Photo: Apple

The recent iPhone OS 4.0 event finally brought a long-demanded feature, confirmed a widely known rumour, as well as brought a few pleasant surprises.

Multitasking: the long-demanded feature

The highlight of the iPhone OS 4.0 event was Apple finally giving in to its user’s demands for multi-tasking on the iPhone. The multi-tasking comes with restrictions, though, and is limited to fast app switching, background location services, VoIP services, audio streaming in the background, task completion and push notifications.

iAd: the confirmed rumour

Apple also demoed its new in-app mobile advertising platform, iAd, which features fully interactive ads which behave more like apps within apps, with the ability to access various iPhone APIs for additional service. An example of this was the Toy Story 3 ad demo, where the maps API was used to show theatres near your location.

GameCenter and folders: the big surprise and the little surprise

Photo: Microsoft

GameCenter, which is Apple’s answer to Microsoft’s Xbox Live service, was the big surprise. It’s essentially Live on your iPhone, with a layer for matchmaking, leader boards, friends lists, and so on. Folders are Apple’s answer to organizing applications. It works very intuitively by simply dropping similar apps on top of one another and a folder, with an appropriate name, will automatically be created.

The stats

Photo: Apple

And in typical fashion, Steve Jobs and friends took time to rattle off some pretty impressive statistics, too. Over 50 million iPhones have been sold, with around 35 million iPod Touch devices being sold, totaling 85 million plus sales for the company’s touch devices. The iPad has moved 450,000 units since launch, with over 3,000 apps already available for it. Over 600,000 iBooks have been downloaded since the service’s launch. The App Store now has over 185,000 apps with more than 50,000 of those being games, dwarfing Nintendo and Sony’s game counts.

The rollout

While developers have gotten an SDK of iPhone OS 4.0 already, the consumer version will ship in the US summer (June-August) with the iPad version scheduled for autumn (September-November).

Photo: Apple

Apple, following their historical trend, has sent out invitations to developers and tech media for their iPhone OS 4.0 preview event.

iPhone 4.0 preview

Today, 8 April, will be the first preview of Apple’s iPhone 4.0. Not only does this follow in the wake of the very successful iPad launch, which saw hundreds of thousands of units sold, it may also be a preemptive strike against its Smartphone competitors, especially Google Android, who are beginning to make ground on the company.

Smartphone title race

Photo: BlackBerry

In their quarterly report, comScore indicated there were around 45.1 million Smartphone users in the US in February 2010, representing a 21 per cent increase over Smartphone users in November 2009. Of those users, RIM, the makers of BlackBerry (who had a fantastic quarter), made up 42.1 per cent of the market, a 1.3 per cent increase over November’s figures. Windows Mobile continued to crater, dropping 4 per cent to 15.1 per cent, as did Palm, whose woes are expanding, dropping 1.8 per cent from November’s share to 5.4 per cent in February.

The real point of interest, however, is the Android and iPhone OS Smartphone platforms. Apple’s iPhone market share of the Smartphone industry remained steady at 25.4 per cent, dropping by a slight 0.1 per cent over the previous quarter’s figures. Google Android, however, turned up the heat, by leaping 5.2 per cent to 9.0 per cent of total Smartphone share in the US, driven, no doubt, by HTC’s growing success in the US.

Hedging bets

Photo: Apple

So while Apple is still by and large the most promising and most profitable smartphone maker in the field, Google Android is on a tear toward the iPhone. For conspiracy theorists, this may explain why the iPhone 4.0 preview event is being held now, but it just might be more a case of it being the right time.

Updated: iPhone OS now powers three top-selling devices, the iPhone, the iPod Touch and the iPad, whereas Google’s Android platform has had breakout success on its smartphones only so far. The Barnes & Noble Nook, as well as the various netbooks and the incoming Android tablet may drastically change this reality, too, though.

Updated for a slight factual error regarding other platforms where Android is available. Thanks all for catching and pointing it out.

Tags for this article: iPhone, smartphone, blackberry

Photo: Apple

The iPhone is the fastest selling consumer electronic device in history, and for good reason, too. It revolutionised the smartphone industry by integrating hardware and software closely, as well as created a platform for thousands of others to develop businesses on the platform. It is not perfect, though, and Apple looks to silence its most vocal critics by introducing multitasking to the device with the iPhone 4.0 software update.

Hello multitasking

Photo: Apple

Possibly the biggest criticism of the iPhone is its inability to multitask – to allow multiple apps to be open at once or to allow apps to run in the background when tasks like picking up the phone or going to the home screen are performed. AppleInsider reports the oft-demanded feature will be available on the iPhone 4.0 software.

Preventative measures

While many have assumed these measures were put in place due to technical reasons, the truth is Apple have had multitask prevention measures in place for security reasons. If applications – especially network connected ones – cannot run in the background, malware and spyware cannot make their way onto your device without you knowing it.
The classic Apple strategy

This could also mean that the iPad will feature multitasking as well at a later stage, or very soon after launch, which will go a long way to dealing with the criticisms leveled against that device. And since iPhone 4.0 is expected to be released on the same day as the iPhone 4G, multitask will be available on from day one.

Photo: Apple

The allowance of a rudimentary function like multitasking and then punting it as if it were a massive technical achievement is perfectly in line with Apple’s iPhone strategy of introducing features that have been around for a long time and making them seem new. They did so with tethering and MMS on the iPhone 3GS, and to expect the marketing team at Apple to do the same with the iPhone 4G and with iPhone 4.0 is not unreasonable.

If Apple’s iPhone release strategy continues uninterrupted, the iPhone 4G and its necessary software update should be announced around June 2010.