Apple debuted the beta version of iPhone OS 4 yesterday, announcing a collection of new features and additions to its prior iPhone and iPod touch applications. Based on photos and details submitted by an anonymous source, we’ve compiled a full app-by-app breakdown of what’s changed in iPhone OS 4. Updated! This article has been replaced by Instant Expert: The Secrets & Features of iOS 4, as well as our full review of iPhone OS 4 / iOS 4.
Home Screen + Multitasking. The iPhone OS 4 Home Screen now supports user-selectable wallpaper, accomplished by adding a drop shadow to all of the icons and text that used to appear on black backgrounds. As with the iPad, these drop shadows move as you scroll through pages of applications. Apple has also changed the look of the iPhone and iPod touch bottom-of-screen dock to resemble the one found on the iPad, complete with icon reflections, a shift back to the look Apple introduced briefly with the first-generation iPod touch.
Though icon changes were initially spotted for only a couple of applications, it turns out that many of the icons have received very subtle tweaks that suggest Apple has done a complete re-drawing of the icon set, potentially for higher-resolution displays. The changes have in many cases added sharper lines to prior designs, such as the gears of the Settings icon and the rays of the Weather icon’s sun, but have also in some cases increased the color or contrast of small details in the icons. See, for example, the Voice Memos icons, the Mail and Safari icons, and the Photos icon.
Multitasking is now accessible on 2009 iPhone and iPod touch models by double-tapping the Home button; you can no longer use double-clicking for the camera or other features. When you switch to the multitasking interface, the screen shifts upwards and the home screen application icons fade out to silhouettes, revealing a hidden tray of four additional icons at the bottom of the screen. They’re shown against a dimpled gray backdrop. You can scroll to reveal more programs that are running by swiping to the left or right. You can stop running applications in the multitasking tray by tapping and holding down on the app icon and then hitting a circle and – button that appears in the corner, similar to the process for deleting an application from the device.
Folders have been added to the Home Screen, represented as rounded square icons with up to nine little miniature icons inside. You create a folder by dropping one icon on top of another, which brings up a dimpled background that looks like the Multitasking dock—hidden under your selected wallpaper, which has been sliced in two pieces and shifted up and/or down to make temporary room for the icons in the folder. The folder starts with the genre name of whatever the first app is inside; you can rename the folder with a pill-shaped text field that appears above the icons. Up to 12 icons can be stored in a folder.
When any application receives a push notification inside of a folder, it’s now indicated on the Home screen with an ! alert, rather than tallying multiple applications to aggregate a number.
Lock Screen. Seemingly unchanged except – for now—an odd duplication of the clock when music is playing on the locked iPhone; the clock now appears both in large numbers and in smaller ones inside the status bar at the top of the screen. This may be a sign of repurposing the lock screen somewhat for background applications.
Phone. Apparently unchanged for now. Third-party VoIP applications now use a similar bar at the top of the screen to indicate that a call is in progress, however.
Mail. Opening mail to the inside mailbox view looks the same as before in portrait or landscape, but backing up to your multiple mailbox view has changed. Now Mail aggregates the contents of all of your inboxes into one master inbox, letting you back out from that inbox to separate inboxes and individual mail accounts instead. Choose an individual account and you see all of the mailboxes—outgoing, inbox, drafts and any additional folders.
An optional threaded view has been added to show multiple messages that are part of the same conversation, each indicated with a double chevron arrow with the number of threaded messages alongside it. When sending photos in an e-mail, you can choose different scaling images to make the message smaller.
When reading messages, you can now see a tiny image from your Contacts for people who you know, as is the case on the iPad version of Mail. Additionally, when you go to share content from your iPhone or iPod touch—a video from YouTube, a photo, and so on—but then stop before sending the e-mail to share it, the device now asks you whether you want to keep the e-mail as a draft, or delete it.
Entire e-mail threads can be deleted at once, indicated via a (x) number when deleting a message, and GMail can be Archived rather than Deleted.
Safari. “Google” has been replaced next to the keyboard’s space bar with the word “Search.” Ouch.
iPod. The iPod application now supports playlist folders and sub-folders created in iTunes. A setting lets you turn lyrics and podcast info off if you’d prefer not to see them on the Now Playing screen. On-The-Go Playlists have been replaced, sort of, by a feature that lets you create a new playlist—basically the same feature, except you can now choose a name for it right from the start. You can also edit, clear, or delete any playlist on the device, including ones synced from iTunes. The contents of albums are now displayed by the iPod application with extra duration, release date, and artist information, plus a shuffle button and album art.
The iPod app is otherwise apparently unchanged at this point, and still does not yet support AVRCP for Bluetooth remote control of the device.
Messages. Messages now has a search field.
There’s also a character count in the settings menu as an option for Messages, which currently only appears after you’ve typed three lines of text in cellular mode.
Calendar. The Calendar application appears to be mostly unchanged for now, not bringing in much of the new aesthetic or functional improvements introduced on the iPad, with a few exceptions. You can now select to show multiple calendars at once, of different types; previously, it was show all or show one.
Additionally, you have the ability to turn on a Birthdays calendar, which is auto-generated from information in your Contacts list, and change the calendar that an event appears on.
Support for Google Calendar is also included for GMail accounts.
Photos. Now has iPhoto ‘09 Faces and Places support, letting users sync collections of photos based on the person identified in the shots, just like the iPad. Places is supposed to show the map locations of geotagged images, but currently crashes when it’s trying to load a map.
Photos also adds “rotate” as an option so you can get the orientation of a picture correct before e-mailing or uploading it.
Camera. The Camera application now has digital zoom capability; you can pinch or tap-and-hold to activate the digital zoom feature, and a slider appears on screen to let you set the zoom level. Not surprisingly, the results look crummy. Tap to Focus has been added to video recordings. Support for a hardware-based flash has been discovered by developers probing the iPhone OS 4 code.
YouTube. Small cosmetic change shows “No videos” when nothing has been found by the Search feature. Apart from the Mail-related searching change mentioned above, the app otherwise appears to be unchanged for now.
Stocks. Apparently unchanged for now.
Maps. The terrain view added to Maps on the iPad is not available in the iPhone and iPod touch version of the Maps app. Only one obvious change has been made: the compass icon has changed to the Northeast-pointing arrow icon used for Location Services.
Weather. Apparently unchanged; still no widescreen mode.
Voice Memos. Apparently unchanged for now.
Notes. Notes now supports wireless syncing with multiple accounts. Syncing appears to be supported for any IMAP-based Mail account, rather than being a MobileMe-specific feature. Consequently, though the app now starts with a yellow notepad, you can tap backwards once to see a list of notes, and backwards again to see a list of accounts to separately create and sync notes. A system-wide spellchecker feature is obvious here, as incorrect words now appear with red underlines.
Clock. Apparently unchanged for now.
Calculator. Has the most conspicuously updated Home Screen icon, but otherwise appears to be unchanged.
Settings. Location Services has been expanded to turn off or on specific applications’ access to GPS data. Now that note synchronization is available, icons have been added to all of the features that can be synced with a server, including Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, and Notes with MobileMe, and fewer with other types of servers. You can also choose what types of information to synchronize from a given service.
A more complex Passcode Lock has been added, with a user-selectable alphanumeric passcode option. This was previously available only through the iPhone Configuration Utility designed for Enterprise users.
