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During a presentation on Apple's Cupertino campus this morning, the company's CEO, Steve Jobs, announced the next version of the iPhone operating system: iPhone OS 4. Apple will release a preview version to developers today and plans to release the OS to consumers in the summer. Among the new features in the OS are multitasking with the help of a new set of APIs. Developers will get access to over 1,500 new APIs, and users will see over 100 new features. Jobs also announced that Apple has already sold 450,000 iPads. Sponsor Note : This is a breaking news story. We will update this story throughout the morning as more news becomes available from the iPhone OS 4 event. Just reload this page to see the updates. iPhone OS 4 New in iPhone OS 4 Fast task switching Multitasking Folders Enhanced mail app Local push notifications Background location services Task completion in the background iBooks for iPhone Enterprise enhancement Game Center social gaming network iAd advertising network In total, Apple has now sold close to 85 million devices that run the iPhone OS. Developers, who will get access to the new OS today, will be able to access over 1,500 new APIs , including better APIs for in-app SMS, smarter ways to access the accelerometer and access to new users features like 5x digital zoom, home screen wallpapers, and access to Bluetooth keyboards. iPhone OS 4 will also finally include support for multitasking. Jobs noted that Apple isn't the first company to bring this feature to the market, but wants "to be the best." A simple double-click on the home button will bring up a task menu at the bottom of the screen. This, however, is just a way to quickly switch between apps. No Multitasking for iPhone 3G Most of these newly announced features will run on the iPhone 3GS and third generation iPod touch, but users with an iPhone 3G or second generation iPod touch will not get access to the new multitasking features. Apple plans to release iPhone OS 4 for the iPad in the fall. Background Apps To run services in the background, as Apple's SVP of iPhone software Scott Forstall noted, apps will have to access a new set of APIs. Music apps like Pandora will be able to stream their music in the background and use the iPod controls in the lock screen to control the playback. Until now, exiting an app like Pandora would stop the music playback. According to Pandora's developers, making the app background aware only took one day. VoIP services like Skype will now also be able to run in the background. Apple will now allow location services to run in the background. This will be a major boon for turn-by-turn direction services like Tom Tom and location-based social networks like Loopt, which Apple specifically mentioned during the event. In addition, apps will also be able to send local push notifications and apps will be able to complete tasks like photo uploads in the background. Folders With iPhone OS 4, Apple is also introducing a new way to organize applications - something that those of us who have installed way too many apps on our phones will appreciate. Now, users will be able to organize apps into folders. To do this, you simply drag and drop apps on top of each other. The OS automatically creates a name for these folders (presumably based on the apps' categories in the App Store), but you can also edit the name yourself. Folders can also live in the dock. This will come in handy if you want to have all your games or news apps available at a moment's notice. Enhanced Mail App iPhone OS 4 will also bring an enhanced mail app with a unified inbox and the ability to organize emails by thread. In addition, users will finally be able to open attachments with apps. Game Center For gamers, Apple is introducing the Game Center, which is basically a social gaming network that will feature automatic matchmaking for multiplayer games, leaderboards and achievements. iBooks Comes to the iPhone After Apple introduced iBooks for the iPad, it was only a matter of time before the company would introduce iBooks for the iPhone. Just like the Kindle app, iBooks will sync pages and bookmarks between the iPad and iPhone. iPhone users will also be able to access the iBookstore right from their device. iPhone in the Enterprise For enterprise users, Apple is introducing a number of new features, including improved security courtesy of support for SLL VPN. Enterprises will now also be able to distribute apps wirelessly. iAd Unsurprisngly, Apple also announced its new iAd mobile advertising platform . According to Jobs, "most of this mobile advertising really sucks." According to Jobs, the best way to deliver mobile ads in not through search ads but inside mobile apps. Jobs noted that Apple wants ads in apps to be even more interactive than on the Web. Currently, according to Jobs, people don't click on ads because it takes them out of the app. Given that iAd is a built-in OS-wide feature, however, Apple thinks that it can deliver a better experience for users. Jobs also took a swipe at Adobe and noted that these interactive ads will be developed in HTML5. Judging from Apple's demos during the event, these ads can be highly interactive and many of them resembled mini-games more than traditional display ads. Apple will sell, host and deliver the ads and share 60% of the revenue with developers. Update on the iPad: 450,000 Sold At the beginning of his presentation, Jobs also recapped last week's launch of the iPad. According to Jobs, the company managed to sell 450,000 iPads since the device went on sale on Saturday. iPad users have downloaded over 600,000 books from the iBookstore and 3.5 million iPad apps from the App Store. It's not clear how many of these books were free books, however. Jobs also announced that the App Store has now delivered over 4 billion apps to iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users, and that there are close to 3,500 iPad apps in the store already. Thanks to our friends at Gizmodo and gdgt for providing excellent live coverage of the event today. Discuss
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Apple Announces iPhone OS 4 with Support for Multitasking
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Mashups artists make the coolest things possible. If you like listening to music on Pandora , why not share your favorite songs with your Twitter friends as well? Dora.fm is a mashup of Pandora, Twitter and link-shortener Bit.ly built by Isaac Salier-Hellendag . This is just one of many mashups built using the Bit.ly Application Programming Interface, which recently saw a substantial upgrade . Sponsor Discuss
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Pandora + Twitter = Dora.fm
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I waited for a year to get an iPhone, and I lost out on a year's worth of opportunities to use one as a result. I have one now and I still marvel at it almost every time I touch it. I expect to have a similar experience with the iPad - so I'm not going to wait. I want a full touchscreen, app-rich experience now. The iPad may be better for content consumption than creation, but I'm not ashamed to say I like to consume content with a good portion of my time. (Thanks for reading this blog I write on for a living, by the way, content consumers!) The experience may be better in a year, but I'm willing to pay for 70% of the ideal functionality today instead of getting nothing for a year. Here's what I'm excited to use it for. Sponsor This post is part of a pro/con series written with ReadWriteWeb's Mike Melanson. Click here to read his counter-point article iPad Schmipad: Who Needs Another Device . I just flew across the country twice in two days. I had a great time reading content I saved on Instapaper on my phone and paying a couple of games of a great little baseball app. Both of those are going to be way cooler on a full iPad screen. Gaming is going to be incredible - and there's going to be a whole lot of games. I look forward to using Tweetdeck on the iPad, the big touch screen is going to be great for the multi-column display of groups of Tweets. Mind mapping on the iPad is going to be great: dragging around nodes of related thoughts, visualizing interconnected concepts. Outlining ideas, dragging items from section to section and then emailing the outlines to computer in OPML format. Give me multitasking soon so I can listen to Pandora while doing that and I'll be even more excited. Do I look forward to seeing newspapers and magazines compete for my attention with their iPad apps? Oh yes, I sure do. My new favorite hyper-local news website Everyblock Portland is going to feel like such a futuristic news rag on a tablet that I might ask my dog to bring it to me in his mouth some mornings while I drink coffee. Is it perfect? No, the iPad obviously has serious shortcomings. The fact that it can't be tweaked and hacked is a serious (if expected) disappointment. If it was my only computer, I'd probably turn into a slovenly, uncreative shell of a human being (except for the web access). But it's not going to be my only computer. It's just going to be another awesome computer in my house. And I'm not going to wait to have the kinds of experiences I'll be able to have with an iPad. Life's too short, I'm getting an iPad sooner than later. Discuss
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Life's Too Short: I'm Getting an iPad Right Away
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We trust services like Last.fm or Pandora to learn our musical tastes and serve up custom radio stations, so why not the same for the numerous streams that bombard us daily? My6Sense , a recommendation engine for your social streams and news feeds, is releasing its functionality today in its " Attention API " at the DEMO conference. Sponsor The company released an iPhone app last summer, which uses the company's "digital intuition" to determine the particular stories and status updates that are most relevant to you according to what you've clicked on and spent time with in the past. The system learns from you, becoming more familiar with what you are interested in as time goes on. According to the press release, "the service is content/stream agnostic and can automatically rank information from all types of sources -- including social streams like Twitter, news streams, RSS, vertical content providers, open whiteboards and more. The solution is optimized for mobile platforms, where digital clutter is the most prominent, and can be successfully used on non-mobile sites and applications as well." With services like Pandora, you need to let the program know when you like or dislike something. The "Attention API", on the other hand, simply requires that the site making use of it report back user activity in order to learn the user's habits and preferences. While this sounds great, and we can see it filtering out some of the noise, we have the same concerns about it as we do about Google customizing our search - that we will end up in an echo chamber of like-minded thought. As our own Frederic Lardinois pointed out when reviewing the My6Sense iPhone app, you may want to step outside the recommendations once in a while for a breath of fresh air. If you are a real news junkie, you will probably still sometimes want to switch to the regular timeline mode that organizes items chronologically. After all, the items you don't usually think you would be interested in can sometimes really grab your attention (which is, to be honest, a problem that all recommendation systems have to grapple with). On the company's API page , it mentions that the API will provide "No fear of bombardment" as "Developers and publishers can broadcast any amount of information and content to a widespread audience, which reaching individual consumers with messages that are uniquely relevant to them." We would hope that, in reality, any service using the API would notify its users that it was doing so and even offer the ability to step outside of the service's recommendations. Discuss
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My6Sense Releases API: 'Digital Intuition' for the Real-Time Web
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AppleInsider is reporting this morning that some trusted sources are predicting a "full-on solution" to multitasking in the iPhone 4.0 OS, which is set to be released this summer. Already, the iPhone shows that it is capable of multitasking with bundled apps like iPod and Nike+, but the update is said to handle a number of security and interface issues. Sponsor Already, jailbreaking the iPhone shows how the device is fully capable of multitasking, but opens up the device to malware and poorly designed third-party apps that can make a full restore necessary. As AppleInsider points out, the real benefit of closing off the iPhone to multitasking is that there are no malicious apps running in the background, hijacking your phone. You are, after all, carrying a constantly GPS enabled multimedia recording device with you. At the same time, it would be absolutely wonderful to be able to listen to Pandora while using the MapMyRide app to track your bike ride across town, or any other number of combinations currently unavailable. But beyond security, AppleInsider discusses the issues of user interface that we might not think of right off the bat. In other operating systems, switching between apps is simple, by way of a taskbar or system dock. On the iPhone, multitasking is often handled by a small strip added at the top of the screen, but this would become messy for multiple applications. Perhaps we'll see a new hardware solution to accompany this issue with the next iPhone "4GS" this summer. And, as Gizmodo points out, if we get multitasking for iPhone, can we really be expected to accept an iPad that can't do the same? While AppleInsider says that its sources have predicted this "full-on solution", it notes that the much called-for feature has been falsely rumored, by their own articles nonetheless, on three separate occassions over the past year. In addition to this, it says that two of the biggest problems - resource conservation and battery life - were not addressed by their sources. Would we really want these features if it meant a bogged down device we had to charge every hour on the hour? And is this just another case of the boy who cried wolf? Let's hope not. Discuss
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Potential Summer Blockbuster: iPhone 4.0 Multitasking
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