iPhone OS 4.0 has made its debut today with Steve Jobs as your presenter at the Apple Headquarters. Main new features of the new OS are — wait for it — multitasking, global Mail inbox, iAd, Enterprise features, and the GameCenter, all coming to iPhone owners this summer (more on that after the jump), while iPad owners should expect it this fall. Let’s go over what was announced in a pretty well-ordered list:
Better Email
Global Mail and threading, allowing you to have all of your email in only one app – Mail. Multiple Microsoft Exchange 2010 account support, mobile device management, wireless ad-hoc app distribution, and SSL VPN support (all for enterprise security).
iBooks for iPhone
That’s right, iBooks is now iPhone-friendly. It works the same, is the same, and does the same things (note: read eBooks). Oh, and you get a free copy of Winnie the Pooh. Sweet.
GameCenter
This is in the ranks of the Playstation Network and XBOX Live. Essentially, you’ll be able to have access to leaderboards, game achievements, and make/keep sights on your friends. And if you don’t have an ideal amount of friends, GameCenter will scan for players that are in your playing level, allowing for fair play. Also sweet.
Introducing: iAd
iAd. That’s the message Apple has just set to Google. iPhone users can have up to 1 billion impressions a daay from searches. And that’s a great place to make some profit. iAd will recongize what you’re doing on your iphone and will provide apps that would please you. Say you were looking at online news (preferably LM), then you’d be presented with CNN for example. Boring? Heck, no! Most of these ads would deliver you to interactive games all built in HTML 5 (insert Adobe Flash joke here). Revenue is 60% to the developer, 40% to Apple’s trees.
Folders
Yeah, Folders. Basically it’s very simple: you’ll be able to make folders of apps that you like and use, with a maximum of 2160 apps per folder.
Homescreen Wallpapers
It’s about time. Same as the iPad, you’ll have wallpapers now.
Multitasking:
It’s downright simple: double tap your familiar Home button then – bam! A tray of all running apps appear, and you can just tap on one to use it. But in another way this isn’t real multitasking as you would find on a laptop. No, it isn’t. It special. This sort of “multitasking” is more like pausing the app you were using before, so that lets say you were in Foursquare, going to another app will simply pause what you were doing, then you could go back again.
An important note for iPhone EDGE and 3G users:
Multitasking will be exclusive to iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 3rd-generation models (32GB and 64GB), and iPhone OS 4.0 is completely cut off for iPhone EDGE users. Sorry!
What Does The New iPhone OS 4.o Mean To Me?
it means that now, the iPhone OS 4.0 is everything you could possibly want, only better and more refined. The iPhone is largely used by the not-so-smart-about-tech crowd, but now the awesome feeling of being a techy will be implemented into the solid feeling of a downright easy to understand OS. It’s a win/win for Apple here, and a warning/waring to Google, Symbian, and RIM. More like an “iDead” moment actually.
