iPhone OS 4 - Special Event Summary and comments

In the iPhone OS 4.x event.  Steve Jobs gave an update on the iPad sales about 450,000 units sold up to April 8th and Best Buy is out of stock.  Over 4 Billion App downloads to date and over 185,000 apps in the App store, and over 3,500 iPad specific Apps.  The iPhone has a 64% of the US mobile browser usage. Sold over 50 Million iPhones and another 35 Million iPod Touches.  

The iPhone OS 4.0 update will be available this Summer for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and then in the fall for the iPad.  Developer preview available April 8th. 

Over 100 new user features including:  Bluetooth Keyboard access, Home Screen Wallpaper, 5x Digital Zoom on the camera, Spell Check, Tap to focus on Video and more. 

However there are 7 key "Tentpole" features

1. Multitasking - Not to be confused with pure backgrounding.  There are some limitations.  Such as it will work only on the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 3rd Gen (and the iPad).  This means for all other owners - Jailbreaking is your only option.   As I said this is not 100% backgrounding of Apps.  In most cases apps are frozen in the background, only some options are able to run in the background.  Like audio in Pandora.  But IM's in Skype or AIM are not live in the background.  Apps must be setup by the app developers to use the limited set of background features. 

2. App Folders - similar to categories on the jailbreak side, accept these folders don't look like folders they look more like tiny docks.  In all you can now put 2160 apps on your device.  If you max that out - there are issues you need to work out with your shrink.  I was surprised on this one - I did not think they would do folders - but am very happy they did. They actually combined Categories and Overboard - This is a nice addition. 

3. New Mail App - Finally - Now you can have a single unified inbox - multiple email accounts including multiple exchange accounts. And organizing by threads.   

4. iBooks - Yes the same iBooks as is on the iPad except smaller for the iPhone and iPod touch.  Can buy a book once and transfer between iPad and iPhone / iPod touch - including wireless syncing of page and bookmarks. 

5. Enterprise - This is for reaching out to the Enterprise users.  In includes - Better data protection,  Mobile Device Management, Wireless App distribution, Multiple Exchange Accounts, Exchange Server 2000, and support for SSL VPN.

6. Game Center - Think of this like match.com for Gamers.  Or I guess X-Box Live.  This will not launch until later in the year.  You can challenge your friends to games or they will match you up with strangers.  

7. iAd Advertising - Remember Apples purchase of Quatro in January - well they will be putting that purchase to use very soon.  Apple will build in Ad serving for apps into the SDK. Apple will take 40% of the Ad revenue - up a little from their 30% cut of App sales.  Will be interesting to see what type of inventory they can get and what the ad rates are. 

Also Custom background images - As mentioned above.  While not as full featured as Winterboard with full themes. It is nice to see this added - and not surprising at all - as it is already available in OS 3.2 on the iPad. 

Overall the new features are really nice - and folders will be really welcome on my iPhone.  However if you have an older gen iPhone or iPod Touch - Apple really is saying go and jailbreak because you are not getting some of these features.  Some you will get - but not all.