Updates to Apple’s iOS are as regular a feature of spring as lambs and blossom, but this year the refreshed operating system may be delayed until autumn to allow more time to go through an unprecedented overhaul with a heavy emphasis on cloud integration.
The new OS may well still be announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, (WWDC) in June, but it might not be released for a further few months. The strategy would be logical. Recent iOS updates have been incremental and the platform, for all its strengths, is under greater pressure than it has been before. Android offers broad appeal, and WP7 innovative experiences.
Further challenges could come from the rise of a new breed of mobile OS - a stripped-down browser/OS geared primarily to web services and the cloud, as epitomized by HP's webOS or Google's Chrome. Apple lags behind in many aspects of the mobile cloud, and this could be addressed by a radical update of iOS this time.
Steve Jobs used last year’s developer conference to launch the iPhone 4, and if Apple follows the same pattern by unveiling version five of the smartphone, the device will likely run the older version of the OS for the first few months.
The talk of a change to Apple's usual product cycle came from the TechCrunch blog, citing "solid sources". It says Apple could launch several cloud-based services to work with the new OS, including a music locker and a location service for tracking family and friends. Apple has already hinted at extending its MobileMe service to become a music storage and streaming platform.
Apple is also tipped to release Mac OSX Lion at the conference. The software has been heavily influenced by iOS, and so should bring the Mac and iPhone experiences closer together. The vendor also recently updated iOS 4 again, with release 4.3.1 - nothing to get excited about, as it mainly fixes bugs and addresses some connectivity issues.
Original article:Latest iOS update may be delayed until autumn