Snow Leopard is here! OSX 10.6 will be shipping to customers on the 28th August, for the princely sum of £25 /$29. Our pal Gene Munster expects Snow Leopard to sell over 5M copies this quarter alone!

One of thing of note, is the poorly designed packaging. What did Apple use? MS word 98? Apart from that, everything looks ok.

Here’s some of the features, taken from the Apple Store:

Better, faster, easier

Snow Leopard enhances your entire Mac experience. In ways big and small, it gets faster, more reliable, and easier to use.

  • Activate Exposé right from the Dock.
  • Wake from sleep and shut down your Mac faster than before.
  • Install it more quickly and get back 7GB of disk space.
  • Enjoy dozens more refinements for everything from iChat to Preview and more.

The 7GB space saving sounds pretty good to us icon smile Snow Leopard is here! Also, the faster sleeping and waking sounds great (but it doesn’t take that long really does it?)

Next-generation technologies

New core technologies in Snow Leopard unleash the power of today’s advanced hardware and prepare Mac OS X for future innovation.

  • 64-bit support, the next big step for the Mac. All key system applications are now 64-bit so they can take advantage of all the memory in your Mac.
  • Grand Central Dispatch, a revolutionary new way for software to get the most from multicore processors.
  • OpenCL, a new technology that unleashes the power of graphics processors to accelerate application performance.

64 bit support for key system applications will be a great bonus.

QuickTime X

As the next generation of media players, it’s built on new core technologies and advances modern media and Internet standards.

  • Watch your videos in a clean, uncluttered interface with the new QuickTime Player.
  • Record audio or video using the built-in iSight camera and microphone in your Mac.
  • Trim your media to the perfect length.
  • Easily publish your media to MobileMe or YouTube.

Quicktime gets a small overhaul, and it looks much slicker now. Its now dubbed ‘Quicktime X’. There’s some cool social elements too in QTX, like recording audio and video then publishing to YouTube.

Out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange

Mac OS X Snow Leopard delivers built-in support for the latest version of Microsoft Exchange Server, something even Windows PCs don’t have.

  • Use your Mac at home and at work and have all your messages, meetings, and contacts in one place.
  • Easily set it up using the Autodiscovery feature in Exchange.
  • Use Mail, iCal, and Address Book to access your work email, calendars, and the Global Address List alongside your personal accounts.
  • Take advantage of powerful Mac OS X features such as Spotlight, Quick Look, data detectors, and more.

Safari 4

The latest version of Apple’s blazing-fast web browser delivers up to 50 percent faster JavaScript performance and is more resistant to crashes than ever.

  • Use Top Sites to view your favorite websites at a glance, see which ones have been updated, and visit them in a click.
  • Complete search queries as you type with built-in Google Suggest.
  • Flip through full-page previews of your browsing history in Cover Flow the same way you flip through album art in iTunes.

As you can see there’s not sot so much any major changes, but some really useful upgrades and refinements. Think evolution as opposed to revolution. But at the price, who can argue?

Features source: Apple Store US

Do you plan on updating to Snow Leopard? What features are you most looking forward to?