloud. Yeah. And actually, uh, we can touch on this just very briefly. There there's been some criticisms about iOS five and I Cloud and uh, and I thought I'd just go and and pipe up on one of them. Since we're talking about the subject already. I heard that apparently when you take photos and it uploads to I Cloud, there's no way to delete them. Oh so if you were to take a photo using your iPod Touch, let's say, okay, so you've got an iPod. iPod touches have cameras, right ones. Okay, so you can tell that I have an iPod Classic people, so I am well behind, although I've got lots of music on it. So you take a photo of your iPod Touch and it's got the eye cloud feature in there, and it's not you're on WiFi, and it uploads to your eye Cloud. Now that photo is visible to all the other devices that are on that So let's say that you're sharing devices with oh, I don't know, um, your your spouse, Um that could you know? You could end up having some problems there if you're taking photos of like you think this one one thing that you're seeing is really funny, and you want to send a photo to your best buddy, but your your your spouse might not find it as amusing as you do. Well, if you take the photo and it goes to the eye Cloud and you can't delete it, your spouse has access to that too. So I'm being really delicate while I'm walking around this. I'm just saying that if there are a lot of people using the same sort of eye cloud, like like a family or whatever, there could be potential problems. I'm sure that that will be addressed if it hasn't been addressed already. But it's a problem that I was alerted to. But let's talk about some of them. The features of iOS five. I want to talk about this notification center. It sounds really interesting to me. So this notification center actually has a little thing of notifications when when new technology, new information is coming into your your iPhone. And I mean, this is something that's really really phenomenal. I mean I've only had this since two thousand seven on my Android phone. I do smell snark. Um yeah, yeah, well, and it's one of the things that I like on my Android phone. Um. Now, on iOS five, if you have a device capable of doing that, you can pull down from the top of the screen. And when I say pull down, uh, you know, we're talking about putting your finger at the very edge of the screen where the menu bar is swiping down and you can actually see the notifications and it looks a little different. I'm showing Jonathan on my iPad. Now, it looks a little different. They have the the gray linen background behind it. Um, but it works very much like the Android operating systems exact same feature. Well, you could kind of expect that at this point, you know, they all kind of know you could have kind of expected it back in two thousand seven or two thousand eight, but Apple just implemented. That's what I'm saying is they they all kind of pick each other's good features and will add them to subsequent releases. What it reminds me of really is and you know, and I'm picking on Apple a little bit about this, about being so late to the game and implementing something like this in their operating system. I'm picking on them. I mean, I'm glad that they've done it because it is a useful feature, and I'm glad that iPhone users and iPad users and ipont touch users were be able to to take advantage of it. That's the feature a lot. Yeah. Uh, the reason why I'm picking on them is it's reminding me a lot of how Apple was really slow to implement copy and paste like or multitasking or multitasking, and these are very basic features that you see in other smartphones, and you wonder, like the people who are Apple fans will say, I love Apple's products, I just don't understand why they have not done something similar to this other operating system that's been doing this for years, and you would think that would be a fairly simple solution. Now, we don't know everything that's going on behind the scene. Are the motivations behind implementing versus not implementing certain features there may be and in fact, I wager there are very good reasons for the rollout being the way it has been. But still from a from an outside perspective, it just seems a little a little ludicrous. So I couldn't help but poke just a touch of fun at Apple for that. Well, a lot of the Android UH fans like to poke fun at Apple for for doing that. Um. That being said, Apple's got a lot of features that Android does not support. Yeah, so I'm fully aware of that Apple fans, So you know, UM, I've also heard a lot of hooting about some of the bugs. There have been some problems installing iOS five. Excuse me, Um, I would I would actually add that I had trouble installing iOS five at first. That just me a couple of tries before I actually got it to work. I think there may have been some some attempts to sync with Apple servers and I tried to install it in the first a and I think that may have been part of it. So it might have been a bandwidth this year. It might have just been that a lot of people are flooding Apple with requests to to up update the iOS. Is that what you're saying, But that that seems fair with bugs and and concerns like this, I feel that's kind of unfair anyway. It's a day zero thing that's gonna happen with any major roll out. Yeah, any operating system, and especially an operating system as popular as iOS five, as as iOS I should say, any operating system as popular as iOS that seems to be magnified because you've got so many people trying to hit it at once, that little problems that for for a quote unquote regular operating system would you know, be noticed by a few people, But because the adoption rate wouldn't be so fast, it wouldn't be concentrated on day zero so much. Uh, the company would have an opportunity to patch problems on a regular basis, and so the average consumer might not ever be aware that there were problems because you know, there wasn't a rush to try and adopt the operating system as soon as it became available Apple. Apple's a rock star company. There are people who were staying awake until the wee hours of the morning the first few hours of October twelve eleven, which is when iOS five became available, uh, just so that they could try and get the operating system as fast as possible. So I've heard about people like I know some guys in Texas who are up till almost three am trying to get it. So well, Frankly, you know, I have an Android based smartphone and I would like to have Gingerbread on it. I still have fro you, but I am waiting for my phone carrier to push that to me. I can't go get it. If I could go get it, I would have already had it well. And and before anyone writes in, yes, we know that if you could take it to the store and have them force it, or you could root your phone get a rom But you know, Chris and I we both like our phones to work. We're funny that way. Well, and that's the thing is, I don't mind tinkering with it, but not to the point where I break it and then I have to go, well, I wanted it to work, which I mean, the nice thing is that it's really hard to truly break it, although you can. UM. But anyway, let's get back to iOS five and talk some more. You were talking about, you know, did you have any other problems once you got through? Was the Was the installation process smooth for you? Um? Basically, the first step in doing this, uh, if you are running iOS four, UM, you plug it into your computer and use iTunes to upgrade the system software. And it says, lay, I see there's an update available. Would you like to do this now? UM? You say yeah, sure, And it takes a while for it to download from from Apple servers. And then what it tries to do is it's going to offer to sink your your device UM with the computer first to make sure that you don't lose anything that's gonna come up again too. UM. And uh, once it goes to that process, UM, it attempts to write the software onto there. And I actually got stuck a couple of times um to the point where it said there's a there's an error. I cannot actually uh install this software on here at this time. Um, you know, give it a give it a shot. And it actually said that it was having trouble sinking uh once or twice two. Um. It was one of those things where I think, uh, it may have been a bandwidth thing. Um. It also may have been a watched pot sort of thing, because I actually told it to go ahead and try it again, and then I went off to do something else, going well, you know, hopefully it'll do it this time, and I came back and it was almost done. Um. Once it actually does install the software, then it reinstalls most, if not all, of your your stuff. I didn't have any problems with it, uh uh installing everything that I had on there. But I understand that there are people who have had apps missing and music missing. Yeah. Tom Merritt of tech News Today and this Weekend tech Um But was on his show. He mentioned that when he was updating to iOS five, about half of his apps were missing. When the installation was complete and he was able to you know, get the apps again, but he had to redownload them to his phone so uh, and he had to do it I guess manually, because it just it didn't do it automatically. And all of his playlists were missing. So he had created playlists on and they were missing not just from his phone but from iTunes, like they were going, yeah the song, the music was still there, it just wasn't arranged in the playlists. So yeah, so he had that those issues, and we've heard of other issues as well through the installation process. But again, this is a day zero thing, and you know, those kind of problems can can occur. Uh, it's just that you know, normally we wouldn't hear so much about it if it weren't for the fact that everyone's obsessed with getting it. Uh. Do you want to talk about some of the other features that iOS five has. I mean, I made fun of notifications just because I wanted to get that out of the way. But the notifications do look a lot nicer than they used to, and you have a lot more control over them there. If you go into um your devices uh system settings, UM, you can actually control how your notifications show up UM, which is nice. Again that's sort of a behind the scenes type of thing. UM, but you know, you can you could sort the notifications um by time or or manually if you prefer um. And uh, I mean, there are a lot of other things that are are sort of behind the scenes to like the Twitter um the Twitter integration. And this is not very exciting if you are already a Twitter usier, you already have Twitter on your iPhone or your iPad or your iPod. But um, we're talking about a p I S again. This is going to enable people. The integration is going to enable people to build apps that will allow you to tweet directly from those apps. Like the the integration is much more fluid now than it will as before. Well, it's kind of like if you take a photo, now there's a one you're one touch away from sharing that photo on Twitter instead of having to you know, maybe go through a couple of commands. It's it's really streamlined that which seems kind of it may seem trivial, but it does make a big difference when you're actually using these and uh as I can attest because I've I've had that where you know, I had to go through and upload a photo from my phone to Twitter, and then eventually I had Twitter integration where I could I could take a photo and then choose at that moment to upgrade upload it to Twitter, and it makes a huge difference. Um. Also, I always five supports I Message across devices besides just the iPhone. Yes, you can have I Message on the iPod Touch and the iPad. So now and that's my message of course. Is Apple's instant Messaging service, Yeah, I know it only works with those eye devices, Um, but it's sort of People have likened it to the BlackBerry Messenger service, where people who have Blackberries can message people with other Blackberries. Um. I would say that people who complain about Apple's closed offness are probably going to complain about this feature too. Um. But it does give you the opportunity to send text messages to other people who are using those devices, even if they're on a different network. Um, you know, without without a penalty. So uh, I say you have three friends and all of you have iPhones. Um, you don't have to pay for text messaging in addition to your data plan. If you just want to send text messages to those three or four friends, as long as they're on an eye device, they can. You could you could share those messages without having to worry about that. Um. There's also the Reminder's feature, which is sort of a built in to do list. Um. I've got a couple to do programs on there. One of the two do is a personal bug bear for me. I have trouble getting myself to write stuff down in a particular place. So I've tried several different ask managers trying to get me to develop a pattern and then make a habit out of writing stuff down. Um. The Reminder's feature is pretty pretty nice built in to do list that I haven't really tried yet. As as we're speaking, iOS five has only been out for actually less than forty eight hours, UM, so I still haven't really gotten to see whether that one's a lot better. It seems to be kind of a low end. Uh. You know, it's not. It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, um, but it is. It is built into the operating system now. iOS five also supports some new functionality with the cameras involved in various uh Apple products that run on iOS. Yes, so now you can do things like with the iPhone, you can uh you can activate the camera from the lock screen. Yeah, which is nice. Although I imagine that also means we will ultimately end up with a lot more photos of the inside of people's pockets. Um, it is possible. One nice thing about this is you might say, what's the big deal. Uh, you could hand your phone to a friend and they don't have to know your pass code to take a photo. Hey wait, wait, wait wait, I'm gonna jump up here and and take a photo of his statue, you know. And you could just take the photo and uh, if somebody else gets hold of your phone, they might be able to take a photo, but they can't look at all the other photos on the phone. It's also nice and that if you are in a situation where something is um, there's a cool photo opportunity that's not gonna last very long. It removes some of the time that it would take you to unlock your phone and go to the camera app and and started up. But it also has other features they're going to have, you know, use gridlines that you can align photos properly, because you know, if you're a photographer, you know there's certain tricks like you can align a photo to make it more attractive as opposed to the way I take photos where the subject of the photo is always dead center in the middle of the picture. And there's nothing interesting going on. Ever, because I am not a photographer, and that is abundantly clear, or when you look at the photos I've taken, well, they've they've also incorporated the ability to use some of the other buttons. The volume up button now becomes the the shutter release, so you can use that rather than having to tap the screen. Um. And uh, you know you can you can pinch to zoom or pinch to shrink as you prefer. Um on the screen. Yeah, because you move your fingers out. It's a reverse pinch to zoom. It doesn't pinch to zoom doesn't make sense. I just my brain's breaking right now. It just mean if it were pinched to zoom to be opposite what you would I need a break? You can um. You can also do red eye removal, do some some basic photo editing like that, and crop and rotation, um, and organized photos into albums. Um. Again these are these are not uh, this is not necessarily exciting, but it's nice functionality to add. Yeah, stuff that you know it may it's the stuff that just makes the features that much more uh easy to use and and really you know, it may not be something that's evident necessarily to a new iPhone owner or iPod touch owner iPad owner, but it's those those little things that just make those features much more useful. Um. There's also did you are you aware of the PC free feature? Yes? Yes, And I tried to go get a PC free and they said I had to pay for it. Yeah. It doesn't mean that you clearly did not read the description. You just thought that you were going to get a free computer, Sad Trombone. No. PC free is a feature where you don't have to have a computer to use an iPad, iPhone, iPod touch because you know, traditionally you would sink that device to a computer, but this is a feature that removes that that step. You can also sink your device wirelessly. Now, um, if you are sinking to a computer, Uh, the only trick is it's got to be plugged in. So once you uh you know, get your your charger and plug it into the wall. Um, then it should be able to sink wirelessly with a hub. So you have a computer that you are specifically using as your your eye hub, Um, then it will will do that. You no longer have to plug it directly in to make that work, which is a feature. There was a neat feature that I was telling Chris about that I had learned about just this morning, because not all the features are the ones that are being touted on Apple's page for iPhone iOS five, but one of them, which I thought was pretty interesting, was to create a custom vibration for particular contacts. So in other words, you know, most phones just have a standard vibration setting so that they're going to vibrate in a particular pattern whenever notification comes in. But with iOS five you can actually this is particularly for iPhones, um, because I don't think anything else vibrates. But you've got an iPhone and you want to set up a specific notification, you can go into your contacts and you can choose a context. So let's say that I want to set up a contact where whenever Chris calls me, um, it's my phone's going to vibrate in a particular pattern. I can go in to my settings on contacts and create a new vibration and it creates a screen where I can just tap on the screen and the rhythm of the taps becomes the pattern of vibrations. So you know I might do shaven a haircut, and then I know it's Chris calling me automatically. I don't have to even look at my phone. I just feel d D D d D. I'm like, oh, that's Chris. I'll just let I go to voicemail. So the that's the cool thing is like I was like, wow, that's I never would have thought of that, you know, that never, And it's probably a feature that very few people are necessarily going to use, but it's one of those when I heard about it was like, Okay, that's kind of cool in a dorky way. Yeah. Yeah. Well another kind of cool uh feature is the location based Reminders UM, because you can tell the device to uh, say, remember to feed the cat when you get home, and it will when you get home send you a reminder at that time, rather than just sending it at you know, five o'clock, because you know, what if you get there, what if what if you're stuck in traffic and so you don't get home until five thirty five o'clock, you get the notice, oh yeah, I'm when I get home, I need to feed the cat. And then you get there at five thirty and you've forgotten about it until your cat wakes up sniffing your uh, your ear, like, oh, that smells good, I can eat that since he's not gonna feed me. You wake up and your spouse is gone and your cat is purring, and you're thinking, oh, there's a spouse shaped uh cat spot spot in the cat's belly. Huh, that was mistake. Look at that to do list one more time. So yeah, I mean, that's that's a nice feature. Um. And then again, it's not glamorous when I would consider a glamorous feature, but it's it's nice. Let's let's talk about a feature that is pretty darn awesome because we're racking up some minutes here, so let's let's talk about Sirie. Okay, I was I was gonna mention newsstand, which is another sort of less than exciting one. Now all right, let's let's let's uh let's be a series not available on all devices. That's it for last. Okay, news stand. Uh. If you'll remember back a couple of years ago now or a year and a half ago now, and one of the things that the the iPad was supposed to help with was uh single handedly saving the magazine industry, um, which may or may not have happened, depending on who you talk to. Mostly not UM. However, a lot of magazines have embraced the iPad, and I've now that I've got a couple electronic magazines on it, I could say it is pretty useful for that. UM. The thing is a lot of publishers have individual apps for their magazines UM. So you know you might have one for Wired and one for Esquire, and you have all these different magazine applications UM, each with its own subscription and all these things. Well, new Stand is designed to sort of look like eyebooks. It's got a faux wooden shelf UM environment, and basically new news Stand is supposed to display all of these Now again, this is an ap I that the developers for these apps can embrace and say, okay, well, as soon as a new issue comes up, we will display it in newsstands. So Newstand will launch the appropriate application UM for an individual magazine, and it will it will display the cover of the most recent UM issue of all those magazines and bring them all into one place, which I imagine will encourage more publishers to embrace the iPad, which is I'm sure what Apple is trying to do, but it is useful. Now. Um, one of the applications that I use from for e magazines still hasn't embraced the the API yet. So the most recent issue I have in that one is not showing up. But I do see wired in there um, which is which is pretty neat. And I think once more people begin to use that or embrace that API, it will be more useful tool. Now can we talk about Siria? Okay, go ahead and talk about series. Siri is pretty freaking awesome. Um, Siri is really an uh you know, I I used an Android phone, as we have mentioned several times in this podcast. Chris, you have one as well. Yeah, and and and people again, the Android people were saying voice recognition. Well I've had that, Yeah, but it's more than't just voice recognition. Mine doesn't work like this. Yeah, voice recognition is awesome. I mean I can do things like call people, I can navigate to places, I can search the web, I can do voice to text messages. I can do all those sort of things. But it generally requires me to open up an application that already has that that technology incorporated into it. So it's you know, using Google's voice recognition software. In whatever the application is, most of them happened to be made by Google, not a big surprise. Siri is a little different. SII is voice recognition, but it also has a natural language recognition element to it. Natural language recognition is tough. It's very difficult, especially when you're talking about people with accents. Yeah, well accents or are they use idiomatic speech or whatever? You know, it's it can be tricky trying to figure out the way. You know, a machine can have problems figuring out what a human wants just based upon natural speech. SIRIE is this, um, this this technology that will listen to you and then take whatever it is you said and come up with a solution based on what it thinks you want. So you might say something like, uh. You might you might hold down the home button, which is the way you activate SIRIE on an iPhone Forest it's the only device right now as of the recording of this podcast. Uh. And you might say, Siri, UM, I'm hungry, Are there any good seafood restaurants nearby? And it might pull up a map and show you the location of seafood restaurants in relation to your location. Or you could say things like Siri, do I need a jacket today? And it's going to look and see what the weather report is and come back and tell you whether or not you're gonna need a jacket. Um. And it's kind of neat. And it does this for all sorts of different applications. So you you might ask it a question and it will bring back the relevant information or it will initiate a search based upon that topic. So you might say something like, uh, Sirie, how many kilometers are in twenty seven miles and it'll pull that information directly from uh from Wolf from Alpha. Yeah, so you'll get that information there. Uh. And it's this is pretty neat stuff. You know. You might think on the surface of it, well that that sounds interesting, but how useful is it? It's actually incredibly useful. I mean. And and depending on how robust this device is, this technology is uh, it could be truly revolutionary. Um and Uh. And my favorite thing is that apparently the people who incorporated Siri into the iPhone for ESTs have a real sense of humor. Yes, very much like speaking of Wolf from Alpha, there are easter eggs in the theory and people have been, um have been investigating that for the past few days. I would encourage you, if you haven't already, uh, to look up some of these UM series. By the way I spelled s I R I if you're looking for that, UM and uh there are I know that somebody has asked it to open the pod bay doors, and there are several different answers to that, including I'm sorry, but I can't do that right now. Also, it uses your name. Yeah, yeah, since you're just a little creepy, yes, since you read. Since the device is registered to a person, Siri will respond to requests with that person's name. UM. But here are some other uh queries and responses. What are you wearing aluminous silicate glass and stainless steel? Nice? Huh. There's a do you know how nine thousand? Everyone knows what happened to how I'd rather not talk about it. Um, there's a there's of course, what's the meaning of life? And one of the answers that it will give is forty um and uh there's another one that's uh uh knock knock. Have you seen that one? Knock knock? And this is a series response knock knock? Who's there? Joshua? Joshua? Who Joshua, I don't do not not jokes. Uh there's uh, there's another one where if you ask what's the meaning of life? Since I don't know, but I think there's an app for that, there's another ones. I can't answer that now, but give me some time to write a very long play in which nothing happens. But as an English major, that was my favorite. Um there's a let's see if I can find the one. Will you marry me? My end user licensing agreement does not cover marriage? My apologies. Uh so Yeah, the people who who designed this created some really fun ones. How much would would a wood Chuck chuck? If a Woodchuck uld Chuck would? It depends on whether you are talking about African or European Woodchuck's money Python reference there's yeah, it's um. The the personality that they have sort of given Siri is kind of fun. It's almost a little GLaDOS from Bordle. In fact, I really hope there's some way for you to get Siri to say the cake is a lie uh or initiated series suddenly starts singing uh still alive. That would be awesome. But uh, yeah, I love that. Not only is it a useful feature, and it has some really cool implications for everything from voice recognition to artificial intelligence to a semantic web. I mean, these are all ideas that are are tied up with the serie application, but it also has a sense of humor. It's fantastic. Well, it's it's uh, it's obvious that as time wears on, the mobile operating systems are becoming much more functional, and they're turning the smartphone and another portable devices into tools that are are just that much more useful for uh, for different people. I definitely want to get into ice cream Sandwich in an upcoming podcast because especially because it's it's going to be useful for both the smartphone and the tablet running the operating system, the Android operating system. So because people were very um outspoken about Google splendoring off Androids so that you had a tablet version and a smartphone version. Yeah, I mean, and Androids had a lot of a lot of criticisms directed its way about fragmentation because there's so many devices on the market and many of them are running various versions of Android and are incapable of running later versions, or the carriers just haven't pushed out the later version to the devices, and so you've got all these different versions of Android out there. Um, so when if you're developing applications for the Android platform, you have to you have to make decisions like well, how far down the Android path do I allow support or do I just aim for the top tier? And UH iOS is a little easier. And that's not to say that there aren't people out there who have older devices that can't run iOS five. That's I mean people do, Chris does. But but it tends to be that with the Apple fans, they tend to upgrade more frequently I think than other device owners. Usually, I Android is a little different. It's it's hard to be an Android owner in a way because three months after you get your phone, there may be a new Android phone from a different carrier or even the same one that is has more features. Right. But with Apple it's a little more predictable. It's usually every twelve eighteen months, right right. Plus, UM, you know each individual carrier is different to UM. Some carriers will pushing an Android update more quickly than others, if at all. UM, and you have with the Android operating systems like UM, you know I have an HDC based phone, So I have HTC Sense as uh you know these they the overlay on my phone and not everyone else does. So my flavor of Android is different from other people's flavor of Android. And I think that's also sort of part of what's behind these glitches too, is you know, once you've taken a device and personalized it, um, you know, it makes it more difficult for the people releasing the operating system to know that it's going to work with that particular cocktail of applications and configurations, which is why it's a little more predictable for Apple products, and it is for uh when machines running Windows or you know, Android, because there are more variations in those. Um. Anyway, Well, I think this was a good you know discussion about iOS five. Will definitely keep our eyes on further updates because uh, you know it's five point one, will be will fix some of these problems and may introduce more of their own. I mean it's pretty common. Yeah, it's not for U, So we'll keep our eyes on it. If you guys want us to cover other specific topics, let's know, shoot us an email our address as tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or drop us A line on Twitter or Facebook are handled there as Tech Stuff hs W and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join How Stuffwork staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you