Steve Jobs Unveils iPhone OS 4.0
Martin Williams: Apple on Thursday provided a peak at sale of the new features coming to its iPhone later this year. And in event at its Cupertino headquarters, CEO Steve Jobs outlined the upcoming updates to the iPhone operating system.
Steve Jobs: Today, we’re giving a developer preview of iPhone OS 4, the next major release of the iPhone Operating System. We’ve been working on this for a while, it’s pretty great. We’re going to ship it this summer, and release a dev preview today.
Martin Williams: The new operating system will bring to a wider variety of applications multitasking, that's the ability to run more than one output any one time. Apple currently allows multitasking for it's own software but the new OS will expound this to third party apps. That means for example that it will be possible for Skype to continue running while you browse the web or for a music app to keep playing while you're checking online map.
Steve Jobs: I can just double-click the Home button and the window raises up, and it shows me all the apps that are running. These are all the apps that are running, and I want to go back to mail, and I go right back to where I left it.
Martin Williams: Mail will get upgraded with a unified inbox that pulls all incoming messages into a single place. And the iPad’s bookstore will appear on the iPhone. For enterprise uses, a new security function will allow all email including attachments to be encrypted with a pin code and there is a new social gaming center.
iPhone OS 4 will also give developers more tools for putting ads in iPhone apps. The iPad advertising platform presents a big potential audience according to Jobs.
Steve Jobs: The average iPhone user spends over 30 minutes a day running third party apps. If you put an add in every three minutes, you’d have 10 apps during that 30-minute period per user. We will soon have shipped 100 million iPhones and iPod Touches. That will happen this summer.
100 million x 10 per day is a billion ad impressions per day from the iPhone and iPod touch community.
Martin: iPhone OS 4 will be available from the middle of the year for the iPhone, the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch models sold from mid 2009 will support all the features while older models will have limited support. It should be available for the iPad later this year.
With reporting by Steve Lowe’s in Cupertino, this is Martin Williams, IDG News Service.
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