Apple's iOS 4 Explored
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 22, 2010 3:27 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- iOS 4
- Gadgets
- Mobile
iBooks
I love my Kindle, but I hardly ever carry it around with me when I’m traveling on business. But I’ve always got my phone. The fact of the matter is that devices like the Kindle 2 or Nook were designed for a different demographic than the iPad or even the iPhone. They were designed for those who wanted more of a book reading experience. If you don’t mind reading on a LCD screen, especially a good one (ahem, iPhone 4), then Apple has your answer.
I like reading books through the iBooks app but the selection is just no where near as broad as what Amazon’s Kindle store has to offer. There’s unfortunately no way to buy books through the Kindle app for the iPad/iPhone, you need to use Safari for that. If Apple can compete with Amazon’s Kindle Store in terms of selection, the iBooks app is getting good enough to be a real competitor to the Kindle.
You can bookmark pages as well as keep bookmarks synced to your iTunes Store account. The iBooks app also doubles as a PDF reader, although flipping pages in image intensive PDFs can be laggy at times (the app itself isn’t particularly snappy to begin with).
PDFs sync through iTunes just like anything else. Simply drag the PDF over to your library in iTunes and it’ll get added to the Books subsection. You can search through PDFs and use the scrubber at the bottom to quickly get to a particular page.
Apple even provides you with a brightness adjustment widget in the iBooks app in case your optimal phone brightness setting differs from your optimal reading brightness setting.
Safari
An updated version of Safari ships with iOS 4 but the updates are fairly minor. Bing is now a search option although Google is still the default (for now).
The search box also autocompletes with suggestions.
The new Safari did crash a couple of times for us during the creation of this article but it’s too early to tell if it’s significantly less stable.
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iamafish - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 - link
Multitasking means running many tasks at once, not saving them and coming back to them later... The switching is fairly poor as well, nothing as seamless as Palm, personally I like how Nokia have done it on the N900/Maemo, tap the top corner and get a grid of previews, tap the preview to switch, 2 clicks and switched - on a properly multitasking OS.Looks to me like Apple are in danger of repeating past mistakes and getting complacent, Android is improving very rapidly, and if MeeGo can build on Maemo then it's going to be good, HPs money behind WebOS can't be forgotten and Symbian is a long way from dead and has a very mature base to build on.
medi01 - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 - link
Symbian simply "long way from dead"? Last time I checked, it had 40% of the market.But it was worldwide, not US, mind you.
solipsism - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 - link
Looks to me like you didn't read carefully. The multitasking APIs offer true multitasking, if the developer chooses, at a fraction of the cost from running each app fully in the background. The saved state is an option, but it's not the only option as detailed in this article and elsewhere.If I am running 5 apps, for example, that need to get my location constantly or periodically I don't need those 5 separate apps all running in the background pulling cellular and GPS data as well as everything else they need. I only need the single geolocation API to be tied to those apps and be running. One process to rule them all. How can you not see that as a benefit?
sigmatau - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 - link
And what is the benefit of having Phone, Settings, Clock, etc taking up memory in the "multitask" bar? Now my phone's memory is constantly full with apps that surely don't need to be multitasked and everytime I need to load an app, another has to be unloaded first since I only have 5mb of memory free.Apple really should allow the user to chose what apps to multitask when they want them to multitask. Simply holding down the home key instead of clicking it once would do it. But we are talking about Apple and they apparently know best....
solipsism - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 - link
Ugh... That isn't a "multitask bar" it's a "fast app switcher bar".The apps in there aren't necessarily taking up any RAM, they are just the last apps you have used recently, in order. If you restart your iPhone and then double0tap the Home button they will all show up in the list.
The reason for this is so you don't keep losing track of the complexity of folders. You can always easily go back to the most recent apps you have used regardless of where you are in the system or what app you are using.
sigmatau - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 - link
See my post above. They do take memory. Not sure where you getting that they aren't taking memory. Basicaly after using the phone for an hour or so, anyone will have only 5mb of free RAM. I usualy have around 100mb free before OS4.Also the "fast app switcher bar" is not fast at all when you get to scroll 4 icons at a time to get to the app you want. And when the phone has to ALWAYS dump one app from memory to load a new one, this is NOT faster but slower. Not only that, but this screws with Safari and multiple tabs.
By Apple not giving us a choice on what to multitask, they tried to make the experience easy for every, they screwed many of the functions of the phone. You do not need Phone, Clock, Settings, etc. to go the that bar. It makes no sense.
Affectionate-Bed-980 - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 - link
Proper push notifications make it UNNECESSARY for full blown multitasking.As an Android user I Wish I had push notifications so I can leave my IM app on without fear of it KILLING my battery.
Apple has already addressed the cases where you DO need an app to be running:
1) Music/Voice
2) GPS
3) Downloads
4) Go to completion
The others can be accomplished by saved states/push notifications/completion. The fact is you can't interact with simultaneous apps anyway... on any OS. WebOS just has that flick thing to look "cool" but do you really need to run 8 apps at a time? Unless you can cascade your windows and use it well on a 3.5" screen it's overrated.
I am a Symbian S60 user who has experienced full multitasking since the beginning of time. I moved down to Android which is a downgrade in that sense, and the iPhone could be a bigger downgrade. However, I actually DO want push notifications and many of the battery saving features of the iPhone.
You can complain about how this is a walled garden and how in principle Apple is evil for restricting you, but they actually got things right this time. For the end user it makes NO DIFFERENCE if you have full blown multitasking or not. Maybe you like how most Android devices barely get by 1 day of charge...
solipsism - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
So you're going on record claiming that when if you restart your iPhone, iOS will automatically load every single app in the Fast App Switching bar into RAM upon restarting. Good luck with that one! :\SunSamurai - Friday, June 25, 2010 - link
This is a PHONE. Do you WANT the battery to last 30 min per charge? All the modern phones are doing it similer to this. Yes even droid. They get very minimal to NO CPU power in the background.This is a GOOD thing people. And to you people bitching about ads, get OVER IT. You want free apps on your droid/iphone/etc? You will get ads.
eloquentloser - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 - link
"I agree that the smartphone is getting more and more complicated. Good for us teck geeks :)."Can someone explain this new folders invention to me - it sounds terribly counter-intuitive. ;-)