Apple just confirmed with a press release Steve Jobs will be on stage (alongside other Apple executives) at the WWDC keynote on Monday, June 6, to officially unveil iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion and iCloud, the upcoming cloud service from Apple. The WWDC ‘11 was long rumored to be focused on new software announcements with Mac OS X Lion set to debut this summer and an iOS 5 beta ready to be seeded to developers, but the iCloud launch was far from certain as Apple was rumored to be closing deal with music publishers, but negotiations could still fall off before the WWDC. It’s not clear yet whether iCloud will be a music service or a much larger set of tools part of a MobileMe rebrand, though Apple’s press release seems to suggest just that.
Apple® CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software - Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS® X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad®, iPhone® and iPod touch®; and iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.
Previous reports indicated iOS 5 would be released publicly this Fall, with betas seeded throughout the summer to developers. The OS was reported to feature new music, location services, “completely revamped” notifications and widgets, as well as a heavy cloud-based underlying structure that, at this point, we assume will be directly connected to iCloud for the web, desktop and mobile. Other rumors in the past months pointed at iOS 5 with new features called “Photo Stream” and “Media Stream” to instantly share photos and videos with your friends through the Cloud, similarly to how a separate report claimed the new MobileMe would be a mix of Facebook and uStream for social functionalities and video sharing.