CUPERTINO, California Apple unveiled details of its next-generation iPhone operating system Thursday in a press event at the companys headquarters here.
The new operating system, iPhone OS 4, will be released to developers this week and to consumers this summer. It will give developers access to calendar, photo library, still image and video data, and includes features aimed at helping apps run faster.
As expected, the new OS will support multitasking of apps.
We werent the first to this party but were going to be the best, just like cut and paste, said Apple CEO Steve Jobs, alluding to the fact that cut-and-paste hadnt been available until a year after the first iPhone launched. Its really easy to implement multitasking in a way that drains battery life. If you dont do it just right your phones going to feel sluggish and your battery life is going to go way down. Weve figured out how to implement multitasking of third- party apps and avoid those things.
With the new OS, users will be able to press the home button twice to see a menu of all the currently active apps, which appears as a bar along the bottom of the screen. Tapping one of the apps takes you directly into that app. Apps can remain running in the background. Apple demonstrated how you can keep listening to music in Pandora while doing other things on the phone, and how the phone could deliver push notifications to alert users to an incoming Skype call.
It was really simple to implement. Just a dozen lines of code, said Skypes head of product development David Ponsford.
To address privacy concerns, the OS will also let you know (via a notification on the apps icon) when an app running in the background has requested your location from the devices GPS.
The announcement comes less than a week after Apples launch of its tablet computer, the iPad. Jobs said the company had sold 450,000 iPads to date, and that users have downloaded more than 1 million iPad applications and over 650,000 digital books from the iBooks store.
The new operating system, iPhone OS 4, will be released to developers this week and to consumers this summer. It will give developers access to calendar, photo library, still image and video data, and includes features aimed at helping apps run faster.
As expected, the new OS will support multitasking of apps.
We werent the first to this party but were going to be the best, just like cut and paste, said Apple CEO Steve Jobs, alluding to the fact that cut-and-paste hadnt been available until a year after the first iPhone launched. Its really easy to implement multitasking in a way that drains battery life. If you dont do it just right your phones going to feel sluggish and your battery life is going to go way down. Weve figured out how to implement multitasking of third- party apps and avoid those things.
With the new OS, users will be able to press the home button twice to see a menu of all the currently active apps, which appears as a bar along the bottom of the screen. Tapping one of the apps takes you directly into that app. Apps can remain running in the background. Apple demonstrated how you can keep listening to music in Pandora while doing other things on the phone, and how the phone could deliver push notifications to alert users to an incoming Skype call.
It was really simple to implement. Just a dozen lines of code, said Skypes head of product development David Ponsford.
To address privacy concerns, the OS will also let you know (via a notification on the apps icon) when an app running in the background has requested your location from the devices GPS.
The announcement comes less than a week after Apples launch of its tablet computer, the iPad. Jobs said the company had sold 450,000 iPads to date, and that users have downloaded more than 1 million iPad applications and over 650,000 digital books from the iBooks store.
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