5 Predictions About iPhone OS 4 Features

April 7th, 2010 by Saptarshi Roy Chaudhury 1 comment »

Back in 2009 when iPhone OS 3.0 was released the most anticipated feature was multitasking. After a year, now that Apple has decided to preview iPhone OS 4 this Thursday, multitasking still remains as the feature with the highest demand. Of course there are other expectations from users and Apple also promises to throw in a bunch of other changes most of which are tweaks like User Expo, which is the Home Screen for iPhone.

Let’s try to predict some of the features for iPhone OS 4 and we can come back to check once we have the final words from Apple.

Multitasking: Of course, this is the most expected feature this time. Well, it was rumored last year that iPhone may get Multitasking with the release of iPhone OS 3.0 but when they previewed it, they showed off Push Notification and positioned it as an alternative to Multitasking. Though, this Push Notification services were first demonstrated with the release of iPhone OS 2.0 however got delayed by a year and finally released in iPhone OS 3.0. Today, when all the iPhone competitors have multitasking as their major feature it becomes all the more essential for iPhone to have multitasking. Let’s hope Apple finally gives us multitasking with OS 4.0 and just not come up with another weak alternative.

Better Notifications: iPhone OS 3.0 pushes you the notification right away, whether its an IM you received or to join a multi-player game online. But this notification system is really at its initial stage of development. These notifications come to the user’s iPhone even when the App is not running in background (as iPhone doesn’t allow yet). So, the parts of the notification system includes badges count, sound & window popup alert. If you’re working on any App on your iPhone and you received an Alert Window notification, you can respond to right there. If at all you quit that notification window you need to go to that app and run it & if you forget to do so then you miss it completely. Given the situation it would be extremely helpful for users if Apple improves this notification system, so that the users can view all the unanswered notifications on a separate screen or something similar. Well, let’s see what iPhone OS 4 has to give us on this.

Better Mail App: The current Mail App need each accounts to be configured separately. All accounts have their inbox separate from other accounts. So, the whole navigation flow to check your inbox is to tap, tap & tap to go from one inbox to other. It’s been expected that there will be a common inbox for all the mails account.

Better Syncing: Apple may introduce a whole new way for syncing Mails, Contacts, Calendar and Multimedia content. Today, iPhone does sync perfectly but there are some itches when it comes to third party syncing options. Like, Google Sync.

Some tweaks with Home Screen: If at all Apple gets multitasking to iPhone via iPhone OS 4.0, and then we should see some little tweaks with the Home Screen. There can be a better way to switch between Apps. It’s also expected that iPhone may have more number of Home Screens (if at all they plan to keep same Home Screen pattern), which currently can only hold around 180 apps on 11 screens.

Apart from this, there can be many minor tweaks for iPhone in 4.0 releases. Let’s wait for 8th April and see what iPhone OS 4.0 has to offer.

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