iPhone OS 4.0 – My First Month

Posted May 31st, 2010 | No Comments

Being an Apple geek and incredibly impatient too, as soon as I’d finished watching the keynote from the Apple iPhone OS 4.0 event in April I just HAD to try the new OS. There was no way I could wait until ‘Summer’ when it is officially released. So I immediately registered with Apple as a developer and gained access to the early beta versions of the new OS. Here’s my account of how it’s been going.

Early Days (Beta 1 & 2)

The first version I installed was incredibly unstable, it worked ok as a phone and the native apps worked fine (except the camera). Unfortunately most 3rd party apps crashed. As much as I wanted to test OS4 I couldn’t handle the instability at this stage and promptly restored OS3 from my backup. Thankfully there wasn’t a long wait for beta2 to be released and it brought big improvements. There were still a few incompatible apps and more crashes than I was used to but it was much more stable and usable in general. Still no camera or ability to take screenshots though.

Almost Perfect (Beta 3 & 4)

The last 2 releases have brought major stability improvements and I have been running OS4 beta 3 and now beta 4 for a few weeks without reverting back to an old backup. There are only 2 of my existing apps that don’t appear to work yet, they are LinkedIn and the Sky Mobile TV app. I can live without LinkedIn and although I miss the Sky app occasionally, not enough to make me give up the OS4.0 features that I have already grown to love.

Why I Love iPhone OS4.0

There are apparently 100 new features in the new OS. I can’t claim to have tested or even noticed all of them but many I have. Some are huge, some are trivial but still fun or useful. Some we should have had years ago like many other smartphones. The following features are the ones that have been the most useful for me in the time i’ve been running OS4.

Custom Wallpaper

Ok let’s get this one out of the way first! Yes you’ve been able to do it on most other smart phones (and plenty of not so smart phones) for years. Now we can too. It’s not a huge deal but it is nice to be able to customise and it’s amazing what a different look and feel you can give your phone by changing the background image. It’s great that you can set a different image for the Home screen as the Lock screen too.

Spell Check

This is another feature that has been lacking from the iPhone for 2 long. Although as with Cut & Paste I think the way they have implemented it is brilliant so it’s probably been worth the wait. If you’re familiar with Mac OSX the way spell check works will be very familiar to you. It works across virtually all apps, when you misspell a word it will be underlined with a dotted red line. You simply tap the word to receive a number of possible suggestions of which you tap the correct one. Very simple and it’s the feature I have had the most use out of over the past few weeks. I’m much more comfortable sending business emails to clients when I’m confident there are no embarassing speeling mistakes.

Folders

If you’re anything like me – addicted to buying/trying apps and have been using an iPhone for years you’ll have gathered a rather large collection. Mine spanned 9 full pages before I was finally able to do something about them. Introducing OS4 folders! Which have allowed me to reduce my 9 pages of apps to just 3! And that includes the home screen!

Folders are incredibly simple but their effect is huge and is probably the one OS4 feature that I really couldn’t live without. I recently purchased an iPad that is of course running OS3 and I miss folders badly. To create a Folder you simply hold your finger down on an icon so that they wobble and then drag one icon over another, a Folder will then be created containing both icons. It has a go at guessing the name of the folder based on the category of app you put in it but you can of course rename them and add more icons. You can even put a Folder in the dock which is very cool.

The one limitation is that you can only have 12 apps per folder, I would have preferred to have more, even if it meant vertical scrolling but it’s a simple enough task to create say ‘Games #1′ and ‘Games #2′ if more than 12 are required.

‘Multitasking’

Besides ‘lack of Flash’ this is the main argument given against the iPhone. Maybe it’s a fair complaint that there has never been multitasking, although personally I understand Apple’s concerns about reducing performance and battery life by having multiple apps running in the background. Which makes their implementation of ‘multitasking’ perfect, although it appears to be true multitasking it’s actually just a clever way of switching apps. Unless both apps absolutely have to be open (say if you’re streaming music from Spotify or online in Skype) the first is actually paused while you switch to the second and you can switch back and forth quickly and easily.

Double tapping the Home button brings up a sort of dock style application switcher, similar to CMD-Tab in Mac OSX. It displays a horizontal scrolling list of apps that support multitasking for you to switch too.

Scroll left and you get iPod controls as well as current track information and the Portrait/Landscape lock. Scroll right and you get more apps to switch too.

Camera – 5x Digital Zoom

I don’t use the camera on my iPhone that much since it’s not the best quality and digital zooms only make that worse. However, it is still nice to finally have one available.

Tapping the screen in the camera app brings up a slider which you can then slide in or out to zoom. Simple but effective. Auto focus has now been added to video recording as well as photos.

Mail: Unified Inbox & Threaded Messages

Mail for iPhone is great as far as mobile mail applications go but it has been missing 2 key features until now. The first is Unified Inbox which means all of your various email accounts can feed into the same Inbox, saving you from checking each one individually. A huge time saver if you have many inboxes to check.

The second feature is one of the best for me, threaded messages are finally here! As a GMail user it was frustrating to go from nice threaded conversations on my desktop machines to the mess off chronological emails in iPhone Mail. If you don’t know what threaded messages are, it basically is just keeping ‘conversations’ together. So the original email and all replies are kept together rather then being separated by however many different emails you might have received in between.

There are other Mail improvements, the most notable being an attachment viewer which allows you to open a variety of mail attachments right within the app.

iPod Improvements (including create Playlists!)

There are several iPod improvements, the biggest for me is the ability to create and edit playlists on the iPhone itself. Gone are ‘Playlist On The Go’ and instead you edit and create playlists exactly as you would on the desktop version of iTunes and they sync to the desktop version too. It’s very quick and easy, a welcome addition.

There are also some nice UI improvements such as an artwork thumbnail in Album view.

Best Of The Rest

The features above are things that I have personally benefited from during the past few weeks of using iPhone OS 4.0. There are plenty of others that I either haven’t used much or are not important to me, they maybe to you though. Here’s a few of them:

Games Center: Think XBox Live for iPhone games! Not much happening in there yet but should be cool once launched (See image)
SMS Search - Very useful to search for a particular text message
SMS Character Count – Helpful if you’re sending long message to users with older phones or if you need to keep track of how many SMS messages you’re using.
Bluetooth Keyboard - I linked my iPhone to my Apple bluetooth keyboard, it worked great and was kind of cool. For me it’s not a huge feature as I almost always have my Macbook Pro or iPad with me, if you don’t and you actually use your iPhone for heavy email/text production then it could be amazing.
Improved battery life? - Actually I’ve no idea if this is true or not, there’s certainly no mention of it in the keynote which seems strange as you’d think they’d like to shout about it. I have to say though, it really does feel as though my battery has been lasting significantly longer these last few weeks!

I’m sure the more I play with OS4 the more new features I will discover. I feel the best will come a few months after it is officially released once App developers have had time to make use of all the new features, especially Multitasking. I’m looking forward to seeing what sort of use apps can make from it.

iPhone OS4 is still scheduled to be released ‘Summer 2010′. We should know more June 7th when Steve Jobs addresses the WWDC and announces details of the new iPhone at the same time.

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