So, you missed the iPhone 4.0 Developer’s preview? Here’s a quick and dirty guide to what were introduced. Warning: Geek fest ahead… (all pics below credit to engadget.com, our favorite site for all Apple news….)
Watch the keynote here > http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1004fk8d5gt/event/
Highlights
• 450,000 iPads sold!
• iPhone Mobile Browser is at 64%, Compared to 19% for Android and mere 9% for Blackberry
• #1 new feature: MULTITASKING! “We weren’t the first to this party, but we’re going to be the best. Like cut and paste — it’s better than any other implementation. It’s really easy to implement it in a way that really drains battery life. And, it’s really easy to implement it in a way that reduces the performance of the foreground app and makes your phone feel sluggish.”
• #2 feature: It’s quite cute the way the describe ‘em as tent-poles… is FOLDERS! A better way to organize all those apps, and no more flicking through tons of home screen pages!
• Tent-pole #3: ENHANCED MAIL! Finally, a unified inbox and combines ALL your emails in one box. Previously, you’ll have to select individual email accounts, but now all your mail will appear in one place! Plus they added in the ability to manage emails by thread, much like Gmail. I’m loving this already. 
• Tent-pole #4: iBooks for iPhone. Need we say more?
• Tent-pole #5 is meant for the boring Enterprise stuff, designed to push the iPhone to as many business as possible. For those who are interested: Better data protection, mobile device management, wireless app distribution to the whole company, multiple Exchange accounts, Exchange Server 2010 support and SSL VPN support.
• Tent-pole #6: GAMES. Now we’re talking… “We wanted to make this even better — we’ve added a social gaming network. We do automatic matchmaking, we’ll find others with a similar ability and match them against you. You can see how you’re progressing in a game with achievements.” OMG.
• Tent-pole #7: iAd – “What some of them are starting to do is put mobile ads in their apps… and most of this advertising sucks. We want to help developers make money with ads so they can keep their free ads free.” OK……
iAd – Mobile Ads with Emotion < That’s quite a cool tagline. Ha ha.
“On a mobile device, search is not where it’s at, not like on the desktop. They’re spending all their time on these apps — they’re using apps to get to data on the internet, not generalized search.”
I guess this meant for the developers and to give them a viable business model to keep software prices low, or FREE. The iPhone is now a huge media platform.
Sidenote: All HTML5.
Interesting, the amount of interactivity you can build and deliver via iAd is impressive. I wonder if that will translate to super cool ads. That’ll be a nice change.
You can even add a game to the ad! Haha, this would be cool.
It even has serious integration with the phone itself. Steve demoed an ad which responds to the iPhones shakes. There’s even in-ad purchase. Looks like the iAd is turning out to be less than an ad but more like a mini-app inside an app…
AND…. it’s all coming to you later this year to the iPhone 3G (partial support and no multitasking), iPhone 3GS (full support), iPod touch (3rd gen) and the iPad (phew!)
That’s it folks!
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