Today Apple Announced the new iteration of it’s iPhone OS. iPhone OS 4.0 gets over 100 new features. 7 of them were demoed by Steve Jobs, Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller on stage in Cupertino. Besides that the new iPhone OS 4.0 delivers over 1500 new APIs for developers. Developers now have the possibility to enhance their application with functions like access calendar, In-app SMS, Photo Library Access, Quick Look, Spell Check and many more new features.
I’ll go through the 7 features which were demoed today.
Multitasking
The first feature demoed was multitasking. To be quite direct: Multitasking is only going to be available for iPhone 3GS and iPad users, Multitasking isn’t going to be a functionality for current iPhone 3G users or users with an original iPhone. Of course it’s sad for current iPhone 3G users that their device doesn’t get multitasking, but in my opinion Apple just couldn’t keep the speed they wanted with this multitasking in the iPhone 3G. Since speed is 90% of a satisfying user experience, I think it’s legit for Apple to disable the multitasking feature in the iPhone 3G.
Multitasking can be enabled for a numerous of functionalities. These include:
- Background Audio (For applications like Pandora and Spotify)
- VOIP (For applications like Skype)
- Background location (For applications like TomTom or other Navigation Apps)
- Task Completion (Upload A Photo to Flickr in the background)
Picture used with permission of Ryan Block and Peter Rojas, gdgt
I think there’s only 1 functionality missing here and that’s an open connection to, for example, a twitter application. But all these background functionalities are very powerfull to enhance the way you use the iPhone. I think this can be a real big-deal and I like it!
Apple has had great succes with Push Notifications and therefore it introduces “Local Notifications”. Local Notifications are like Push Notifications but without the need of a server. The local notifications are directly from your iPhone.
An extra feature wich comes with multitasking is Fast App Switching. Fast App Switching is the feature which is the easiest to implement by developers. It saves the state of the application and it let’s you return to the application where you left it. So if you’re in a game and Fast Switch to an other application, the game continues when you return back to the game. The state is implemented in a way that it doesn’t take any system resources.
Folders
With OS 3.x it is possible to see 180 apps on your Homescreen. iPhone OS 4.0 offers folders, so that you can expand the number of available applications on your Homescreen to 2160! Now I think I’ve got a lot of apps on my iPhone (around 200) but I don’t think that I’ll ever reach the limit of 2160 applications on my Homescreen.
Picture used with permission of Ryan Block and Peter Rojas, gdgt
Apple has managed this to “stack” applications into folders. Drag an application onto another application to create a folder. The name of the folder is automatically set, but you can change it easily. This way you are able to create folders like “Games”, “Tasks”, “Social Networking” Etc. Because I always have too less space on my Homescreen I like this feature a Lot!
An other feature is that with iPhone OS 4.0 you can set a different wallpaper for your lock-screen and a wallpaper for your homescreen.
Unified Inbox
The Unified Inbox feature (again) is a feature I’m personally very happy with. At the moment I have 4 e-mail accounts set on my iPhone and they all have a different inbox. It would be great if I had just 1 inbox and that all my mail would arrive in just 1 inbox. This is exactly what happens with the new Unified Inbox feature. It is possible to select “All Inboxes” and see all the mails in all the inboxes from all the e-mail accounts. It’s like an aggregation of all inboxes in one view.
Picture used with permission of Ryan Block and Peter Rojas, gdgt
Other additions in the email application are for organize by thread and Open attachments in Apps.
iBooks
Of course we saw iBooks on the iPad first and Apple made a version for the iPhone as well. It’s just like the iBooks app for the iPad, but smaller. I don’t know if I’ll ever read an entire book on the iPhone, but the iBooks application could definitively help me to read more books!
Enterprise Features
Additional Enterprise Features are not really the most spectacular features for the average user, but Apple thought well about what Enterprises would like to see as feature enhancements.
The real killer-feature is that it now is possible to sync with multiple exchange accounts. Personally I think this it the best feature of iPhone OS 4.0. Having multiple exchange accounts available is a real big feature for me and I like it very much that they’ve made this feature available.
Other enterprise features (which you’ll probably never ever hear from again) are Mobile Device Management, Wireless App Distribution and SSL VPN support.
Game Center
Apple adds a social gaming network. With this social gaming network it is possible to Invite Friends, Matchmaking, view Leaderboards and Achievements.
I guess game developers can hook their application into this Game Center and give users the possibilities to use the Game Center functionalities in their Games.
Actually the Game Center can be very much compared to the Plus+ network.
iAd – Mobile Advertising
Apple would like to help developers with making money by using the iAd mobile advertising features in their free Apps. The Ads would show up around every 3 minutes while using the App. I think this is a lot – and I think I’d rather pay for an application than see an ad every 3 minutes.
iAd isn’t really a feature enhancement for users, but more for developers of free Apps. One good thing is that Apple challenges to make creative ads. This can be a game, a video (with HTML 5) or anything else.
Concluding thoughts & Wrap-up
Overall I think that iPhone OS 4.0 is a really nice upgrade of the iPhone OS. A lot of features are added and some of them are more than welcome!
I think the iPhone OS comes to a stage where there are less and less like-to-haves for the iPhone OS, because we got (almost) everything we wished for. When we have multitasking, multiple exchange, better inbox integration; what keeps left to wish for; Please tell me your wishes for the iPhone OS which STILL isn’t included in the iPhone OS 4.0 in the comments of this thread.
Finally I would like to thank some people. First of all Ryan Block from gdgt (http://www.gdgt.com) for letting me use his pictures and the excellent liveblog. Vincent Nguyen from Slashgear (http://www.slashgear.com) and Joshua Topolsky from Engadget (http://www.engadget.com) for their great Live blogs; You guys Rock and many many thanks for keeping us up to date so damn quickly. An other thank goes out to all the guys from OneMoreThing.nl and a very special thanks to Gonny & Jean-Paul from iPhoneclub.nl for their live stream directly from Amsterdam.
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