Live from Apple's "Let's Talk iPhone" event

We're here giving you updates from Apple's "Let's Talk iPhone" event. Will it be the 5, will it be 4S? Keep reading and refreshing the page to find out. Tim Cook is on stage inviting us to Apple's campus. He says the place is like a second home to everyone who works there. He talks about the momentum Apple has had, especially with opening new stores. They've opened two in China; Hong Kong and Shanghai. The Shanghai store is their biggest store so far. They have 357 stores in 11 different countries.

Is it going to be one or two iPhones?

He then goes on to talk about the success of OS X Lion. Six million copies of Lion have been downloaded so far. After elaborating further on the success of the Macbook Air, the Macbook Pro and the iMac, Cook moves on to talk about music.

The iPod launched in 2001 revolutionizing the music industry. Over 300 million iPods have been sold. 45 million of those were sold between July 2010 and June 2011. iTunes is now up to 20 billion songs. Which brings us to the iPhone, which Cook admits is the reason why so many people are in that room today.

But then it turns out the iPhone mention was just a curveball. He quickly moves on to talk about the iPad, Apple's youngest product. iPads are showing up everywhere, including schools. A 40 pound flight manual is replaced with a light iPad. Hospitals are testing iPads for pilot or deployment programs. Basically, iPads are everywhere.

Scott Forstall steps up to the plate. He says that iOS is the number one mobile platform with a ComScore of 43% as opposed to Android's 33%. There are also 5,00,000 apps in the App Store, 1,40,000 of which are specifically for the iPad. 18 billion apps have been downloaded. He's showing off a card app that lets you make your own greeting cards. Apple will print and mail the card that you make to its intended recipient and even send you a notification of when the card gets delivered. It's $2.99 (Rs. 148) to mail a card in the US and $4.99 (248) to mail a card anywhere else in the world.

He then goes on to talk about iOS 5. Talks about the top 10 features of the mobile OS. Features include notifications, iMessenger (BBM for iOS), push to all devices, Reminders app, Twitter integration, Newsstand, Background display, and camera function. They're trying to make it easier to get to the camera so if you double tap on the home button, you can take a picture. You can use the volume button to take a photo. 

iOS 5 cometh on October 15

iOS 5 will drop October 12th. It will be available for iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 2, iPad, iPod Touch 4th and 3rd generation.

Eddy Cue then comes on stage to talk about iCloud. He starts talking about iTunes in the cloud. You can download and re-download your music and media at any time on any device. Photos too, you take them on your iPhone and you can send them to any other device. Documents get pushed too. iCloud will also be out on October 12th. Apps and books are redownloaded too. There's a daily backup of iCloud events.

It's all in the cloud now

He then talks about Find My Friends. It's an app which will let you quickly see the locations of your friends who have chosen to share their locations with you. Apple's gone one step ahead of Foursquare and Facebook in location based social networking and have added the ability to see the longitude and latitude of your friends' exact positions. What's useful is you can share for limited time so if you don't normally share but are driving to a friend's house, you can share during that time so your friend can redirect you if you're lost. There are parental controls too to prevent stalking.

iCloud is free for Lion and iOS 5 users. 5GB of space is available but more can be purchased. Then there's iTunes Match. This service scans your library and finds the stuff that iTunes has to add and uploads anything that isn't already in iTunes. You can stream your entire library just by tapping on it. $24.99 a year (Rs. 1,224 approx). iTunes Match will go live in the US at the end of October. Apple is working hard to bring iTunes Match to other countries.