Today Apple finally released iOS4. I’ve already previewed it here twice – when covering the iPhone OS4 special event and the WWDC Keynote. Now it’s time for a full review. I’ll use the 3GS model for this purpose and make remarks when something is not available in the 3G model. Let’s start with the obvious features. First, this is the new home screen. Take a look at it below:
Obvious change is the wallpaper – no more black screen, thankfully. And you can use different wallpapers in the home and lock screens. This feature is not available on the 3G model.
Another feature you may have noticed is the ability of organizing apps in folders. A very welcome feature for people who have lots of apps. In my case, I have 98 apps installed, so you may imagine the chaos in iOS 3.1.3: a lot of pages and very annoying navigation. The iPhone can now handle 2160 apps. Folders aren’t available on the 3G model.
Creating a folder is very easy: just drag an app and drop it on another to group them in a folder. iOS4 automatically names the folder based on the app’s category (you can rename it to whatever you want, of course). You can add up to 12 apps per folder, making it possible to visualize up to 192 apps in the home screen. To delete a folder, just remove all apps from it and it’ll go away. And you can organize apps in folders exactly the same way in iTunes 9.2, of course. App management is much better, but it’s still missing a way of deleting stock apps you never use, though.
Next, multitasking. For now, not so many apps are ready for multitasking, but they’re slowly showing up at the App Store. Anyway, soon we’ll have multitasking for all the cool apps we want, like Skype, Pandora, and GPS navigation apps. To alternate between apps, just double-tap the home button and an app dock-like interface will appear on the bottom of the screen. You may scroll that dock to find all the open apps and also a useful remote for the iPod and an even more useful screen orientation lock . To remove an app from the dock, click and hold, then click on the red icon.
Multitasking is a very welcome feature and users have been waiting for this forever. But it isn’t really multitasking – as I said in the OS4 Developer Preview, there are 7 APIs that are allowed to run in background. And downloading new data while the app is in background isn’t one of them. This will impact things like news apps, Twitter clients, Facebook news posts, etc. But the rest will suit most users well, like VoIP (i.e. Skype), background audio streaming (Pandora) or GPS navigation (TomTom).
It’s working well, but it’s too early to tell how it impacts battery life. When we have most apps supporting it, we’ll have a better idea. FWIW, I’ve been testing multitasking since iOS4 Beta 4 and it hasn’t impacted battery life in any noticeable way. Also, multitasking isn’t supported on the 3G model.
The next topic is Mail, which is much better. For a starter, the initial screen is redesigned and you can now easily access your accounts mailboxes from there much faster than in the old version. And there’s also the unified mailbox, like in the Mail app in MacOS X. Another welcome change is the ability of organizing messages in threads – a small number on the right side of the message shows how many messages are in that thread. That’s very useful for mailing lists, like the binutils mailing list in the screenshot below:
Another welcome feature is that you can now open and edit attachments using 3rd-party apps, just like in the iPad.
But not everything is perfect. Search still sucks, as you cannot search for things in the message body, you can’t flag messages and we still don’t have smart folders like on the Mac.
For multimedia, we have a new Photos app, featuring Places and Faces, just like in iPhoto 09, and iBooks (available as a free download at the app store). The improvements on Photos are very welcome and make the app a bit more like iPhoto for viewing purposes. As for iBooks, it looks exactly the same as in the iPad, plus the PDF reader feature. The PDF reader is very cool, but the screen size on the iPhone is a major limiter.
Continuing on the multimedia features, we can now create playlists on the iPhone, a very useful feature that should have been there since the first generation. On the camera features, we now have 5x digital zoom (useless, if you ask me) and the ability to tap to focus while shooting video (another not-so-useful feature).
The rest:
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Spellchecking, which works exactly the same as on the iPad.
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Bluetooth keyboard pairing (I’m not sure why someone would do that)
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Spotlight is a bit better: now SMS messages appear on the search (no e-mail message body search, nor phone number searches) and you can search the web and Wikipedia from there.
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Messages now show a character count for texts over 1 line and group messages allow multiple texts to be grouped in one single thread.
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File sharing now exists: supported apps may move files to and from the device via iTunes (Apps tab).
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Settings now allow users to shutdown cellular data (3G off only is still available).
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Safari features Bing as an option for searches.
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Apps that use GPS location now feature a small purple arrow on the upper right corner of the screen so the user is aware that GPS is on.
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3GS model: Interface feels faster and the phone doesn’t feel sluggish, although there can be some hiccups when playing more demanding games.
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3G model: it feels a bit slower than iOS 3.1.3, so I’m not sure users should upgrade.
Overall, this is a very welcome update and I’m very pleased with I’ve seen since the first betas and in the final version. There are some stupid things that need to be addressed, like making Mail more like the app on the Mac, improving Spotlight and adding more multitasking APIs, but it’s a good start. iPhone 3GS users should upgrade, as they’ll benefit from all the goodies. 3G users, on the other hand, should think a bit, since in my tests, the phone felt slower than before, when it was running on iOS 3.1.3. – this may be a sign that 3G’s hardware isn’t that good (the reason why I just got my iPhone when 3GS was released). I’m also eager to see how iOS4 will run on the new iPhone 4, because for now, 3GS is so good that it doesn’t really make any sense for us to upgrade. So, let’s wait and see it next week.