Today, at Infinite Loop 4, Cupertino (CA), the nuts and bolts of the new iPhone OS 4 have been revealed. Oh my, things are gonna change!

This and below images courtesy of GDGT

This morning starting at 10:00 Apple hosted the iPhone OS 4.0 event, revealing the new and improved OS that will power the current and next generations of iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

Warm up

The event started with some numbers, showing the market impact of the iPhone and iPod Touch devices  and app deployment system. The iPad is part of the summary too, with its 450 thousands units sold, 600 thousands iBooks sold and 3.5 million applications downloaded.

Ladies and Gentlemen: iPhone OS 4.0

The new iPhone OS 4 brings more than 1500 new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for developers, giving them access to calendar, photo library, still and video camera, SMS, accelerometer, as well as new user possibilities, like digital zoom, playlists, tap to focus video, home screen wallpaper, file and delete mail search results, and Bluetooth keyboards.

The new OS will be built on what Steve Jobs has called “Tent pole” features, which sustain the new OS experience.

Apple’s CEO explained and demoed in some details the following tent poles:

• multitasking, defined by Steve himself as the biggest one;
• folders, now on the iDevices;
• iBooks, the app introduced with the iPad;
• GameKit, for the Hard Core gamers;
• iAd, the Apple mobile advertisement platform.

Multitasking

Steve has pointed out that is somehow trivial to implement multitasking, if you don’t care about battery life, but the iPhone OS 4.0 features a solution which does not drain the battery life and does not affect the performance of the foreground running application.

For the user it will as simple as double clicking the home button: this will make a window raise to show and switch among running apps. Steve Jobs demoed this with the Mail app and the browser.

For the developers things will be a little different, and Scott Forstall, SVP of iPhone Software, has explained the undercover solution.

After studying tens of thousands of apps in the App Store, Apple found the services needed by those apps in order to run in the background. These services have been turned into APIs to the developers,which will evoke them to have multitasking while preventing battery drain.

The new services are:

• background audio;
• Voice over IP (VoIP);
• background location;
• push notifications;
• local notifications;
• task completion;
• fast app switching.

Some of the above, like background audio and VoIP services are self explanatory, and they will used by applications like media players, Pandora (demoed during the event) and Skype (demoed during the event) to run together with other apps.

Background location will be used either for turn by turn navigation software like TomTom. or  by social networking services like Loopt. To prevent abuse of the background location service, iPhone OS 4.0 will show an icon in the status bar if an app is using your location info and you will allow enabling and disabling it on per application.

Push notifications are the ones iPhone users are used to. The new iPhone OS features local notifications, which are like push notifications except that they are made by the phone (there is no server pushing them to the phone). These local notifications are one of the most awaited for feature, and it s to be expected Apple to implement them like this.

The task completion service can be used by app like Flickr, where you need to wait a certain amount of time to finalize a task (e.g. uploading a photo).

The last service is fast app switching, which is obtained by storing the state of an app that doesn’t need anymore the OS resources. Having been on Palm OS for the last 4-5 years, this reminds me very much of the way I think Palm OS is (was…) managing apps. I wonder if Palm OS has some intellectual property on this…

Folders

The second tent pole gives a warm welcome to folders to the iPhone OS: with a simple drag and drop of one app to the other a folder will be created. In this way you will be able to create a folder called “Games” to organize your crowded list of apps. In this way you will be able to have 2160 apps in your device (seems 12 apps per folder).

The good thing is that folders can be placed in the dock too.

iBooks

The new iBooks is now part of the new iPhone OS, and iBooks will be available on both iPhone and iPod Touch.The cool thing is that pages and bookmarks will be automatically synced wirelessly.

Game Center

Many gamer will be glad to now that one of the tent pole is the Game Center, which will be featuring a social gaming network: the system will make an automatic matchmakingto find a good opponent with similar skills.

This will bite Xbox Live and alike.

iAd

The iAd tent pole is probably one of the biggest news for OS 4.0. The intent is to allow developers to release free apps, introducing at an OS level a system of mobile advertising, so that developers can make money even releasing free software.

Well it’s hard to think this is made only to help the poor developers, and for sure Apple will have a revenue thanks to this. The ads income will give a 60% to the developer, and the remaining to Apple, which will offer the advertisements storing and distributing platform.

The ads are described as interactive and emotion causing by Jobs. They are realized as an HTML5 web page that is part of the app.

Jobs said during its speech that:

The average user spends over 30 minutes using apps on their phone. If we said we wanted to put an ad up every 3 minutes, that’d be 10 ads per device per day — about the same as a TV show. We’re going to soon have 100m devices. That’s a billion ad opportunities per day!

This is really welcome if it can stimulate developers ideas, but it is obviously also Apple’s opportunity. However, at one add every three minutes I would prefer to pay the full app if I like it. This could be right for trials.

In my opinion this is a “one shot two kills” attempt:

• deploying an ad platform on a completely different territory, the mobile devices emerging field, thus anticipating the big Web ad company, namely Google;
• using HTML5, thus ruling out Adobe’s Flash from what Apple feels to be the field to invest in.

Last thought: did they add multitasking ONLY to place these iAd thing?

Mail

Mail will have a unified inbox and also threaded messages. Then you will be able to have more than one Exchange account, allowing for fast inbox switching.
It seems apps will get more complete and more complex at the same time: you will get more features at the expense of intuitiveness and ease of use.

Enterprise

The last (not the least) tent pole was about enterprise, which will welcome some new APIs to allow developers to encrypt all the data INSIDE their app. Companies will be able to wirelessly distribute applications through their own servers. Support for SSL VPN is another new feature.

In the end

The new OS will be available for last generation iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as iPad, with full functionality. Previous generations will not be able to run it fully, but could qualify to the upgrade.

Most of the news were long awaited, and many iPhone OS users will be happy with iPhone OS 4.0.

I will wait to see where the new OS will allow the Apple devices to go, and maybe I will switch to one them.

Via: GDGT