iPad Accessories

Now that the iPhone OS 4 has been officially announced, let’s recap the event from Apple and some of the press and community reaction to what is being offered. As such, we’ll break-down the seven ‘tent-pole’ features that Apple demoed for its event audience. Topping that off will be an extra section that covers what is not officially known about the OS update but has since surfaced thanks to numerous people digging around in the 4.0 Beta SDK and on Apple’s developer site.

The Known

• Multitasking: Developers will have access to seven multitasking services, which will allow tasks to be performed in the background while preserving performance and battery life. So you’ll be able to make a Voice over IP call while playing a game or checking email, find a restaurant on Urbanspoon while listening to Pandora, and more.
• Folders: Organize apps into folders with drag-and-drop simplicity. Get faster access to your favorites and browse and manage up to 2160 apps at once — many more than the current limit of 180 apps.
• Enhanced Mail: See messages from all your email accounts displayed together in a unified inbox, switch between inboxes more quickly, organize messages by threads, and even open attachments in third-party apps.
• iBooks for iPhone/Touch: The best way to browse, buy, and read books on a mobile device. Easily flip through the pages of a book you’ve downloaded from the iBookstore while listening to your music collection. Browse tens of thousands of books — many of them free — by title, author, or genre. You can even check out reviews and read sample pages before you buy.
• 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. Mail will include support of MS Exchange Server 2010 and multiple Exchange e-mail accounts, as well as SSL VPN connectivity.
• Game Center: The iPhone OS 4 will include a preview of Apple’s new social gaming network. Your users can invite friends to play a game, start a multiplayer game through matchmaking, track their achievements, and compare their high scores on a leader board. The final version of Game Center will be available to iPhone and iPod touch users later this year.
• iAd: 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. For developers, it means a new, easy-to-implement source of revenue. For advertisers, it creates a new media outlet that offers consumers highly targeted information.
• Home Screen Wallpaper: The iPhone OS 4 will include settings to change your desktop background with included Apple samples and ones from your camera roll(s). You can make your desktop the same as your stand-by image, or different if you want separation.

The Unknown

Analyzing the Apple iPhone OS 4 Media Event initially in low-res streaming and subsequently in high-definition streaming has revealed additional details about the forth-coming OS update. This section covers what has surfaced in the days since the Apple Event.

• Quick Look: Applications can now present previews of documents, like attachments in Mail, using the new Quick Look APIs.
• Video Playback & Capture enhancements: You now have full programmatic control over video playback and capture, using new APIs in the AV Foundation framework. This includes 5x Digital Zoom and Tap-to-Focus video as part of iPhone OS 4 for end-users.
• Additional Accessibility features: Those who are visually impaired will be able to increase font sizes in Mail, SMS, and system-wide Alert messages.
• Additional E-mail features: You will be able to change the image size in Mail messages as well as Rotate images embedded or to be sent-out. You will also be able to File and Delete Mail search results, and Edit from Outbox.
• Support for Additional hardware: The iPhone OS 4 will include additional support for Bluetooth keyboards and remote control hardware. The iPod-out functions for Docks will gain extra support and functionality, but was unspecified as to what those will be.
• Extra Apple App features: Support for Places in their Photo App, creation of Playlists and Nested Playlists in the iPod App, Rotation of images in Camera Roll, better Spellchecking while typing, Birthday Calendar support in iCal App, Top-hit and Web-search suggestions for Safari Searching, as well as retaining recent web search history.
• New Dock appearance: The iPhone/Touch dock will take on an appearance similar to the iPad 3.2.0 OS and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
• Safari Search Button: Like with the iPad OS 3.2.0, Safari in iPhone OS 4.0 will be renamed from ‘Google’ to ‘Search’. This either means Apple will be dropping Google searching as the main search engine branding, or adding extra search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, and so forth.
• Rate on Delete function removed: The controversial ‘Rate on Delete’ pop-up which was designed by Apple in iPhone OS 2.2 to encourage App users and buyers to submit reviews and scores, will be removed in iPhone OS 4.0. Developers have felt that only those bent on deleting an App would rate it, and hitherto provide a bad rating, skewing perception and rating of Apps, instead of providing satisfied clients to rate for Apps being kept.
• Web & Wikipedia Spotlight Search: Spotlight search, currently accessible in iPhone OS 3.0 when flicking left on the first page of Apps, will allow you to search content on the Web and within Wikipedia. Not only can you use Spotlight search for items on your iPhone OS device, but now the web and Wikipedia in the upcoming OS.

We will cover additional details regarding iPhone OS 4 and how it affects the iPad for this Fall’s OS launch as they become available.