iOS 5 To Be Available To Everyone On October 12th

This morning at Apple’s iPhone event in Cupertino, Apple’s Senior VP of iOS Software Scott Forstall took the stage to fill in the rest of the details regarding iOS 5 before they moved on to talk about new hardware.

iOS 5 will launch to everyone on October 12th.

For those who need a recap, the top 10 features of iOS 5 (as hand-picked by Forstall himself):

• Notifications: A replacement system for iOS’ otherwise antiquated alerts system
• iMessage: A free to use, iOS-to-iOS SMS replacement
• Reminders: user creatable time/location based reminders
• Twitter integration
• Newsstand: Apple’s in-house distribution system for iPad magazines
• New and improved camera (One click access from the lock screen, red eye removal, cropping, rotating, etc)
• Game Center (Recommendation engine, Achievements system)
• Improved Safari browser (Faster, lighter, tabbed browsing on iPad, and the “Reader” content scraper)
• Mail.app improvements
• PC-Free (Activation without iTunes)

Also hugely important to iOS 5, but mentioned later in the presentation: iCloud, Apple’s photo/document/data syncing solution. It stores your photo stream, backs up your contacts, keeps a catalog of all the apps you’ve ever purchased, and can store documents and files from third-party apps. iCloud will launch to everyone on October 12th, as well. Everyone gets 5 GB for free, while 10 GB, 20 GB, and 50 GB plans are available for $20, $40, and $100 per year respectively.

The iOS 5 update will work on the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 1 and 2, and iPod Touch (3rd/4th gen).