No joke this time: iPhone OS 4.0 coming April 8th

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 06 April 2010 11:39

Your IT - Home IT

Although my last pronouncement of an iPhone and iPad OS 4.0 was an April Fool's joke, Apple's latest announcement is that it will be delivering a 'sneak peek' into the iPhone OS 4.0 on April 8th, although there's no word yet on when the actual OS itself will be downloadable for existing iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users.

With all of the rumours of iPhone OS 4.0 hitting web analytics firms, rumours of references to Expose-like multitasking, and an acute desire for multitasking by iPhone users jealous of Android OS and Symbian multitasking capabilities, the iPhone OS 4.0 anticipation has nearly reached boiling point.

Apple has clearly been working hard on 4.0 of its OS, and on April 8th, a mere 5 days after the iPad's April 3 launch, we're finally going to find out what goodies the new OS will contain, and whether any of those goodies include the much-desired ability to multitask.

Although I had written up an April Fool's joke announcing that Apple had launched the iPhone OS 4.0 before the iPad itself had launched as a kind of last minute 'one more thing' surprise, fiction wasn't too far behind reality as the Apple announcement indicates.

Engadget has the briefest of details of the announcement, saying the event will be held at 10am Pacific Time on April 8 for a 'sneak peek of the next generation of iPhone OS software."

If past history is any guide, which it clearly is, we can be sure that the iPhone OS 4.0 will bring new features to existing iPhones, while likely denying some of those features to the original iPhone 2G and perhaps even iPhone 3G, letting the faster iPhone 3GS have access to more of the newer features, and saving some features for the iPhone 4.0 hardware due to come mid-year, the time frame that all new iPhones have arrived for consumers to actually buy.

Will there be an improved rear camera, a flash of some kind to illuminate night time photos, a front facing camera for iChat or Skype video calls, Apple's 1GHz A4 processor, a newer and better home screen, multitasking in limited or unlimited form, voice dictation capabilities as seen with the Google Nexus One, a vastly improved notifications system and much, much more?

Steve Jobs has already publicly said that the next iPhone would be an 'A+' update, naturally leading us to assume that the iPhone OS 4.0 would also be delivering A+ goodness.

 

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