iPhone OS 4.0 - Preview

Normally, reviews of phones, let alone software upgrades for phones don’t get done - at least not that often. But this is an exception because there are just so many people that this update will be available to; everyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch will be able to get this update sometime this year.

History

Back in the day (2001) Apple released the first ever iPod with 5GB of storage and a simple black and white screen and worked only with Macs. Nearly a decade later, with the biggest iPod 32x memory of the original and having sold over 220 million iPods they completely revolutionised the way we listen to music and the freedom we have to listen to it wherever, and whenever we want. They have also sold over 35 million iPhones and iPod Touches as well as 300.000 iPad’s in the first day (interesting statistic I just worked out: 300k x min price of $499 = $1.5 billion, working out to $104k (£68k) per minute!)

Apple have done amazing things with the iPhone, and have done something very rare - they created a whole new market, that being that App store. The App store is where iPhone OS users can go and browse over 150.000 applications, some of which are free. Before the iPhone was around it never existed, and within three years the App store market place is expected to be worth over £4.4 billion - in just three years!

Apple is one of the best and most successful companies of the decade, quite literally going from nothing to something everyone knows. No wonder Steve Jobs has been voted best CEO of the decade.

The OS

Please let me point out that I did not get this from a dodgy site, and you should never, ever download anything illegally. It is immoral and put simply, makes you a thief. I develop applications for the iPhone and have access to the iPhone OS 4.0 beta (more like alpha).

One of the most noticeable things for the end user is multitasking. Apple is most certainly not the first company to introduce multitasking to a mobile device, but with their statement going along the lines of “We aren’t the first, but we will be the best.” sure means that have to do it properly, and they have, sort of. As is Apple’s way, they limit developers access to certain things on the phone, and this is no exception. The background tasks are limited to things such as background audio, VoIP, background tasks and more which is quite annoying as people like me are restricted to what we can do - but it does mean that the phone will have a lot longer battery life and not slow it down like is the case with the Windows Mobile platform, and more noticeably in my experience, the Palm OS.

Essentially, it means that you can be listening to some music from Spotify, go into a game such as X-Plane and fly around while listening to music, pause the game and read an email, and go straight back to the game without loosing your current position. In my opinion, excellent.

You can now also have folders so you can store all your apps in different sections, such as games, utilities, pointless apps (which will be full up straight away…) etc.

For app developers reading this, there is also an astounding number of new API’s, according to Apple over 1500 of them which is jolly nice.

And for gamers, well they are introducing something called a Game Centre, something like the PSN or Steam community which lets you play online games on the phone with your friends, have trophies and points and see other gameplay statistics.

The mailbox has been changed slightly and now allows a unified mailbox where if you have more than one email account on your phone, simply means that it appears as one. Other minor things include iAd which is a better more interactive way of adverts to be displayed (honestly, these adverts are actually entertaining to look and read), iBooks which is an ebook read app and an improved notification system.

Although, some of these features will not be available to all iPhone OS users - specifically those with iPhone 1G, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch 1G and iPod Touch 2G. To find out your iPhone or iPod Touch click here.

All in all, a fairly impressive update which will most likely cost ~£6 for iPod Touch users and free upgrade for iPhone users. It’s meant to be released this June, so watch out for it.