Jan Zdarsa Today, Steve Jobs introduced the new generation of iPhone OS 4, with which he plans to run away from the competition again. So let's take a look together at what awaits us in the new iPhone OS 4 this summer.
Live translation is also prepared by Ondra Toral and Vláďa Janeček at Superapple.cz!
People are slowly settling down, music is playing, we wait for the lights to go down and start. Journalists are asked to switch off their mobile phones, so the start is nearing..
Steve Jobs takes the stage and starts by talking about the iPad. He is proud to have received so many positive reviews, for example from Walt Mossberg. In the first day, 300 iPads were sold, and to date, a total of 000 iPads have been sold. Best Buy is out of stock and Apple is trying to deliver more as quickly as possible. To date, there have been 450 million for the iPad.
Steve Jobs also presents various iPad applications. Whether it's racing games or comics. Steve Jobs wanted to show that great games and applications were created in such a short time. But it's back to the iPhone again, that's what we're most interested in today.
iPhone OS 4 announcement
To date, over 50 million iPhones have been sold, and together with the iPod Touch, there are 85 million 3,5-inch iPhone OS devices. Today, developers will get their hands on iPhone OS 4. It will be available to the public in the summer.
Developers get over 1500 API functions and can access calendar, photo gallery, embed SMS in their app and more. It introduces a framework called Accelerate.
100 new functions have been prepared for users. Whether it's creating playlists, five-fold digital zoom, click and focus for video, the ability to change the homescreen wallpaper, bluetooth keyboard support, spell check...
multitasking
And we have the expected multitasking! Steve Jobs is aware that they are not the first to have multitasking, but they will solve it the best of all. If things are not done right, the battery will not last and the iPhone could become unusable after running multiple apps due to lack of resources.
Apple has avoided these problems and presents multitasking in action. Great UI, that's the bottom line. Steve launches the Mail app, then jumps to Safari and back to Mail. Just double-click the main button and the window will display all running applications. Whenever it exits an application, it doesn't shut down, but remains in the same state as we left it.
But how did Apple manage to keep multitasking from killing battery life? Scott Forstall explains the Apple solution on stage. Apple has prepared seven multitasking services for developers. Scott shows the Pandora app (for playing the radio). Until now, if you shut down the app, it stopped playing. But that's not the case anymore, it can now play in the background while we're in another application. In addition, we can control it from the lockscreen.
Pandora representatives are on stage talking about how the iPhone has helped grow their service. In no time, they doubled the number of listeners and currently have up to 30 thousand new listeners per day. And how long did it take them to redesign the app to run in the background? Just one day!
VoIP
So this was the first API called Background audio. Now we're moving to VoIP. For example, it is possible to jump out of Skype and still be online. After it pops up, the top status bar doubles and we see Skype here. And although the Skype application is not running, it is possible to receive VoIP calls.
Background localization
Next is Background location. Now, for example, it is possible to run navigation in the background, so that even if you are doing something else, the application will not stop searching for a signal and will not "get lost". You can easily browse in another application and the voice will tell you when to turn.
Other applications that use location in the background are social networks. Until now they used GPS and that took a lot of energy. They would now rather use cell towers when running in the background.
Push and local notifications, task completion
Apple will continue to use push notifications, but Local Notifications (local notifications directly in the iPhone) will also be added to them. It will not be necessary to be connected to the Internet, it will simplify many things.
Another function is task completion. So now apps can continue some task they are doing in the background. For example, you can upload an image to Flickr, but for now you can do something completely different. And the last feature is Fast app switching. This will allow apps to save their state and pause them so they can be quickly returned to later. That's 7 multitasking services.
Folders
Steve returns to the stage to talk about ingredients. Now you don't have to have dozens of applications on the screen, but you can easily sort them into folders. This makes it much easier, and from the maximum number of 180 applications, we have a maximum of 2160 applications at once.
News in the Mail app
Now we come to number 3 (total of 7 functions will be presented in detail). Function number three is the extension of the mail application, for example, with a unified inbox for emails. Now we can have emails from different accounts in one folder. Also, we are not limited to a maximum of one Exchange account, but we can have more. Emails can also be organized into conversations. And there are also so-called "open attachments", which allow us to open an attachment, for example, in a 3rd-party application from the Appstore (for example, a .doc format in some 3rd-party application).
iBooks, functions for the business sphere
Number four is iBooks. You probably already know this book store from showing off the iPad. You will then be able to use your iPhone as a reader of books and magazines from this store.
News number 5 hides functions for business use. Whether it's the once-mentioned possibility of multiple Exchange accounts, better security, mobile device management, wireless distribution of applications, support for Exchange Server 2010 or SSL VPN settings.
Game Center
Number 6 was nGame Center. Gaming has become extremely popular on the iPhone and iPod touch. There are over 50 games in the Appstore. To make gaming even more fun, Apple is adding a social gaming network. So Apple has something like Microsoft's Xbox Live - leaderboards, challenges, achievements...
iAd - advertising platform
The seventh innovation is the iAd platform for mobile advertising. There are many applications in the Appstore that are free or at a very low price - but the developers have to make money somehow. So the developers put various ads in the games, and according to Steve, they weren't worth much.
The average user spends over 30 minutes a day on the app. If Apple placed an ad in these apps every 3 minutes, that's 10 views per day per device. And that would mean one billion ad views per day. This is an exciting opportunity for both business and developers. But Apple also wants to change the quality of these ads.
The ads on the site are nice and interactive, but they don't evoke much emotion. Apple would like to evoke both interaction and emotion in users. Developers will find it easy to embed advertising into apps. Apple will sell advertising and developers will receive 60% of the revenue from advertising sales.
So Apple took some of the brands it likes and created fun ads for them. Apple shows everything in the advertisement for Toy Story 3.
When you click on the ad, it doesn't take you to the advertiser's page in Safari, but instead launches some other app with an interactive game inside the app. There is no shortage of video, toys to play with…
There is even a mini-game here. You can also choose a new wallpaper for your screen here. You can also directly buy the official Toy Story game in the app. Whether this is the future of mobile advertising is anyone's guess, but I really like the concept so far.
After clicking on the Nike ad, we got to the ad, where you can look at the history of the development of Nike shoes or we can download an application for designing your own shoe design with Nike ID.
Summary
So let's sum it up - we have multitasking, folders, Mail extension, iBooks, business functions, game kit and iAd. And that's only 7 out of a total of 100 new features! Today, a version is released for developers who can test iPhone OS 4 right away.
iPhone OS 4 will be released for iPhone and iPod Touch this summer. This applies to the iPhone 3GS and the third generation iPod Touch. For the iPhone 3G and the older iPod Touch, many of these functions will be available, but logically, for example, multitasking will be missing (lack of sufficient performance). iPhone OS 4 will not arrive on the iPad until the fall.
Questions and Answers
Steve Jobs has confirmed that the success of the iPad will have no effect on the start of international sales and everything is going according to plan. So the iPad will appear in a few more countries at the end of April.
Apple is currently considering whether to introduce achievement points like on Xbox to its Game Center platform. Steve also confirmed his hard line against Flash on the iPhone.
iAd ads will be completely in HTML5. As for loading, for example, Twitter feeds in the background, Steve Jobs claims that push notifications are much better for that. When asked about widgets for the iPad, Steve Jobs was very vague and replied that the iPad went on sale on Saturday, rested on Sunday (laughs).. anything is possible!
According to Jason Chen, Apple does not plan to become an advertising agency. “We tried to buy a company called AdMob, but Google came in and poached it for themselves. So we bought a Quatro instead. They teach us new things, and we try to learn them as quickly as we can."
As for the compatibility of new features with older hardware, both Phil and Steve confirm that they try to be as sensitive as possible on this issue. It tries to support as many features as possible even on older hardware. But multitasking was simply not possible.
How will the App Store change with the arrival of iPhone OS 4? Steve Jobs: “The App Store is not part of iPhone OS 4, it's a service. We are gradually improving it. The Genius function also helped a lot with orientation in the App store."
There was also a question about how applications are turned off in iPhone OS 4. "You don't have to turn them off at all. The user uses the stuff and doesn't have to worry about it." And that's all from today's iPhone OS 4 launch. Hope you like it!
multitasking only for 3GS :-(
Hmm, I miss lock screen widgets :/
I agree, I miss them more than multitasking
I'm annoyed that nobody mentioned Opera :( And I'll miss FLASH there for the rest of my life... I'm seriously desperate... something so necessary in today's world (even my old N6300 could do FLASH for god's sake)... omg why us they punish .. they only see money and cough on people ... (we are afraid that users would play flash games on the net and blah blah) ... quite pathetic ...
If they were only interested in money, then the flash is there... And if you were expecting it there, then know that it was 100% clear for about a month that it would not be there. Fortunately…
The question is, how will it actually be with Flash... they trembled at the introduction of Adobe Creative Suite 5 and maybe they will also start relying a little on HTML5 and CSS3..
So I am very pleased. I didn't even expect that there would be such interesting news. And I also hope that we will hear some of the others as soon as possible. :)
"Emails can also be organized by topic." — if this is the translation of "threaded email conversations", then it is very wrong.
The translation was fast, but that's exactly it :) I just couldn't think of anything other than a threaded conversation, which would be unclear to many people.. I'll try to rewrite it in a better term..