Apple iOS 4.0 (Formerly iPhone OS 4.0)

Perhaps as a consequence of the seemingly iterative nature of the improvements, Apple has for the first time made this full iOS upgrade free to all of its iPod touch customers, rather than charging the customary $10 fee that provoked groans in the past. Many users will be thrilled—particularly some of the iPod touch owners who held off on versions 2.0 or 3.0 in protest over the charges. But as a disappointing aside, iOS 4.0 is the first version that doesn’t run at all on the original iPod touch or iPhone, and loses certain significant features on second-generation iPod touch and iPhone 3G models, as well. In fact, it’s at least a little different on each generation of device it runs on, and has not as yet been formally announced for the iPad.

Our review of iOS 4.0 isn’t here to convince you to download or skip this major upgrade; the free pricing and new features will most likely entice you to install it on any device that’s capable of running it. But to the extent that the major new features deserve attention on both Apple’s current devices and the upcoming iPhone 4, we discuss them below for your interest.

Folder system to the iPhone

Though Apple waited way too long to add a folder system to the iPhone and iPod touch, iOS 4’s implementation of the feature is intuitive and almost entirely excellent, enabling the effective organization of numerous applications into simple categories. Tapping on any folder icon splits the screen into three parts: two faded-out views of other apps above and below a high-contrast view inside the folder’s apps. This animated look inside the folder is so attractive that it’s easy to forgive the bland-looking folder icons themselves, which rapidly transform the device’s screen into a busy-looking 5-by-4 grid with mini 3-by-3 grids inside—a future feature to switch the folder to your preferred representative icon would be great. But given how much folders improve access to apps, transforming multiple swipes into a couple of quick taps, it’s easily to love the functionality of this feature even if the look isn’t ideal.

Pre-iPhone phones—smartphones and non-smartphones alike—gave users the option to customize their background artwork, which Apple seemed to actively pooh-pooh in the name of clean design. Customizing the Lock Screen was as far as the company was willing to go for the iPhone’s and iPod touch’s first three years, until the iPad came along with iPhone OS 3.2 installed. Suddenly background artwork for the Home Screen was okay, and with iOS 4, the feature has come to the iPod touch 3G and iPhone 3GS. In fact, it’s more than okay for these devices: you have to go out of your way to give these devices an all-black background, as they no longer include one on their own.

Users can now select from built-in or self-supplied artwork and photographs for both the Lock Screen and Home Screen, choosing the same image or two separate images as they prefer. Apple applies dimming, drop shadowing and anti-aliasing effects to enable its own icons and text to stand out against the backgrounds, but otherwise the imagery is left unchanged in scale, positioning, and vertical orientation from the way you set it up. The Dock has been redrawn with a reflective silver glass look that matches the iPad’s and Mac’s, and icons have been given small cosmetic tweaks that modestly enhance their apparent levels of detail. Notably, the 2008 iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2G get the updated Dock design and icons, but cannot display Home Screen background wallpaper, a disappointment given that hackers have for years been able to use Home Screen backgrounds on even original iPhone and iPod touch models.

Few apps have changed

A few apps have changed, as well. The main screen of the Voice Memos application, for instance, has received a quiet redraw that shrinks the size of the holes in its classical mesh microphone artwork. Most of these changes are very minor on the current models of iPhone and iPod touch, reflecting improvements designed primarily for the higher-resolution displays of the iPhone 4 and iPad, but the Home Screen background artwork is a welcome addition—we wouldn’t be surprised if owners of iPhone and iPod touch models without support for this feature were seriously disappointed by its absence.

What could have been the single most significant feature in iOS 4 turns out to be something far less critical on day one to the new operating system release. For years, Apple has resisted calls to allow the iPhone and iPod touch to run multiple third-party applications at once, claiming that poor battery life and sluggish performance would follow. And to Apple’s credit, these claims were both true and not trivial to address within the iPhone and iPod touch, devices that the company engineered specifically to use relatively small battery packs and limited but power-efficient processors. The eventual solution includes new iOS 4 software—both on Apple’s end and from third-party developers—as well as new hardware. Only the 2009 iPhone 3GS and iPod touch, plus their successors and presumably the iPad, are capable of running the multitasking solution Apple eventually came up with; it’s just missing from 2007 and 2008 iPhones and iPod touch devices, including the base 8GB iPod touch model sold throughout 2009 and 2010.

The latter four buttons all replace the former iPhone OS iPod controls, which appeared some time ago as a blue text and icon overlay in the center of the screen, letting you change tracks or play/pause status from wherever else you were in Apple’s applications. While the new buttons add little to what was there before, their bottom-of-screen location and appearance are both improvements on the prior overlay Apple used, if slightly more inconvenient to reach in the name of making multitasking more usable. Overall, Apple made the right compromise here.

One of the iPhone and iPod touch’s biggest omissions to date has been meaningful software support for their Bluetooth hardware: Apple failed to include drivers for wireless game controllers, keyboards, or even AVRCP remote button controls built into headphones, amongst other things. The company took a small step towards remedying this in iOS 4.0, carrying over the Bluetooth and wired keyboard support it introduced in iPhone OS 3.2 for the iPad—the Bluetooth part has been publicized by Apple, but the wired part has not. As a result, you can now type on the iPhone or iPod touch using external Bluetooth keyboards such as Apple’s Wireless Keyboard, and—on the iPod touch—Apple’s own iPad Keyboard Dock, which has just enough room to hold the slender iPod in its narrowly-tailored dock. This is clear confirmation that wired keyboards are possible on all iOS 4 devices, with primarily physical rather than electronic or software incompatibility standing in the way.

But it should be noted that at least as of this moment, Apple is preventing most wired keyboard accessories from working with the iPhone and iPod touch. The iPad Camera Connection Kit works just fine with the iPad to let USB keyboards and other devices communicate with the larger-screened device, but Apple has blocked both of the Kit’s accessories from working with the iPhone and iPod touch. Hopefully, Apple won’t block other companies from developing smaller, pocketable keyboard options that don’t depend upon Bluetooth to interface with its pocket devices.

New section of the VoiceOver menu within accessibility

iOS 4 also supports wireless Braille devices within a new section of the VoiceOver menu within accessibility, assisting visually disabled users. Until Apple adds support for AVRCP so that headphones and other Bluetooth remote controls can change iPod music tracks wirelessly, the company’s support for Bluetooth will continue to feel unimpressive. Further, the absence of support for monaural wireless headsets on the iPod touch is at this point similarly puzzling, given that the feature is included with the iPhone; this prevents permitted VoIP applications such as Skype from using single-ear wireless accessories for listening and speaking purposes. It’s time for Apple to open up Bluetooth on all of its devices.

Two iOS 4.0 features will have significant impacts on users down the line, but are essentially inactive as of the mid-June, 2010 release date of the new operating system. Game Center is a matchmaking service for online games, enabling iPhone and iPod touch users to request each others’ presence in supported multiplayer titles, and tracking “achievements” within those games. You set up an account, a username, and a list of friends you wish to track, then can follow their accomplishments and make formal device-to-device pushed requests to play games with them. With its own standalone icon on the iPhone and iPod touch Home Screen, Game Center operates independently from and in place of third-party matchmaking, leaderboard, and achievement software released over the past two years.

Feature built

iAd is a feature built by Apple to create additional revenues for itself and developers using in-app advertising that’s more compelling and powerful than what has been found in earlier iPhone and iPod touch applications. In short, iAd gives the developer a quick and easy way to insert banner-style advertisements hosted and served by Apple into their applications, with the developer receiving a cut of ad revenues based on impressions. Apple’s ads are effectively apps in and of themselves, running on iOS 4 devices without the need to exit the application a user finds them within: they can be started or stopped seamlessly without interrupting the app currently being used. iAd has been pitched as a tool to help app developers generate revenue without having to charge users higher prices; it remains to be seen how pervasive the ads will become, and whether they will tarnish the experience of using Apple’s devices, particularly given the bandwidth caps recently instituted by AT&T for new iPhone customers.

* A prominent top-of-screen icon that appears when using Location Services—either the GPS hardware in iPhones or the Wi-Fi-approximated GPS in iPod touches—to signal that multitasking processes such as location trackers can currently tell where you are;

* Replacement of the notorious “not made to work with iPhone” accessory incompatibility nag screen with a new, even less useful version, changing the Yes/No Airplane Mode option to a Dismiss button;

* Support for new first- and third-party iPhone 4-specific applications, including iMovie for iPhone, which are prevented from running on earlier iPhones based on hardware differences.

Despite all of iOS 4’s additions, there are a number of iPhone OS 3.2 features from the iPad that haven’t make it onto the iPhone or iPod touch—and it’s possible that they never will. They include:

* The omission of paned widescreen modes or additional cosmetic enhancements for old iPhone and iPod touch apps, even on the high-resolution iPhone 4;

* The incompatibility of full-screen third-party iPad “HD” applications with iPhone 4, based in part on control and in part on text and graphic scaling issues.

Conversely, iOS 4.0 doesn’t run on the iPad at all. As of today, Apple has only said that it will bring the updated operating system to the iPad this fall. It’s currently unknown as to what new features will make the cut to the iPad, and whether the release will bring Apple’s internally-developed iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad apps into greater sync with each other. Rumors have suggested that iOS 4.1 will be the name of the fall iPad update, and that the company will bring most of the iPad features to the new iPhone and iPod touch, then vice-versa.

Overall, Apple’s release of iOS 4.0 follows in its predecessor’s iterative footsteps, adding features and performance boosts—obvious and non-obvious ones—that collectively make the iPhone and iPod touch families more attractive than they were last year, albeit with greater benefits for iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 3G models than 2008 iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2G versions. To the extent that this operating system update is free for every device that supports it, there’s little room to criticize its value, beyond to state that many of the features would have done a lot of good two years ago, when concerns were first being raised as to their absence. That Apple is just getting around now to adding folders and a unified inbox detracts from its ability to push decidedly ahead of competitors such as Google’s Android and Palm’s WebOS, leaving iOS behind the curve on matching its rivals’ prior year features such as Lock Screen widgets and contacts with social media hooks. That said, Apple’s implementations all reflect the sort of measured, smart approaches to problems that result from forethought and good judgment rather than a rush to implement half-baked and ultimately disappointing solutions. It’s some consolation that even if an iOS feature is very late, it’s likely to be done right.

Our praise for the overall quality of what’s in iOS 4 is tempered only by an increasing sense that Apple’s development strategy has become somewhat muddled by the release of so many different iOS devices with different screen resolutions and hardware capabilities, resulting in an unprecedented level of user confusion as to which devices are capable of running certain software. In some cases, the “capabilities” seem artificially imposed, either for marketing reasons or to compel hardware upgrades—for example, 2007-2008 iPhones and iPod touches are surely capable of displaying Home Screen artwork, and could have in iPhone OS 1.0—while in other cases, they’re based on legitimate differences in CPU power or integrated RAM, which Apple doesn’t communicate to customers at the time of purchase. The company has limited some of these issues by preserving a fairly consistent user interface across devices and treating iPhone/iPod touch applications as baby “run them in a window” versions of iPad programs, but there are still major questions as to how the iPad will handle multitasking and other iOS 4 features, as well as how developers will deal with creating apps for all of the different devices, particularly when they can’t all run the same version of iOS at the same time. For now, these issues will remain unresolved; it’s expected that Apple will address them in the very near future with the sort of thoughtfulness that went into the rest of iOS 4.