Today Apple hosted an event at their campus to give us a peek at what iPhone OS 4.0 is going to look like. And, it’s looking good.
If you remember a post of mine early this year, I made a list of 9 stupid things I wanted Apple to change in OS 4.0. Well, they nailed almost the entire list! Let’s see what’s better:
-
Unified Inbox in Mail, just like in Mac OS X. Also, it’s quicker to move through different inboxes and it’s finally possible to organize messages as threads.
-
Multitasking. It finally came to the iPhone, and in a smart way IMHO. Since the app itself doesn’t need to be running in background all the time, but just some services, Apple decided to implement these services in a way that they use less energy and provide them to developers as APIs. This is good, as most programmers are stupid (including myself sometimes) and it’s good to make something like that idiot-proof. There are 7 provided APIs: background audio (Pandora demo), VoIP (Skype demo), location services, push notifications, local notifications, task completion and fast task switching.
-
New options for the desktop screen: custom wallpapers and Folders. You can now change the desktop wallpaper, like in an iPad, and you can also organize apps by folders – that’s good for people like me who already have 5 or 6 pages of apps installed.
-
Notifications got a bit better with local notifications. Anything that can be done locally won’t have to use push anymore.
-
iBooks on the iPhone – I’m a bit unsure about this one. The Kindle app works nicely for short reading periods, but reading on the phone really sucks. Some people may find this useful, but I’m not sure…
-
Some more enterprise-focused features. Let’s see if this hits BlackBerry adoption.
Plus, there are 1500 new developer APIs and 100 new user features. You can check everything at Apple’s website here.
And there’s the bad thing: Apple finally announced iAd, an ad-distribution platform for iPhone. Although it may give some competitiveness to free-app developers, I think ads are very annoying and this platform may make some developers include ads in paid apps (which are ad-free today). Let’s see how this goes.
All of this will be fully available for iPhone 3GS and newer iPod Touch models (32/64GB) in the summer. iPad users will have to wait until fall. And previous generation iPhone/iPod Touch owners will be able to enjoy some of the features of iPhone OS 4, but some (like multitasking) will not be available in these old devices.
Developers enlisted on the iPhone Developer Program can download the beta SDK here.
As for me, I cannot wait to get my hands on this new thing! And, I will post a full review here, of course. Let summer come!