Apple unveiled the 4th major version of their iPhone OS (and iPad and iPod Touch) this morning, touting over 100 new user features and over 1500 new developer APIs.
And yes, you’ve been waiting for it for years, and those of you with weird, irrational hatred for the iPhone will need to find a new target for that weird, irrational hatred.. that’s right.. custom wallpaper!
What else?
• Multitasking! — Yup, iPhones will be able to run more than one app at a time. A double-tap on the home button brings up a little dock-like interface showing all running apps. Apple makes a big deal about “doing this right” so it won’t have as dramatic an impact on battery life and performance as it tends to have on other platforms. It sounds like they’re doing this by providing specific APIs for doing certain background tasks. In other words, the whole app doesn’t keep running, using all the memory and processor cycles it would be using if you were looking at it. The new background services include background audio, VoIP, background location, local notifications, and a system that suspends an app instantly so it can resume where it left off when you switch back.
• Folders — Organize apps into custom-named folders.
• Unified Inbox — See mail from all accounts in one inbox, without that brain-killing 5 tap dance I’ve now done approximately 9 billion times.
• iBooks on iPhone — Yawn. No surprise there, though keeping your place in a book on iPhone and iPad closes a big gap with the Kindle.
• Social Gaming — Wow. Apple basically now has their own XBox Live. Achievements, leaderboards, matchmaking, etc. That’s going to be big.
• iAds — Apple’s own built-in mobile ad network. Wow. Ad interactions will stay in the app, Apple will sell and host the ads, and 60% of revenue goes to the app developer. If this works, Apple may have just opened the floodgate to tons and tons of mobile advertising dollars, elusive up to now.
These features close a lot of holes in the iPhone OS, adding tons of things users will love as well as several new models for app developers to make money. This is a big one.
Apple usually posts the video of these events soon after they end, so that should be available soon.
A developer preview of OS 4 will be available today, and the update will ship this summer.
Update: The new OS will be available for all 3G and 3GS iPhones, as well as recent iPod Touch models, though only the 3GS (and later, assuming they announce new hardware this summer) will support multitasking and some of the other advanced features. OS 4 will be on the iPad in the fall.
What about letting me sort and organize photos on my iPhone directly on my iPhone?!? No more having to sync with iPhoto or My Pictures! I want to open up the camera roll, and send a photo right to a food photo folder on my iPhone right after taking it, not later when I get to another computer.
Some of these, well most of them, fall into the about time category. Multitasking and the unified inbox are about the only ones I care about. Now if they can just make Safari not so sucky and get rid of the annoying slow downs and pauses I might not consider abandoning them when the Windows 7 phones come out.
Maybe.
@1 – Yeah, that would be a nice feature. Doesn’t look like anything like that is in this update, though they only really discussed the big features, so it’s possible, though my hunch is no.
@2 – Curious, what do think is sucky about Mobile Safari? I find it really good, better than any other mobile browser I’ve used by far. Not sure what kinds of slow-downs you mean, but I haven’t had those kinds of issues.
Is the multitasking as awesome as “Switcher”, for the original Mac?
These are mostly features that already exist if you jailbreak your iPhone. Vertical scrolling on pages, folders, multitasking with backgrounder+kirakae, etc. Nothing new here except Apple wanting to force their users into experiencing FULL SCREEN pop-up ads “every three minutes”..
Underwhelmed.
@6 – Sigh. Look, if you can do things with a jailbroken iPhone, good for you, but it’s completely irrelevant here. OS support for these concepts is guaranteed to work better, and it’s what most people care about, and there’s a LOT here that will make a big difference to users and developers. And there’s certainly nothing that suggests that these ads will do anything like what you’re describing.
@4 I have a 2 year old 3G version and it likes to be quite slow when I first wake it up. It will just hold when I go to text, or get a map, or anything. It also likes to slow down when I am typing.
As for Safari, it likes to crash on me, especially on more graphics heavy pages like slog. There is of course the lack of flash, and I find it does not render pages all that well. It wasn’t bad a couple years ago, but I expect better today.
The update saying no multitasking on 3G’s pretty much seals it for me. I’ll probably be ditching Apple come summer. The iPhone is nice, and I have liked it, but like most Apple products it is too limited.
@8 – Interesting. I almost never see these kinds of significant performance problems, though of course I also expect performance issues from time to time on all devices, especially small devices being asked to do a lot. Are there other mobile browsers you’ve used that render pages better, and support Flash in a usable way?
i still wish the maps had turn-by-turn directions, as opposed to having to buy it from at&t, or whatever. also, i wish at&t would (finally) allow tethering. all that said, it looks like few of these changes will affect those of us still kicking in the kiddie pool known as iphone 3G
that was unclear: turn-by-turn directions that announce the next step and recalculate when you don’t follow their directions. that’s really handy and on most other smartphones (that i’m aware of)
8: I’ve never seen those problems on an iPhone that hasn’t been jailbroken. Plug it into iTunes, sync/back up, and hit the button to restore the OS.
Barring hardware problems, where I’d expect more more severe manifestations, a restore is likely to resolve Safari crashes and mysterious slowdowns. (Unless you’ve jailbroken it, in which case blaming the device is poor form.)
I am inclined to agree with 6, partly– on a jailbroken phone you’ve been able to put apps into category folders and background processes (albeit somewhat clumsily) for a really long time, so none of this is new for us besides the ads and social gaming, and I don’t play many games on my phone anyway. But it’s nice that Apple is trying to include these features OOB, and having native OS support for them will be great.
Thanks for compiling the list.
Anthony, do you know if it’ll be possible to still use separate inboxes in OS4? I’ve got several e-mail addresses for different gigs and want to keep them separate.
Wow. All of the things I’ve already been doing, now available for dumbasses.
I think iAds looks great. Hopefully it’ll bring down the price of some apps. On Android, many developers offer a free ad-supported version as well as a paid ad-free version, so with iAds, iPhone apps could do something similar. It’s great for developers. Though the exampes Apple game were a bit excessive, they seemed like complete apps inside of apps, which is way too much, but otherwise it could be useful.
The Gaming thing seems awesome too. iPhone has become a pretty big platform for gaming, something Android is definitely lagging behind in.
Everything else is underwhelming. Seems like they’ve been playing catch-up pretty hard. Not that it’s a bad thing, it’s great that iPhone has these (officially) now, and I’m sure they’re going to work flawlessly, it’s just that Apple takes forever to implement basic things and then likes to tout is a new and innovative.
@9 Opera Mini is incredibly fast on my G1 (there’s an iPhone version, but I don’t think it’s been approved, or if it ever will), and Android will have flash very soon (and from the videos I’ve seen, it looks very usable and not slow at all). Just sayin’.
@16: iPhone apps routinely offer ad-supported and paid versions. iAd is just a high-profile, non-exclusive new delivery mechanism.
@12 I have tried all of that. As have others I found via the google. It is not, nor has it ever been, jailbroken.
@9, I like the HTC Evo’s browser.
Unrelated, but in the Q&A Steve answered this to one of the questions:
That was such a disingenuous and douchey answer. You know where else your kids can download porn, Steve? THE INTERNET. The exact same place you have to go to download that Android porn store, since the Android Market doesn’t allow porn apps either. There are some legitimate reasons for now allowing unsigned apps (even though I don’t necessarily agree with them), but that answer was just terrible and offensive. I think one of the reasons I’m overly harsh on Apple a lot of the time is attitudes like that.
@19 – Sure, it’s a pretty unfair slam on Google—you can get porn apps for iPhone too from jailbreak app stores, so Google no more endorses it than Apple does—but they’re big competitors, and have had a lot of bad blood lately. It’s weird, but not particularly unique to Apple. I don’t see how it’s offensive, it’s just a very competitive guy talking shit about his competition.
Told you the iPad would multitask – the A4 processor can handle that, but the main prob is 3rd party apps weren’t designed to handle it yet.
One more nail in Flash’s coffin.
@19 Agreed! Not to mention that many of those porn sites on THE INTERNET are designed specifically for iPhone users. App or no, every ‘net machine is a porn machine.
What does flash have to do with multi-tasking? The thing that will kill Flash (if it ever gets killed) is HTML 5. The problem is that HTML 5 isn’t wide spread enough yet to do away with Flash.
@20, he’s not just a very competitive guy, he’s a very, very douchebaggy guy. It doesn’t mean the products aren’t good, but I can see where Nick is coming from. Saying that anyone who wants something that Apple doesn’t provide is after porn — probably kiddie porn, right, Jobs? — is a very Apple attitude, taken to an extreme.
As others have noted, a lot of the improvements look like jailbreaks.
I never upgraded to OS 3.1.3 because pretty much all it did was break blackra1n, and I wanted all those illicit little goodies.
I have folders, and I have multitasking — and interestingly, it works in the way described in the article.
More interesting, though, is that apparently Mr. Jobs hasn’t upgraded his iPhone OS either. According to email headers he’s sent, he’s still using 3.1.2.
Gee. Wonder where all those nifty new ideas came from… 😉
Bitching about Apple has become the new pasttime of hipster-wannabe’s.
Look, the iPhone will never compete with your fantasy phone; you know, the one that’s about to ship with every imaginable feature: works perfectly out of the box, will never, ever need to be upgraded, never crashes, battery lasts forever, etc. That phone? You should totally buy it and stop bitching about the POS from Apple. Right?
But, in the real world?Apple is kicking ass.
@26, except that Apple is losing market share in smartphones.
@27, market fluctuation, new device release timings, and general noise in the numbers. That said, who cares? Apple has existed for its entirety on the margins in most market share categories, and has done just fine.
If your point is that Apple should be afraid of the competition right now, I think even you’d have a hard time buying that reasoning. 😉
@28, yes, Apple is a niche holder. Always has been. I don’t know why people continually assume there is nothing in between “monopolist” and “out of business”. I think this too is part of the Apple-fan mindset, the idea that criticizing any aspect of their cult constitutes an assertion that they’re about to, or should, fail.
They’re just electronics, not pieces of the True Cross.
And yes, Apple is afraid of the competition. That’s what Jobs is saying in the quote above: “I’m afraid of Google”. Not because the iPhone is going to go away, but because the race to innovation is never over, and Google has a bit more mojo these days (though the iPad is making things interesting).
If there had never been an iPhone, Android wouldn’t be as good as it is. If there had never been an Android phone, this new iPhone release never would have happened. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. It doesn’t make Steve Jobs any less of a dick hole, though.
Thing is, the iPhone is still be best all around smart phone out there. I don’t love mine but I like it a lot, and its tons better than smart phones I had in the past or my wife’s current Blackberry Whateveritis and her previous Palm Something. There are many things I wish were different but it remains the best synthesis of all the various elements found in smart phones. This, and not simply the Cult of Apple, is why so many have been sold.
I just don’t think “fear” is the right word for Apple OR for Jobs. I don’t think he’s motivated by fear; his patience in releasing features that many on here decry as already outdated point toward a different motivator for Jobs than is typical in most companies and with most CEO’s.
Look, he’s had to endure a lot in this industry that worshipped at the feet of Microsoft et al for years. He rules with an iron fist within Apple, but I think Jobs, more than anyone else on his level in the Computer industry, cares about innovation. I think this is the primary motivator of Jobs. It’s not market share, it’s not beating Google. Job’s has a vision of computing that he wants to get right.
You can hate on him all you want; I just think he’s an extremely interesting character. And, I think the model of Jobs at the head of corporations is something to be emulated, not derided. There are way too many bean counters running companies these days who care nothing about the product other than the market share number. I think that’s going to lead to increasing difficulty for many corporations.
Fnarf @29:
Probably because many of the older die-hard Apple fans can remember a time when Apple was about to fail. Some of the ones I’ve talked to can be pretty touchy about it.
I suspect it’s also in part because Apple markets their products as if they are evidence of the consumer’s identity as an enlightened iconoclast. It’s not hard to imagine a person who sweats a little at the thought of losing one of his badges of hipness.
This isn’t to say that any of this is wrong or bad. I have and enjoy an iPod. But it definitely seems that gadget geeks can get weird about their gear.
“Hipster-wannabe” is an oxymoron.
For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Jobs.