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

Don’t you just love wading through someone’s rambling voicemail greeting in order to leave a message? Someday I need to press 5 (for more options) to find out what those are. Why I can’t press that first…; but I digress. Now, you can train others to do it a different way by setting a better example. Enter YouMail—trust me; callers will love it and so will you.

The whole idea is that you get to pick the greetings your callers get to hear AND how long the messages are. You can pick generic ones, pre-recorded ones, or ones you record, and you can assign one or many contacts to the same message, or individual recordings for each special contact using their name (makes ‘em grin big-time).  You can even set up messages for blocked calls, i.e. “We don’t accept calls from blocked numbers!”, or something of that nature.

Set up takes a little time, but full instructions are available on their site in the form of FAQ and video tutorials including:  how to import your contacts, which greetings to assign to which contacts, or whether to simply use the default greeting YouMail provides for everyone. It all happens from your desktop by logging into your account page on the YouMail site. You need a microphone, but you can also change a greeting for a caller from your phone when you check your messages. The basic service is FREE, but the paid versions allow for voice-to-text, transcription to email, and more. With either service you are given a number to call from your phone (almost ANY phone), which will then switch your carrier’s voicemail to YouMail and you’re set.

Sign up HERE and give it a try.

Features Available:

• Visual Voicemail
• Voice-to-Text
• Personal Greetings
• Voicemail Sharing
• Unwanted caller blocking
• Online community
• Voicemail by Email

Basic service: FREE

Paid version: Depends on plan and services you choose.

This is for those of you still reeling over the price you just paid for that wonderful piece of technology, namely iPad.  This is especially true when you can get tablet netbooks with twice the power and 10 times the storage, not to mention all the inputs that the iPad lacks for a couple hundred less, that is, if you shop around.

Now I understand that the iPad is a completely different class of device and I am sure to catch a lot of flack if I compare it to a tablet netbook.  So I won’t, because I understand that it is different, however, that doesn’t mean I agree with the Flash issue.

Gadget.com has a list of the technology inside the iPad and what each piece costs.

• Touchscreen – $95
• Apple A4 CPU – $26.80
• 16GB flash storage – $29.50
• Aluminum rear panel – $26.80
• Broadcom Bluetooth, WiFi chip – $8.05
• TI controller chip – $1.80
• Ciruss Logic audio chip – $1.2

Replace the flash storage with a $59 32GB chip or a 64GB chip at $118 and you have an idea how much other models cost.

Now, if you use the numbers from forums.macrumors.com and really lowball the price of the device (I used $600)  you come to the profit on devices of more than $150 million. That’s a lot of extra cash to put in the development, labor and software.  As for advertising……it’s Apple.  Seriously.

So now that all of that is paid for within the first week of the device release, Apple can reel in the MEGA profits from here on out.

I’m not saying that there should be an Apple boycott or anything like that.  I’m just taking a real look, with some very crude math, to show what Apple (and many other companies I suspect) are doing nowadays.

Is this information a factor in your purchases?

Will it make you research a little harder before your next purchase?

Give us your thoughts.

Today’s JAMM Store Deal of the Day is Lyma Pairs for Windows Mobile.  You can register Lyma Pairs for half the regular price today, so be sure to check it out!

Simply tap the card to turn them trying to match the pairs. If you turn two cards and they do not make a match then you try another set. The object of the game is to turn all cards within the least moves.

Features:

• High Scores will be automatically added to the scoreboard
• Includes 7 different card Themes
• Default
• Christmas
• Easter
• Tech
• Smilies
• Food
• Colors
• Colors automatically match the Theme Background (Windows Mobile 5 and Higher)

Minimum Requirements:

• Pocket PC 2003 or above
• Supports Portrait, Landscape and Square Devices!

Display Dimensions
240×240, 240×320, 320×240, 320×320, 480×480, 480×640, 480×800, 640×480
Operating System
Pocket PC 2003, Pocket PC 2003 SE, WM5, WM6, WM6.1, WM6.5

The crew at Astraware has just released a major update to one of their classics, Zuma.  A hybrid action/puzzle game for Windows Mobile devices, the new version includes support for new devices, improved graphics that support VGA, VQVGA and WVGA devices and support for multiple languages.

You can expect to see a full review of the update in the very near future, as I learn to control the stone frog idol while exploring the various temples.  See the full details below:

1.50 Apr 6, 2010
•    Complete re-write to add support for new devices!
•    New enhanced graphics
•    Added support for new resolutions (VGA, WQVGA and WVGA and square screens)
•    Added multilingual support: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian Portuguese!
Please note! This is a completely new version of Zuma, totally rebuilt for all phones running Windows Mobile 5 and later. It adds compatibility for newer phones and has a new play mode, but if you already have Zuma, you’ll need to completely uninstall the previous version and you will lose your saved games. If you don’t want to lose your progress, please do not install this new update.