Apple iPhone OS 4.0 Review

100+ New User Features

With iPhone OS 4, iPhone owners will enjoy over 100 new features that make it easier to interact with apps, manage email, read books, and more. New features include the following:

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.

Even Better 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 app

iBooks

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.

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. They can even use new GameKit APIs to develop for Game Center, the social gaming network Apple will launch later this year.

Learn more about the iPhone Developer Program
and iPhone SDK 4

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. 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.