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iOS 4 brings the usual bang from Apple for mobile

iOS 4 brings the usual bang from Apple for mobile

After spending a couple of weeks with the latest edition of Apple’s mobile OS, I have one clear reaction: the line between an iPhone and an iPad is becoming more of a perceptual thing.

In February, just a couple of weeks after the iPad was unveiled, I jokingly referred to my iPhone 3GS as an “iPad Nano.” iOS 4 — available for immediate download via the “Update” button in iTunes — turns my bad joke into a credible reality.

iOS 4 (Apple’s new name for the OS that powers all of their touch-based devices) features that I once thought of as “signature” software differences between the iPhone and the iPad:

Support for hardware keyboards. The iPhone can now pair with any Bluetooth keyboard. Even the iPad Keyboard Dock worked when I wriggled my iPhone 3GS into the slot, though that’s certainly an “accidental” feature.

All of the keyboard’s navigation shortcuts are supported. I found it a little clumsy to juggle keyboard typing with tapping buttons on the iPhone’s small screen, but even a foldable travel keyboard is a serious “Win” for any phone. It allows you to blast through piles of emails and even write modest reports without carrying your notebook around. For many road warriors who don’t want to shell out for a netbook or an iPad in addition to the $200-$300 phone that they were going to buy anyway, that’s a hugely-valuable feature.

File associations. Someone sends you a Word file as an email attachment, or you’ve got a spreadsheet in your cloud storage folder and are viewing it in your iPhone’s Dropbox app. Now you want to actually edit it. Tap the file’s icon. iOS presents you with a list of other apps that can handle this file type, and then the OS launches that program and hands off the file.

It’s one of the iPad’s stronger features and now that same mechanism is available to iPhone apps … including the ability to quickly sync mobile apps with desktop documents via iTunes. It’s not as powerful as having a straightforward open file system, but it still nudges the iPhone closer into that “portable computer” ring.

iBooks. I’d been developing a dedicated book reader app for the purpose of self-publishing some of my stuff. The Kindle iPhone app didn’t convince me to abandon the project … neither did readers from Stanza, Barnes & Noble, or any of the others in that category.

But iBooks is such a lovely app, and presents ebook content so well, that I threw in the towel. Now iBooks is available as a free downloadable app for any iPhone running iOS 4. All of the iPad’s features are included, including notes, bookmarking, and access to the iBookstore. You can re-download all of your purchased content to the phone. As with the Kindle app, if you’ve been reading the same iBook on multiple devices, the iBooks app will sync all of those copies so that you never lose your place or your notes.

I do wish I could disable the the fancy page-curl animation. On an iPhone 3GS, at least, there’s a slight, but annoying, additional pause as the app does a whole lot of math.

Incidentally, both the iPhone and iPad editions of iBooks now support PDF files. And if the Mail app sees a PDF as a file attachment, it can send the file directly into the iBooks library for permanent storage. Now, moving documents and reference info onto your iPhone for permanent offline storage couldn’t be simpler. Print your five-page travel itinerary to a PDF and then email it to yourself. Done.

Yes, of course: there are fundamental differences between an iPhone and an iPad that go far beyond simple screen size. But it seems clear that when Apple put the iPhone and iPad OS’ names under the same trademark, it was more than a simple bit of housekeeping: it’s a signal that these two devices have far more in common than just the spiffy logo on the back.

And the iPhone 4 can be thought of as a literal sister to the iPad. It uses the exact same processor, and its ultra-high-definition display is much closer to the pixel real-estate of the iPad than the previous generations of iPhones.

Overall, iOS 4 and the iPhone 4 seem like either a shrewd or an accidental move on Apple’s part. Not everybody wants an iPad, or can defend the decision to spend $500 for one. Nearly everybody these days can spend $200 on a smartphone. With iOS 4, Apple can lure these people into the barn with, yes, an iPad Nano, and the lure of owning its big brother at some future date.

Multitas(qu)ing.

And that’s how you start a column about iOS 4 if you’re a beard-stroking tech columnist. Normal humans would probably have lost no time talking about Apple’s intended “here … now shut up and sit down, you ungrateful little bastards” feature: Multitasking.

Though I suppose that it should be spelled “Multitasquing” … and for the same reason why supermarket shelves are packed with products that use “Cheez-” and “Choko-” as prefixes. It’s very, very much like the sort of multitasking you get on your desktop … but it’s not so close that you can throw that word around without adding quiet little cough and an explanation.

“No multitasking” has historically been seen as a signature limitation of the iPhone. Every Android commercial seems to punch the phrase “and it runs multiple apps simultaneously” with extra echo and reverb. Apple has consistently claimed that they were waiting to implement that feature in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the stability, security, or battery life of the device.

In my experience with Android devices, I haven’t really suffered much due to multitasking.

It’s annoying that multitasking causes my Nexus One’s battery life to be so unpredictable, but it’s usually easy to figure out which of these background apps had been needlessly keeping the WiFi or GPS radio active. I then banish it forever to the land of ghosts and winds and switch to another app that’s better-behaved. And my Android phones, while less stable than my iPhones, don’t crash or freeze frequently enough to be worth trading off such a useful feature as running third-party apps in the background.

Everyone knew that multitasking features would come to the iPhone eventually. But Apple has that same annoying habit that your parents did when you were 16. You wanted a car. You asked them for a car. They thought about it and ultimately concluded that you really didn’t want a car, specifically, as much as the ability to go wherever you wanted after school instead of being stuck in the house. So they bought you an unlimited bus pass instead.

Some of us (grudgingly) admitted that actually, yes, they were right … and that it was a relief to not have to keep shelling out for gas, maintenance, and insurance.

Others among us harbored the sort of deep-seated resentment that could only escape in the form of a spectacularly ill-advised Spring Break tattoo.

Yes, with iOS’s multitasking features, Apple has given iPhone users a bus pass. iOS 4 doesn’t allow third-party apps unrestricted access to background processing. Instead, Apple has identified the seven kinds of things that developers and users want their apps to do in the background, and they’ve provided APIs for each that can implement those features in a polite and orderly fashion.

Well, think about it. Do you really want your game to keep running in the background while you go off and check your mail? Or do you just want to switch between those two apps instantly, and for the game to be exactly where you left it when you come back a few minutes or even a few days later?

Do you really want your streaming-music app to keep running? Or do you just want Pandora to keep streaming in the background while your turn-by-turn navigation app keeps barking out directions?

Do you really want your photo uploader app to keep running? Or do you just want the freedom to move on to another app and another task during the 11 minutes it’ll take that app to finish uploading 50 photos to Flickr?

Et cetera. So maybe this bus pass really is a perfectly adequate solution.

iPhone OS 3.0 apps don’t get any multitasking features “for free,” though. If a third-party app hasn’t specifically been written to take advantage of iOS 4, it’ll simply quit when you move to another app, just as it did in the previous editions of the OS.

But there are are already a few studly apps in the App Store. The scheme seems to work well. Double-tapping the iPhone’s mechanical “home” button causes the iPhone’s screen to slide up and reveals a ribbon of running apps. The most recently-used ones are front-and-center. Tap an icon and the screen “carousels” to that app’s display. The switch is nigh-instantaneous.

There’s a curious addition here: swipe to the left and you’ll reveal what can only be described as a “widget dock.” Here you’ll find a big button for locking the screen orientation (just like the one on the iPad) as well as a deck of audio-control buttons and the icon of whatever app is currently making with the music. Will this area be populated with more gadgets in the coming year? Hmm.

I like this system. With such a lack of multitasking-aware third-party apps available for testing, it’s hard to tell how well this scheme works, or to resoundingly determine if Buss Pass Multitasquing — damn, man, I really ought to trademark that one — really does work just as good as the real thing. From what I’ve seen over the past five days that iOS 4 apps have been available, it’s at least as good as the fake-but-close-to-the-real-thing that’s found on Android.

For now, I like it even as a basic mechanism for switching between apps. The Springboard application launcher has been a thick and confusing forest of icons ever since the App Store opened. Without any effort, the new switching dock always contains the apps that you launch and use most frequently. Nice.

As-is, I only have two complaints. First, since I like this switcher so much, I’m tapping that mechanical Home button a lot more than I used to; that button will only get more of a workout as I shift from a “one app at a time” mentality to a mindset where I keep using several apps at once. I wonder if the iPhone 3GS button is mechanically up to that kind of abuse. I hope that Apple kept this in mind when designing the iPhone 4.

And secondly, there’s no shortage of useful multitasking functions that aren’t supported by Apple’s Magnificent Seven APIs. RSS reading, for example. I want my RSS reader to regularly and invisibly download new articles the same way that my Mail app is always downloading new messages. I’m even willing to trade off some battery life to make it happen. But nope … that’s a non-starter.

Folders

The second “name above the title on the poster” feature of iOS 4 is the concept of Folders.

It’s an organizational feature for the iPhone’s Springboard app launcher that helps you tame your endless tapestry of installed application icons.

Hold down the “Home” key to start your icons jiggling, just as with previous editions of the OS. In iOS 4, dragging one app icon on top of another creates a “folder” — it’s metaphorical, not an actual directory on the phone’s file system — that contains both icons. You can drag in additional apps, filling the folder to the brim at 12. iOS automatically creates a folder icon that contains micro-thumbnails of the first 9 apps therein, and assigns a default name based on the OS’ best-guess as to the “genre” of the first two apps. You can edit the name later. In practice, you tap the folder icon and the screen “splits” to show you what’s inside. Tap an icon to launch the app and close the folder.

It’s a handy tweak, and once I get a little free time I’m quite certain that my iPhone will contain exactly one top screen of free-floating icons with all of my other apps in Folders. I do wish Apple had given us a slightly more powerful solution, though. Folders are handy. An alternate “text” view (in which I don’t have to guess at the full name of an app) would have been even better.

Potpourri

And the hits keep on coming, with dozens of minor tweaks. I can’t be absolutely certain — I only have one iPhone 3GS in inventory and couldn’t do an iPhone OS 3/iOS 4 side-by-side comparison — but iOS 4 “feels” faster. The Camera app, for instance, now launches quickly enough that you actually almost kind of have a halfway decent shot at getting a picture before the Moment passes, if you’re lucky.

There are new privacy and security enhancements. iOS 4 includes more than 60 patches for previous vulnerabilities (50 of which were associated with the browser). The passcode lock is also more deeply embedded into the OS, making it more effective.

And you can now selectively enable and disable individual apps’ ability to determine your location via an enhanced Location Services prefs box. Another tipoff that Big Brother might be watching: a new icon in the status bar that tells you that the GPS radio is active.

Many of the built-in apps have received incremental tweaks. iOS 4 Mail now delivers a unified Inbox that collects all of your mail from all of your accounts, and it also supports threading. A bulleted number next to a Mail item indicates how many replies are in the thread and a tap brings the whole conversation into a single scrolling list. It’s a nice feature but I wish I had the option of disabling it. If a new message is part of a thread, I now have to tap twice before I’ve drilled down into the actual message text.

The Camera app has a (cherished by some, deemed useless by many) digital zoom feature.

The Photos app now recognizes faces and places, which is a boon for organization. If you have a thousand iPhone pix in your library, it’s easy to narrow it down to just the ones you took at your Aunt Estelle’s house, for example. The music player now supports the editing and creation of on-device custom playlists. And now there’s a system-wide spell check feature that works across all apps.

Complaints

It’s too bad that this release “orphans” many previous iPhones. Only the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 receive the full boatload of features; the iPhone 3 and older iPod Touches don’t support multitasking, and first-generation phones and iPod Touches are totally incompatible. But Time Marches On.

No, my real complaints are mostly philosophical:

iOS is showing early signs of clutter and lack of elegance. There’s nothing wrong with these Folder icon designs. But when you drop an app into a folder its icon shrinks so small that it passes through “mini-icon” and “micro-icon” status and is winds up so tiny that it’s in danger of being attacked by white blood cells. It might look fine on the ultra-high-def display of an iPhone 4, but on an iPhone 3GS they’re just flecks of dust.

I was a little more surprised by how cluttered the iPhone’s status bar has become. With new status icons for navigation and screen orientation, the thing’s becoming (dare I say it) Android-esque.

Clumsy design is like a creeping fungus. It doesn’t become a real problem until the problem becomes too big to easily solve. I think it’s time for a thorough housecleaning.

Many of the iOS’ built-in apps are starting to look long in the tooth. It’s OK that the Weather and Stocks and Calculator apps have barely been touched since iPhone OS 1.0; maybe Apple should let third-party apps handle those tasks.

But I’m impatient for the staples of the iOS experience to get some TLC. The iPhone quickly becomes the documentarian of your personal life; the Photos app needs better tools for sorting, tagging, and retrieving images when you can sense that the conversation around the table can be manipulated into a “let me tell you about my grandchildren” moment.

The iPod app is looking frumpy and under-featured. Thanks for letting us create new playlists. How about throwing in a good podcatcher? How about making some of the basic control buttons larger and easier to hit when you’re on the go?

Many of iOS 4’s “new” features are old hat on other phones. Custom screen wallpaper! Bluetooth keyboards! A built-in way to move random documents on and off the device! Multitasking! They’re wonderful! And they’re also features you could get in most phones since well before the first iPhone hit the market.

Which is par for the course for Apple products. Historically, they’d rather say “we did this feature exactly right” than “we did this feature before anybody else.” That’s a very correct and user-focused attitude, best illustrated by the way the iPhone handles cut-and-paste. It just plain works, and it works the exact same way in every iPhone app that wasn’t written by idiots. When I cut-and-paste in Android, there’s always that Christmas Morning sort of excitement, as I wait to see exactly how, or if, it’s going to work in this particular instance.

Okay, but the key here is that Apple needs to be able to say “It was worth the wait.” Can they say that about the majority of these new features?

Hmm.

A Great Update At The Right Price

One advantage that Apple consistently delivers: for the most part, it’s One Nation, Under Jobs, With Features and Functions For All. Before long, Google will release Version 2.2 of the Android OS and the frustrating Update Dance begins. Google releases the master update, but then it’s up to the makers of every handset manufacturer to release a build that works on that specific device. And then it’s often up to the individual carriers to make that update available to its users. Or … not.

With an iPhone, it’s a free update and it’s available right now via iTunes. Even if it delivered nothing but a pile of security patches, it’d be worth it.

And it’s much, much more than just a pile of security patches. It really does puts an iPad Nano in your hands for the cost of a few hours of automated backup-and-install. Even in the ‘90s economy, that’s a bargain.

[Thanks: http://www.suntimes.com]

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