All about iPhone OS 4.0

Multitasking — Apple claims they’ve finally figured out a way to do true app multitasking in iPhone OS without draining the battery, and it all has to do with pairing down multitasking function to a few core APIs: background audio (Pandora), VOIP (Skype) , persistent location, push notifications, local notifications (e.g. a to-do list program) and task completion (allowing the state of an app to be stored when a user switches out). It’s not true multitasking, but for all intents and purposes, this is good enough.

• Folders — Apps can now be stored in folders, maximizing the number of apps that can be installed on any iPhone OS 4.0 device to over 1,000. Just drag one app on top of another to start the folder.

• Wallpaper — Not a big one, but it’s nice: in iPhone OS 4.0, you can control your wall paper on both the home screen and lock screen.

• Enhanced Mail Application — Mail now gets a unified inbox, multiple Exchange account support, fast inbox switching, threaded messages and the ability to launch attachments with third party apps. iPhone Mail just got as full featured as it is on your Mac.

• iBooks — The iPhone OS 4.0 now has iBooks, just like the iPad. The best part of this is that your pages read and bookmarks will be synced automatically across multiple devices, just like on the Kindle. So, for example, if you leave the house without your iPad, you can carry on reading your book on your iPhone from your last page read, seamlessly.

• Social Gaming Network — Think Xbox Live for the iPhone: you’ll now be able to use your iPhone to challenge friends to multiplayer games, automatically match you with people who want to play the game you’re playing online, earn achievements and compete on leaderboards.

• iAds — Finally, there’s iAds. This is a big deal: unhappy with the disruptive way that mobile advertisements yank users out of the experience of using an app, iAds will allow advertisers to develop truly interactive ads that will work within an app to put the product or service pitch across. Even better: 60% of the revenue will go to app developers who program the functionality into their programs. This is huge: Apple’s joined the mobile advertising game, but side-stepped challenging Google directly by fighting the war in apps, not on the web… and the developers have just been given a strong reason to make as many of their apps as possible totally free. This is a win not only for Apple and its developers, but for users as well.

Dozens of other features

Other minor features highlighted in a slide of iPhone 4.0 enhancements include:

File & delete Mail search results
Search SMS/MMS messages
Web search suggestions
Choose image size in Mail messages
Bluetooth keyboards
CalDav invitations
Larger fonts for Mail, SMS & alerts
Cell data only setting
Spell check
Persistent Wi-Fi
Gift Apps
Birthday calendar
Recent Web searches
Create Playlists
Top Hit in search
5x digital zoom
Nested Playlists
CardDav
Tap to focus video
Upload workouts to Nike+
Places in Photos
iPod Out
Home screen wallpaper
Search SMS/MMS messages
Wake on wireless

Availability

A developer preview of iPhone 4 is available now, the release will ship sometime this summer. All of the features will be available to last year's iPhone 3GS and the 3G iPod touch.

The 2008 iPhone 3G and 2G iPod touch will get "many things," but will not support multitasking, as their hardware is significantly slower and has less installed RAM.

iPhone OS 4.0 will ship for iPad this fall.