Sneak peak at iPhone OS 4.0
Posted on 13 April, 2010 by Jimmy Liew
A few nights ago, Apple gave a sneak peak of the future of iPhone OS that will be launched sometime in the summer this year. Like how Snow Leopard was revealed as being an evolution of a maturing OS X, iPhone OS 4.0 reveal was similarly subdued. The new features were expected of a maturing operating platform but as usual given twists and redefinition of how they should work by Apple.
In a nutshell, iPhone OS 4.0 will have over 100 new user features and the iPhone OS 4.0 Software Development Kit (SDK) will have an additional 1,500 Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that can be used by developers. Some of these new user features were briefly revealed by Jobs. For example inclusion of 5x digital zoom in the Photo app, user configurable Home screen wallpaper, Spell checking to name some. For developers, they now have direct access to Calendar, Photos and Video data straight from their apps, sending/receiving SMS within their own apps and plenty more.
Out of these, Steve Jobs highlighted seven of them – terming them as the 7 Tentpole features – which he covered in his presentation. These seven were namely Multitasking, Folders, Enhanced Mail, iBooks, improved Enterprise, Game Center and last, iAd – Mobile advertising.
MULTITASKING
First off the list is MultiTasking – something that many cry out for since Day 1 of iPhone launch. It took them till version 4.0 before deciding to provide Multitasking to the rest of the 3rd party applications.
Yes, iPhone already has Multitasking – if not how can we play music through iPod while reading emails? But like Cut-and-Paste, Apple feels that they have finally a good way of implementing Multitasking without any impact on performance or battery life. And how they go about doing this is by limiting how 3rd party stays in the background through seven services:
- Background audio — this gives 3rd party apps to provide audio cues/music while other apps are running in the foreground
- Voice Over IP — you can have Skype running on background while you chat or wait for calls while doing something else
- Background Location – GPS app can run on background and with background audio, you will still receive your audio direction cues
- Push notifications — already running on some apps
- Local notifications — similar to the above service except that it doesn’t require any push server, like how Calendar shows its reminders.
- Task completion – apps can their task while running on background — like finishing your uploads of photos to Flickr while it runs in the background
- Fast app switching — saved state of each app is kept when the app is switched when the “task manager” is activated by double click of the Home button
In the presentation although it wasn’t clearly stated, when you are activate the Fast App Switcher, it will only show 4 icons but in the video of the presentation, Jobs was seen scrolling through to illustrate how easy to locate and switch background apps. But they didn’t specify how many apps can run in the background before the OS’s decide to terminate the least used ones. To keep the UI similar, to delete any apps in the background, you just need to hold onto the background app’s icon till it starts jiggling, you will find a similar icon to delete the app. Click on that and the app is removed from the background stack.
To counter any privacy advocates complains with background location services running, Apple has added a settings page for user to enable/disable location services for every app, similar to the ones for Notification. There is also an indicator to show if any app is utilising background location on the status bar.
FOLDERS
Folders are implemented to satisfy people who wants to have all their apps on their iPhone – more than the 11 pages/180 visible apps (you can have more than that but you will need Search to find them) that you could previously. With Folders you can have a total of 12 apps grouped in a folder, and that means a grand total of 2160 apps in your iPhone.
To create Folder is simple — just get the Apps into the jiggly mode and dragging one app icon over another, and they will be grouped into one folder. The Folder is named based on the category of that app from the App Store but you can rename it accordingly when you first create it.
To fill up the Folder is also simply dragging/dropping into that Folder. Likewise to delete an app from the Folder, you get them into the Edit mode and drag them out of the folder like how you would want to shift the app to another page. The Folders can be renamed and also can be placed within the Dock.
One of the most used app on the iPhone — the Mail app on iPhone is at times also the most frustrating to use. First off, you have to scroll to individual Inboxes to read your mails, and for those who wants multiple Exchange account — its pure torture.
Like the Desktop version, we now have a Unified Inbox where you can view all your emails in your various accounts within the same window. Also you can configure multiple Exchange accounts in your Mail app. That will be helpful to many who might want Push Mail on both their work email and also Gmail.
There is also a new thread view that lets you follow the conversation spanning multiple emails. You can easily move between read and unread emails of the same topic. There is now the option to open attachments from emails with apps you have downloaded from the App Store whereas before it was done by the iPhone’s version of Quick View.
iBooks
Not surprising to find the iBooks available for the iPhone since it was revealed during the iPad launch. Like the iPad version, you can purchase and download books from the iBookStore, read the books like an e-reader and it also syncs the current page and bookmarks wirelessly so if you read across devices, you can start where you last stopped.
ENTERPRISE
A common comparison between Blackberries and iPhone is the lack of Enterprise support although Apple already has quite robust support for businesses. But with OS 4, there will be more improvements to that.
There will be increased data protection of your corporate emails, even including the attachments. There are also APIs that can allow developers to encrypt their data within their apps. Besides allowing enterprise distribution of apps without going through App Store, the new OS will now support management of those devices and also allow distribution of those app wirelessly through their own servers.
As mentioned earlier, there will be multiple Exchange accounts and the iPhone OS 4 will also support Exchange Server 2010. Lastly there will also be support for SSL VPN for even secure access to corporate networks.
GAME CENTER
To some purist, the iPhone is still not a gaming platform. But that didn’t stop Apple from implementing the Game Center – a social gaming network that allows you to invite friends to play with you on the same game, matchmake you with other gamers with similar skills, shows you the leaderboards and also achievements gained in that game. If Apple implements this as well as Microsoft does with XBox Live, current iPhone gaming networks like OpenFeint or Plus+ will be redundant.
iAd Mobile Advertising
Steve Jobs feels that on mobile devices – search is not the key avenue for ads since many spend time on apps rather than searching. Also he feels that current mobile ads just sucks. According to him, an average user spends over 30 minutes using their apps and with 100million devices out in the market – that will be like having a billion ad impressions per day! (also means an additional revenue channel for Apple)
That said, Apple won’t do what everyone else does – they will try to do it better. So with iAd built within the OS itself, Apple can deliver rich media ads within the app without having to close the app to view those ads. By doing it in HTML5, iAd can provide advertisers the platform to have interactiveness, videos and even games within the ad – just like having a microsite running within an app.
Apple will host and serve the ads and developers will 60% revenue from those ad servings.
After the presentation, Apple had a Q&A session with the journalists and some additional nuggets of information were revealed.
- Multitasking will only be supported from iPhone 3Gs onwards but the rest of the new OS 4 features will be supported by the rest of the older models. (although with a little hacking you can)
- No Flash or Java in the foreseeable future
- Enterprises need to sign their apps before they can be distributed wirelessly – so no avenue for non-enterprise distribution wirelessly without the App Store
- Likewise there will be no unsigned apps distribution. Steve don’t want porn to be on iPhone.
- No clear commitment from Apple whether there will be an approval process similar to Apps for the iAds
A few sites have uploaded additional discoveries of the iPhone OS 4 and here are some of them:
In case you missed the presentation, you can watch it here from Apple.
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