iPhone Reviews

At one of the most anticipated events of this summer, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone OS 4.0 which created a whole deal of buzz in the past couple of weeks. You might have come across a lot of rumours on what will and what won’t make it to the latest version OS of the most happening phone on earth. Now the cat is out of the bag and here is a sneak peak of the real deal. The iPhone OS 4.0 will have over 100 new user features, out of which seven features; Apple calls as “Tentpole” features are of particular importance.

The event:

The introduction of the iPhone OS 4.0 was held on 8th of April 2010, 10AM. As soon as Jobs was up on the stage, he said that Apple was excited about iPhone 4 and thanked the reviewers for their positive support on the new iPad. He was particularly quoting Walt Mossberg, surprise!

“After Spending hours and hours with it, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly…”

-Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal

This was followed by a few choice quotes from some of the early reviews. The revolutionary iPad sold 300,000 on the first day and in the next couple of days, the numbers reached a peak of 450,000. This was followed by some more stats on the iBooks and iPad Apps.

Finally, when Steve moved on to iPhone, he was happy about the fact that Apple has won the JD Power award for the year 2010 and has done so for the past three years in a row. This was followed by a very interesting graph on the US mobile users and Apple’s Market share on that. iPhone seems to possess a massive 64% of mobile browser user share, and everything else added together just makes half of iPhone (Android: 19%, Blackberry: 9% and Other Phones: 8%). Apple has sold 50million iPhones to date and if we consider Touch too, the sales shoots up to 85million iPhones and iPod Touches.

iPhone OS 4.0 Preview:

The unveiling of the most anticipated iPhone 4.0 OS began with Steve Jobs saying “So Today we are giving a dev preview of the iPhone OS 4. We have been working on this for a while and it is pretty great. We will be shipping it this summer and release a developer preview today”.

Apple has included over 1500 new APIs in the OS4.0 and the developers get to access calendar, In-App SMS, Photo Library, Quick Look, Full access to still and video camera data, full map overlays and heaps more. The OS includes a framework known as “Accelerate” which is for hardware accelerated math functions. And as we had mentioned earlier, the OS sports 100 new user features: Create Playlists, Sync IMAP notes, 5X Digital Zoom, Nested Playlists, Card Dav, Tap to focus video, Places in photos, iPod Out, Home Screen Wall paper, search SMS/MMS messages, file and delete mail search results, web search suggestions, Bluetooth Keyboards, CalDav Invitations, Spell Check, Persistent WiFi and lots more.

iPhone OS 4.0 Highlight Features:

Multitasking:
Multitasking has been included the iPhone OS 4 and Steve Jobs introduced this saying
“We were not first to the party, but we are going to be the best”.

Multitasking is now available in iPhone and it is done in such a way that it does not hinder either performance or battery life. These were the two of the biggest issues that the other mobile platforms face and so, it really makes sense that Apple wants to make sure that these issues are addressed in its multitasking feature. Apple has offered seven multitasking services and so you will be able to make Voice over IP call while playing games or checking mail and just find a restaurant while listening to Pandora and more. Background location is a new part of the OS and it will work with the social apps with turn-by-turn applications.

Folders:
With this feature you will be able to organise your apps into folders with just drag and drop simplicity. With this application, you get faster access to your favourites and will also be able to browse and manage up to 2160 apps at once, which is much more than the current limit of 180 apps.

Better Mails:
Better mails means you can see all the messages from all your mails in a unified inbox which allows you to switch between inboxes more swiftly, organise messages by threads and also open attachments in third party apps.

iBooks:
iBooks have proved to be the best way to browse, buy and read books on a mobile device. Esay flips through the pages and you can browse over tens and thousands of them, out of which, most of them are free. This app even allows you to check out the reviews and read sample pages before you purchase them.

Developers:
With a rich set of over 1500 new APIs, the iPhone SDK 4 provides developers with a broad range of technologies to enhance the functionality of their iPhone and iPod touch applications. Developers can use these new APIs to make their apps more powerful, more feature rich, and more amazing than before.

Game Center:
Despite Nintendo’s claims to the contrary, the iPhone platform is becoming a mobile powerhouse for gaming. Apple wants to make it even better by adding a social gaming network. Think XBox Live but for your iPhone or iPad.

iAD:
iAd is a breakthrough mobile advertising platform from Apple. With it, apps can feature rich media ads that combine the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web.

Enterprise:
iPhone OS 4 offers more useful features for businesses. With enhancements to security, scalability, and compatibility, IT managers have even more reasons to deploy iPhone throughout their enterprises.
These are just seven of the biggest features coming to iPhone 4.0 OS. You cannot wait for its release? Can you? So cant we!