Okay Geek Farm
Apple iPhone OS Update 4.0
Nick Mahar
We have everything major that you need to know about in the update - This update will not disappoint in even the smallest way. Some of the major features include home screen wallpaper, 5x digital zoom, search text messages, and the biggest, multitasking…
Multitasking
It has been long awaited and has finally arrived. Jobs says they have been able to add the tool without damaging battery life. Simply double tap the home button(like you would for music) and a little dock at the bottom pops up showing you what apps are running. What apps would you use this for? The biggest example would be Pandora. You can now listen to music off Pandora while browsing the internet. Another example would be chatting with someone on Skype and being able to still use your phone like you would a normal phone call. The best part for the Skype app is that you can still receive calls while away because the app will run in the background.
Push Notifications
Apple has pushed over 10 Billion notifications since they implemented it. The new type of notifications are local notifications. They’re like push notification, except they ‘re all done ON your phone. An example Apple uses is uploading photos to Facebook or Flickr. Start uploading and you can navigate away from the upload. The local notification will tell you when the photo has been uploaded thanks to the help of multitasking.
Folders
As people download more and more apps they want a better way to organize. Folders is the perfect way to organize games, social apps, and more separately without having different pages. To create a folder, you simply drag and drop apps onto one another to create folders. The name is created for you but you can always change it. Folders can also be inside the dock! If you did use all folders, you could see 180 apps on 11 pages but really there is 2,000 if they are all full folders! That’s a lot of apps.
Now you can have all your mail in one box. If you want to focus on one mail account, there is fast inbox switching. You can also open attachments in a certain app. The features include unified inbox, multiple exchange accounts, fast inbox switching, threaded messages, and open attachments with apps.
iBooks
It came to the iPad and now it’s here for the iPhone/iPod Touch. We have the same interface as the iPad. The highlights include delightful ebook reader, bookstore, buy once, read anywhere, sync page and bookmarks, and a free copy of Winnie the Pooh.
Social Gaming Network
Gaming on the iPhone has become huge. There are over 50,000 games on the App Store. Now Apple has created their own “Xbox Live”. You can invite friends to games, have matchmaking, share scores, check leaderboards, the whole experience. Also every game has the opportunity to have achievements.
iAd
Many of the free apps already include ads. Apple feels that the way developers are doing this, well, suck. The average person spends about 30 minutes per day using apps. If an ad appeared every 3 minutes, that’s 10 ads per device per day. This amounts to about 1 Billion ad opportunities per day. The iAds will deliver not only interaction but emotion. The ads on the internet are catchy but that’s about it. Any ads in apps now take you out of the app completely. Now clicking the ad will keep you in the app while checking out what is being advertised. Apple shows off a Toy Story 3 ad that brings you into demos of their game they have on the app store. It actually doesn’t seem as annoying as i thought it would.
Sadly for some this update will not include everything listed above.
Steve says:
For iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2nd gen, they will run many things, but not everything — they will not support multitasking, the hardware just can’t do it. Now, we’re releasing a developer preview today. You can get it today at developer.apple.com. We are releasing it to end users this summer, and that’s for the iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 3rd gen (last fall’s). They will run pretty much everything.
Other updates that are shown but not talked about include:
- Sync IMAP Notes
- Create Playlists
- Gift apps
- Spell Check
- CalDAV Invitations
- Web search suggestions
- file & delete Mail search results
- Search SMS/MMS messages
- Place in Photos
- Persistent Wi-Fi
- Birthday Calendar
- 5X Digital Zoom
- Tap to focus video
and many more, over 100 new features. As always we find out it will be coming out this summer. I’m very excited but we will have the full keynote of the event up later today when Apple releases it.
