iPhone OS 4 was previewed today. It is available to iPhone developers today – to the rest of us sometime this summer. Here’s a breakdown of the 7 ‘Tentpole’ features that Apple considered the most important.
Multitasking:
- While in an app, double-click the home button and it brings up a ‘dock’ of your currently running apps while pushing up the rest of the UI toward the top of the screen.
- 3rd party apps can run audio in the background (Pandora)
- VOIP apps can listen for calls in the background (Skype)
- GPS apps can continue giving turn-by-turn directions in the background
- Task completion – if a photo upload is taking a while, it can be pushed to the background while you move on to something else.
- Fast app switching – Allows you to continue using an app where you left off rather than re-launching it from scratch.
Folders
- Store apps of the same category (Or however you choose) in a folder. Reduces the number of pages you have to flick through to get to an app.
- Folders can exist in the dock as well
- With folders, over 2,000 apps can live on your iPhone
Enhanced Mail
- Unified inbox – all accounts go directly to the same inbox, much like the Mail app in Mac OS X.
- Fast inbox switching – to switch to different, specific accounts.
- More than one Exchange account (This is great for me, personally since I use Exchange for work and Gmail for personal – I can have push for both!)
- Organize by thread – again, like the Mail app in Mac OS X
- Open attachments with a 3rd party app.
iBooks
- iBooks will be available on the iPhone as well – not only the iPad
- Buy books once, read them anywhere
- Wirelessly sync books between platforms
- Free “Winnie The Pooh” book
Enterprise Features
- Better data protection
- Mobile device management
- Wireless app distribution (for corporate ‘home’-built apps)
- Multiple Exchange servers, plus support for Exchange 2010
- New VPN options
Game Center
- Achievements
- Leaderboards
- Match Making
- Invite friends to play
iAd
- Apple says that current advertising in apps ‘stinks’
- Apple is aiming for emotion + interactivity
- Keeps you in your app
- HTML5 (Still no Flash. Ever.)
Again, the update will be available sometime this summer. The iPhone 3G will not be able to handle ‘some tasks’. Multitasking was specifically pointed out.
There was no indication that there would be any new hardware this summer, neither was anything spoken about availability on the Verizon network. It seems that now would’ve been the time to make an announcement, but they may still be keeping those a surprise…who knows?
