Tommy Collison

Clarification: It’s been brought to my attention that the iPhone 4G doesn’t have optical zoom as I state below, it has digital zoom, same as iPhone 3GSs running iOS 4.0. Apologies!

On June 7th, Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, announced that iPhone OS 4.0 (henceforth referred to by its new name: iOS 4) would be ‘coming soon’. He also previewed the new iPhone 4. If you’re like me (a 3GS owner with no immediate plans to upgrade to Apple’s 4th generation revolutionary smartphone), you’ll be really interested in the first part of the announcement more so than the new iPhone – with good reason. It was first previewed back in the first week of April, where 7 ‘tent pole’ features were discussed:

1 – Multitasking
2 – Folders
3 – Mail
4 – iBooks on iPhone
5 – Enterprise features
6 – Game Centre
7 – iAd

1 – Multitasking

A feature already offered on other platforms – most notably Android – Apple commented that “We weren’t going to be the first to the party, but we’re going to be the best, just like [with] copy and paste”. With previous iPhone softwares, usage of the phone’s wifi or data connection was only allowed while the application was open, so that if you left the app to answer an SMS or a call, whatever you were doing would be stopped. There are a couple of main areas where this is relevant:

AUDIO – Demonstrating this new feature back in April was Pandora founder Tim Westergren. If you were listening to Pandora or Spotify (services that allow you to stream audio over the net. Think YouTube for music), the app would have to be open while streaming – if you went to check email or Twitter or text someone, the music had to stop because it no longer had the connection. With multitasking, the app can continue using the connection in the background, allowing you to do anything else while audio was streaming. Helpfully, the iPod controls double up in function: serving Pandora or Spotify while you’re listening to them.

SKYPE/MSN – Skype have a pretty nifty app for the iPhone, but it’s only useful for chatting and possibly making calls, because again, the only way it would get calls was if the app was open, and people would be unwilling to leave it open because they’d be doing other things with their iPhone. With background apps, Skype can continue to use the data/wifi connection to alert you if someone calls you even when the iPhone is locked.

Also – there are some great MSN/AIM apps for the iPhone but thanks to the lack of background apps, their usefulness and indeed usability was diminished – to stay signed in, you had to keep the app open. Even the iPhone auto-locking would kill the wifi/data connection. Multitasking now brings MSN/AIM back to full strength.

LOCATION/GPS – If you have a turn-by-turn GPS app, you can now leave the app and it will still be able to use the GPS feature of your iPhone to know where you are and guide you.

LOCAL NOTIFICATIONS – Twitter and Facebook already have ‘push’ notifications – a little popup is sent to my phone whenever I get a new @ reply/DM/FB message. This requires external servers though – now, apps can pop-up notifications despite not being open. Example: a TV Guide App can sent you a little alert 10 minutes before Doctor Who starts.

START WHAT YOU FINISH – Some apps (like the Flickr app) have tasks that take time to do; in this case uploading pictures. Thanks to multitasking, you can close Flickr and do something else while your holiday snaps upload in the background.

BOOKMARKS – Before iOS 4, if I went into Settings, then Sounds, then went to choose a ringtone but suddenly got a call, when I went back into Settings, I’d be back to the main menu. Hardly a groundbreaking feature, but if you’re like me, with 3,000 photos and are viewing the previous years’ France shots, if you accidentally hit the Home Button, you no longer have to swipe through years of photos to get back where you were.

WHERE? To access multi-tasking, double tap the Home Button. This opens up a mini dock showing four of the most recent apps used. To access more, simply swipe left. Also to be found are the iPod/Pandora controls if music is being played or streamed. To fully close apps, simply tap and hold them in the multitasking dock until they jiggle and a red button appears. Click to close. One tap to stop the jiggling, one to return to home screen or two taps to return to the app.

2 – Folders

According to Jobs, from June 7th, 15,000 apps get submitted to the App Store every week. Of which, 95% get accepted. That’s 14,250 new apps every week. Spread out over a possible 11 Home Screens, that makes navigation somewhat difficult. Spotlight search was introduced to try and fix this but never really took off. Now, Apple has given us an alternative: Folders.

Hold down on an app until it starts to jiggle, then drag it on top of another one. A folder is created, cleverly named as to what category the apps came from. Each folder can contain up to 12 apps and there’s no limit to the amount of folders you can have. It reduces clutter magnificently – on iOS 3, I had 33 apps over 4 Home Screens. Now, I have 33 apps on 1 Home Screen. Interestingly, it now brings the maximum number of apps you can have installed from 180 to a whopping 2,160.

3 – Mail

Apple has made several changes to the Mail application, most importantly a feature called ‘unified inbox’ – allowing you to see all incoming mail from different accounts. You can now also jump easier between inboxes and also iPhone now supports more than one Exchange account at a time.

Attachments are also improved – tap files attached to emails and open them in 3rd party applications - Twitter, FaceBook, FourSquare, etc.

4 – iBooks on iPhone

A borrowed feature from the iPad – Apple are making their iBooks application available to iPhones running iOS 4 It’s not available just yet though – wait for 4.1. Bookmarks in books are still supported and if you begin reading something on iBooks on iPhone, you can pick the book up from the same page if you have iBooks for iPad. It’s not yet released for iPhone, so a full review isn’t really possible. The fact that it supports PDFs is massive, though.

5 – Enterprise features

iPhone looks to be striving to accommodate the business users of their smartphone. Top of the list is better data protection – all email can now be encrypted with a PIN Code. This blogger hopes that such a feature can and will be extended to the SMS application. This encryption API will be released for developers, meaning that they can make their data similarly safe – good news for those Password Apps.

Back in April, Steve Forstall noted that 80% of Fortune 100 companies use iPhones in some capacity, which make Apple’s next enterprise feature quite cool – plans to roll out improvements for mobile device management for companies that have large numbers of iPhones. Companies can now also wirelessly distribute applications worldwide from their own servers.

6 – Game Centre

With the announcement of Apple’s social gaming centre, which looks to compete with xBox Live and the Playstation Network, you’ll be able to invite friends, get stuck in with online matchmaking and compete in leaderships. Only available to developers at the moment, Game Centre will be rolled out to end users later this year (4.1 maybe?). Hopefully it’ll improve on current multiplayer games – Open Feint is an absolute joke to try and get working and Flight Control never really worked for me either (granted I was in America at the time: unfair test conditions).

7 – iAd

In the immortal words of Steve Jobs: ‘users like free apps, developers like to make money’. iAd is Apple’s foray into mobile advertising. Jobs also says that most current mobile advertising ‘sucks’ and believes that iAd is the way forward. Apple wants to bring ads to existing applications and compares it to ads on TV – interactive video content can now be included in an ad without the user being taken out of the application. The revenue split is 60/40 in favor of the developer (in contrast to app store sales, which are 70/30 – again in the favor of the developer) and iAd rolls out July 1st.

What else is new?

IPOD CONTROLS – To get to multitasking, you double tap the home button. Previously, this would pop open the iPod Controls, which allowed you to pause/play, skip, go back a track, fast forward or rewind as well as adjust the volume. iPod Controls can now be found on the first pane of the multitasking dock. The ability to change volume is gone and only the song name (and not the artist and album) are visible, though.

CAMERA – To those without an iPhone 4, we have to settle for crappier optical zoom while iPhone 4 users get an optical one. Not bad though. Camera shutter effect is now sped up, as is the effect of sucking the picture into your camera roll. We also have manual focus in the video camera as well as the still image camera – highly useful.

EFFECT SPEED – As mentioned above, the shutter effect has been speeded up. So also has the unlocking effect (with the apps falling into place).

ORIENTATION LOCK – If you’re anything like me, the first thing you reach for in the morning is your iPhone to read new emails, blogs and tweets. However, if I’m horizontal I often have a fight with my iPhone, who wants to rotate things while I don’t. The orientation lock fixes this, not allowing apps to go into landscape mode no matter what the accelerometer reads. Also useful for photos which are wonkily rotated. Orientation lock can be found on the first pane of the multitasking dock, and a little logo appears beside the battery indicator to let you know it’s in operation.

UNLOCKING – Before iOS 4, you could set a 4 digit PIN code that you had to enter before the iPhone could be unlocked, stopping unauthorized usage. With the new software, you’re not limited to 4 digits or indeed digits at all – you can have mix of letters and numbers. I haven’t checked or read anywhere of the max amount of characters (too scared of locking myself out of my iPhone) but it’s at least 15.

NOTES – Notes.app now supports syncing over MobileMe…. if only anyone still used it.

WALLPAPERS – iOS 4 borrows from its cousin the iPad in allowing you to set a background image on the Home Screen (previously an unchangeable black) that’s the same as the lock screen or an entirely different image!

So why get it?

Well, quite apart from the features, it’s always good to be on the most recent software from a compatibility point-of-view. Developers are already going to be gearing themselves to iPhone 4′s increased retina display, and only ‘supporting’ 3GS – so we’re already at a disadvantage. When iOS 3 was released, it wasn’t long before “Requires 3.0 or higher” began appearing in the App Store, leaving 2.x users at a disadvantage.

The same is undoubtably going to happen here so I fully recommend upgrading.

While I’m on the subject – as someone who’s owned a jail-broken/unlocked iPhone as well as a legitimate one, I wholeheartedly recommend being legit over unlocked. Less stress, less chance of bricking your iPhone, less time to wait to upgrade while hackers find an unlock for the latest software, it’s better overall. If you’re in a contract, buy a Vodafone 3GS second hand – they don’t lock their iPhones while o2 do*.

* NOT held responsible if I’m wrong here, but the two Vodafone iPhones I’ve used were both unlocked and their iPhone customer care say they haven’t changed anything.

Who can get it?

That depends on what you have. iPhone 3GSs support all features under iOS 4 (apart from the optical vs. digital zoom). iPhone 3Gs will be able to run iOS 4 but not multitasking or, apparently, background wallpapers. iPhone 2Gs, the original ones released in 2007, won’t run iOS 4 at all – a fact that played a big role in my upgrading to the 3GS.

If you’ve an iPod Touch, it depends when you bought it whether or how much you can avail of iOS 4 – bought in 2007, you’re gone the way of the 2G – you’ve reached the end of the upgrade line and can’t run 4 at all. 2008 iPod Touches; the same as 3G – some but not all features. 2009 iPod Touches support all features.

How/When do I get it?

Same way as all previous releases. On June 21st (if you’re Irish; see Apple.com for international release dates), plug in your iPhone to iTunes and check for a new software update. One thing though – to work with folders and such, iTunes needed to be updated. If you’re not on iTunes 9.2 already, you’ll need to upgrade.

Any bugs?

I’m going to be honest here – I know of two bugs. I saw a tweet from someone saying that their iPhone 3G was dropping calls but iOS 4 isn’t made for the 3G, it only supports it. I haven’t made a call on my 3GS since upgrading but I’ll be sure to let this section know if it drops calls. Second, on my own iPhone, I found that the camera lagged when opening. Not crashed, but lagged – I have my Dad’s 3GS running iOS 3.1.3 for comparison. One restart later and everything was back to normal.