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App multitasking announced for iPhone OS 4
Photo by Eric Risberg, Associated Press
Apple’s Steve Jobs today announced that apps like “Skype,” navigation apps, location-based services and games for the iPhone will be able to run in the background on iPhones and iPod Touch devices. (And, presumably, on the new iPad.)
As part of a press conference for Apple’s latest version of its iPhone operating system, OS 4, Jobs said that the company has held off on rolling out multitasking (where apps can continue to run in the background after you’ve exited them to do something else) because of battery drain and performance issues.
Those issues seem to have been fixed and now developers will be able to update their apps to take advantage of multitasking. If, say, you use Skype, you’d be able to get a notification of an incoming call even if you don’t have Skype on your current iPhone screen.
It’s been one of the most-wanted features of the iPhone, especially since other smartphones can already do this (namely the Palm Pre and Android phones).
Other new features: folders! You’ll be able to better organize your apps. You’ll also be able to change your background on an iPhone.
A unified inbox will make it easier to bring multiple e-mail accounts to the Mail app. And it looks like iBooks is coming to the iPhone/iPod Touch as well.
Apple also announced its mobile ad platform, iAd, and Game Center, which will bring Xbox Live-like features including leaderboards and game achievements to the OS.
The OS update is expected to roll out to non-developers (the rest of us) this summer. It was made available to developers today.
Jobs also detailed how the iPad is doing so far. He said 450,000 iPads have been sold since Saturday and that there are already 3,500 iPad apps in the App Store. Apps have been downloaded 3.5 million times for the device, he said, and there are 185,000 total apps in the store. 50 million iPhones have been sold and total app downloaded have reached 4 billion.
Whew!
We’ll update this blog entry with more info as it arrives.
BIG UPDATE: The multitasking feature will not be available for the iPhone 3G (or the first-gen iPhone), only the iPhone 3GS and the iPod Touch 3rd-gen. D’oh! That’s a bit of a stunner, but it says to me that Apple will introduce a new iPhone version by summer and will be phasing out the 3G iPhone. At least that’s my best guess.
Also, the iPad OS update will not arrive until fall. Steve Jobs saved those two bits of bad news for the end of the presentation. Sorry, iPhone 3G owners!
All info from Engadget’s excellent live blog of the event.
Edited to add my take: So, now that the dust has settled, here’s my quick take. Folders, multitasking, unified e-mail and a game service to Xbox Live are all welcome additions to the iPhone universe. But just as the press conference was ending, Jobs poured cold water on the Apple faithful by revealing that the iPad version of the OS update won’t be available until fall and that the iPhone 3G, which is still currently being sold for $99, won’t be able to do multitasking.
Sure, we know the iPhone 3G S is faster, but it’s not like the 3G is an obsolete model that’s no longer being sold.
What this says to me clearly is that a new iPhone is in the wings for summer and that the 3G will no longer be sold. If you own a 3G or even a first-gen iPhone or are thinking about buying an iPhone right now, DO NOT BUY A 3G. In fact, I’d hold off from getting a 3GS until we know what the next version of the iPhone will feature and how much it’ll cost.
If it turns out the new iPhone is overpriced or doesn’t have the features you want (like, say, the very sexy-looking Android-based HTC EVO), you can always get a used 3G if you still want it. Will the new iPhone model be on Verizon as well as AT&T? We shall see in the summer.
Otherwise, this is mostly good news. Folders are a welcome (and long overdue) addition to the tedious task of managing your apps across multiple screens. Multitasking will make apps like “Pandora Radio,” “Skype” and “AOL Instant Messenger” much more useful. “iBooks” for iPhone/iPod is a no-brainer and something anyone could have predicted as soon as it was announced for the iPad. Apple’s iAd platform, however, probably means we’ll see many more adds in our apps. That’s not something regular users will cheer, but app developers, businesses and ad agencies will benefit.
The biggest worry for me as someone who manages a house with different iPhones, iPods and now an iPad is that each one of them will operate apps differently. The first-gen iPhone my wife owns won’t multitask when 4.0 rolls out while my 3GS will. For some months, the iPad won’t be able to run apps the way the iPhone 3GS does (that is, with multitasking), but will run iPad apps that the iPhones can’t. Never mind the apps that only work on devices with cameras or those that requires Bluetooth (which the first-gen iPod Touch didn’t have). Apple’s line of Internet devices is getting more segmented than it needs to be.
Apple is supposed to be making our lives easier, but this is going to make things very confusing for a while. It’s going to frustrate their largest base of iPhone users, those who own 3G phones. And it’s going to be a headache for app developers to deal with different versions of the same app for these different versions of devices and to keep quality control consistent.
Get ready for a few months of chaos before things settle down.
That’s usually how it is with Apple: three steps forward, one big step back, even within its own supposedly unified product lines.
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