iPhone iOS 4 delivers multitasking, iBookstore ... and ads

ABOVE: Mr Wiggs.

iPhone owners can now download a free update to the Apple operating system software that runs their phones.

New features in iOS 4, which went live on iTunes yesterday, include:

•  Long, long awaited support for multitasking (that is, the ability to open a non-Apple programme without having to close another first)
• Game Center, for finding and playing other iPhone users over the net
• The ability to support multiple Microsoft Exchange email accounts,, and display all email accounts in a single, unified inbox
• Better security for corporate users, including a BlackBerry-like ability to remotely wipe data from a lost handset
• Support for iBookstore (though not yet for Kiwi users), formerly tied to iPad
• Mobile advertising, called iAds, served up to iPhone users in the same manner that Google delivers AdWords to users of its search engine, Gmail and other services
   

Early New Zealand adopters were wowed by some of the features added with the update, but annoyed by others.

“I just got served my first iAd and I'm not sure I liked it,” Y&R NZ's globe-trotting creative director Vaughan Davis groused on Twitter after installing iOS 4 to his iPhone. “[It’s] Absolutely intrusive and out of context”.

iAd, which is built into iOS 4, is currently being trialled ahead of its official launch on July 1. Apple brags that it has already booked $US60 million in global campaigns (which represents almost 50% of the total forecasted US mobile ad spending for the second half of 2010 by a JP Morgan forecast) booked for Nissan, Unilever, Disney and other multinationals.

 ABOVE: iPhone apps can now be nested in folders, allowing you to download 12 times as many.

iPhone power user Lance Wiggs, on the other hand, was sold on OS 4’s ability to nest up to a dozen iPhone apps in a single folder, (folders were not previously supported).

With the number of iPhone screens still at 11, Apple had increased its market capacity by a factor of 12, said Mr Wiggs, with every user able to download up to 2112 apps - a boon for local developers such as Wellington game developer Shidhe that are pouring out $1 programmes.

And while most iPhone users will hail the arrival of true multitasking, at least one iPhone junkie sees a downside.

Craig Scoggie, head of Symantec's Australia and New Zealand operation, told NBR he appreciated iPhone iOS 3's lack of multitasking - at least to the degree that a virus or malware could not run in the background (because, indeed, no second program could run beyond whatever you were using in the foreground).

All the usual suspects have iOS 4 reviews; the best is this encyclopaedic feature-by-feature write up on ars technica.