In an event today, Apple has at its headquarters in Cupertino announced features of the new iPhone OS 4, to be released during Summer 2010 (comes to the iPad during Fall).
Steve Jobs took the stage to tell how Apple has won the J.D. Power award three times in a row, for highest customer satisfaction. That’s pretty good.
Steve also showed that iPhone counts for 64% of mobile browser usage in the United States.
One of the new features in iPhone OS 4 is multitasking. It’s not “real multitasking” as you might know from your computer, but Apple made a bunch of services available to run in the background so that app’s can take advantage of audio, GPS and such, in the background. Meaning, the whole application doesn’t actually have to run, as this will make your phone feel sluggish (sometimes) and drain battery too. I’m looking very much forward to this new feature, I think it’s going to rock!
Q: How do you close applications when multitasking?
A: (Scott Forstall) You don’t have to. The user just uses things and doesn’t ever have to worry about it.
A: (Steve Jobs) It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager… they blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it.
iPhone OS 4 will also come with a Game Center, where you can invite your friends to play, have leaderboards and such. Like XBox Live, I guess? When it comes to games & entertainment titles, you can see from the picture below, how Apple is doing compared to Sony PSP and Nintendo DS…
iBooks, as known from the iPad, will also be coming to the iPhone via OS 4.0.
Steve also demo’ed iAd. A new way to add interactive ads to apps. It looked really cool (did I really say that about ads?!).
We will now also be able to create folders with apps, so we don’t have to scroll through several pages of apps to get to a certain app, but instead group them together in a folder. Oh, and change the wallpaper now, too (finally).
While iPhone OS 4.0 will also be available for iPhone 3G, the 3G version will not get multitasking and some other features, since the hardware simply cannot handle it. The latest iPod Touch will be fully iPhone OS 4 compatible.
Hopefully a video from the keynote will be released in a few hours, keep an eye on Apple’s website.
Lastly, during the Q&A session with the press, Steve was asked “any change in Apple’s position on Flash and Java?”. Reply: “No”.
What would it do for the normal users of this phone?
.-= paul | entertainment tonight´s last blog ..Anne Curtis on Women’s Health magazine =-.
groovy, though I can’t say I’ve actually been missing multitasking on the phone.
Think I read somewhere else that they had around 100 new features coming in OS 4… some more noticeable then others of course.
Any how, I like that he stands by his decisions and they’re constant struggle to make the complicated stuff seem ever so simple.
Awesome, do you have any idea on release date? I’ve read that it’s not quite the update that OS 3.0 was, but it’s absolutely fantastic that the new iPhone OS 4 brings some sorely needed features like multitasking, home screen folders and a unified email inbox.
Is this the end of the kindle ? Amazon is marketing that like mad – maybe they know that they end is near for that ridiculous product.
well, i think that multitasking was a must have feature on the iphone because my old nokia used to have multitasking with symbian quite some time ago. but what i have learned is that there could soon be an iphone 5 due to the antenna problems of the smartphone.