What's new with iOS 4?

It's a good one. So we've had a lot of requests, and I mean a lot of requests for us to cover a couple of different topics. And uh, we already talked once about the iPhone four, So now we're going to talk about the operating system that exists on top of the iPhone four I O S four. Actually it also works on some, but not all, of Apple's other devices as well, right, um, Actually, and it doesn't work the same way on all of Apple's other devices, which

makes it kind of complicated. But let's let's start into that. Let's start with the iOS thing that's new, right, Yes, it used to be the iPhone OS right, But of course it also operated the i iPod Touch and um just recently of course, with the launch of the iPad UH, it is the operating system for that device as well, So I guess they decided that they should make it the iOS and UH, which is glad they haven't gone back to using the version of its old, old, old,

pre Macintosh operating system Apple sauce. Yeah, it's also the fact that they've changed the name to iOS. I mean, first of all, to me, that just makes sense because, like you pointed out, it's running on it's it's powering multiple devices, not just the iPhone. Yes, so to call it the iPhone OS is not really that accurate. But it also has raised some room mers that perhaps this is the future of the Apple operating system and that they will slowly back away from the mac OS operating system. Yeah.

I don't see that really happening necessarily, at least not completely, because I think there's always going to be at least a little demand for a full fledged mac OS system unless the iOS gets so sophisticated that can do practically everything that mac OS can do already. UM, I just don't see that happening. Just from the the media editing uh industry alone would probably flip out. Well, they give

it this way. The Google Chrome operating system that will be powering netbooks in the not too distant future is not really intended to be a main operating system either, And yet it is also more sophisticated than the Android operating system, which is what is operating on handheld devices. Yeah, so sorry, but I do think I do think that uh well uh, and it's in the same vein that Apple does not really intend this to be a full fledged, heavy duty, let's run sixty three programs on it at

once type operating system. Right, so let's talk a little bit about IO S four and what what makes it special. Uh. And we we just kind of touched on one. Multitasking. Yes, that's actually a big one. Yes, limited multitasking. Yes, it is limited multitasking. It is not on you know, you can't run as many applications as you want in the background, all at the same time. And you can't even run

every sort of application in the background. It's uh, I think there were like seven different main types of applications that Apple said you would be able to to run as background applications. Well, um, it's so it sort of depends. Now. Of course, the Apple applications have always been a little bit more multitasking friendly, even even before uh, the advent

of iOS four. Um, you could, for example, play a song on and you know, the iPod app and then change to something else and you'd still get to hear your music. But if you wanted to try that with say, Pandora, you know, as a third party application, as soon as you uh decided to go check your mail or use Safari or some other application, it would drop off. Right. Yeah, So now they're allowing third party applications to take advantage of this as long as they fall within seven different

apps services and I've actually got them up here. So it includes audio, VoIP Um, push notifications, local notifications, task completion, and fast apps switching. As long as it falls within one of those, uh, those categories, then it can run in the background. If it's outside of those, then it

it's still will not run in the background. And uh, and you have a limit on how many you can run at one time, I believe as well, right, and UH, if you're hoping that you'll be able to have these applications work across uh, you know, as you're using the entire operating system. UM, they're not really going to be able to do that, nor will you be able to uh have one application receiving push notifications while you're running another application. Is just not going to get updates like that.

It's just not intended to do that. And the reason that that Apple didn't want to use multitasking in the first place was because the company was concerned about battery life UM and just the idea of having all that stuff running at one time, UM, bogging down the system. They wanted it to be a nice, fast user experience. But at the same time, they've taken a lot of flak for where from a lot of people for not

offering multitasking as an option. So this is sort of I guess this is sort of a compromise if you will, that the company is offering UM. And I also should say that a lot of my the information that when I was researching was came from Ours Technica, which did an excellent breakdown of the iOS uh in addition to you know, the Apple websites information, so um thanks and

could to them. Yeah, Whereas I got a lot of my information from a c net full breakdown on the OS so again, uh, they did a lot of the work for us. We're just really kind of reporting on it and commenting on it um. But that's probably mostly because neither as far as I know, Chris, you don't. You aren't. You don't own anything currently running the OS four. Yeah, that's uh. Actually, if you want to get into the maybe a good segue for the devices that can and

will run the iOS four. I own a first generation iPod Touch, which does not would the very first Chris, I'm curious how how long after you bought it did the second generation come out? That was about six weeks Jonathan, Yeah, six weeks. Uh. Yeah, Well I got it as a as part of the you know, every fall, Apple does the education deal where if you buy a Mac you can get a free iPod or what you really get

as a credit, which is about the same amount. So I used it then and you know, when I went back to school a couple of years ago, and that's right, and then six weeks later, which is why I think it's actually a clearing house and let's get rid of the old stuff. We need to get rid of this old stock so we can make room for the new stuff.

The other device I have that will run the iOS four doesn't have it yet, and when that's the iPad that will be getting it later this year, this year being in case you're from the future and listening to old podcasts, and we do get that sometimes, so yeah,

hello to our future listeners. So we hope, we hope all our meals are in pill form and that we fly in cars, but it probably isn't going to happen, so anyway, Yeah, the second generation and third generation iPod Touch will run the iOS four and uh, any of the generations of iPad after, you know, starting this fall, we'll be able to do that. Um the iPhone, Um, that's a little trickier, I think. Uh, you know, the iPhone three G and three GS will run a version

of iOS four. Of course, the iPhone four will without any problems for the iPhone, for it's the native operating system for the iPhone three G and iPhone three G S. You have to update your you have to upgrade your phone. You have to sink it and upgrade the operating system, which in some cases reportedly has been a fairly painless process takes like fifteen minutes. But I've I've read of other cases where it's taken hours and hours to upgrade the operating system UM, and as far as I can tell,

there's no real uh defining factor that differentiates those. Although I did from why I understand a lot of the three GS owners had fewer problems than the three G owners. So it may just be that the older the your hardware is, the longer it's going to take for it to upgrade. UM. I don't know that for a fact, because I don't I am not currently running anything that's running iOS four. I do have one device that can run it, which is it's actually not mine, it's my

wife's up ontouch UM. But I have not upgraded it yet. I just haven't sat down to do it. UM. But yes, so that's a good, good point that there are these various devices that can run the iOS four, not all of them are going to have the same UM experience, and a lot of that has to do with the the hardware that they actual uh uh abilities of that hardware, you know, the kind of processors that they have and

the batteries that they have. UM. Apple does not want the user experience to suffer, so certain devices have various features turned off, like not all of them can multitask, for example. Um, but there are other ones that we can talk about. Two. In fact, there's some that are only native to the iPhone four. It may eventually come out for other devices, but the current generation of devices uh cannot access those features. So let's talk about some of the other ones though. Uh. Some of the other

features of iOS four other features. Yeah, okay, Um, actually a meal has uh some new features. UM. Maybe less exciting if you don't use the mail feature on your on your device very much. But there is threading now, which I think is a very useful feature. Also unified inbox. Um, so if you like, if you have several email accounts and you want to combine them all into one inbox, um, which sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. Um, you know you can do that. And apparently it has a

little more support for on for the exchange server. Yeah, you can actually have multiple exchange accounts. Um. You can access multiple exchange accounts from one device now, which is is kind of cool if you if you're running let's say you're running a business and uh, because you know,

some people ask why would you have multiple exchange accounts? Well, let's say I'm running my own small business, and I have one email address for say, sales orders, and another email address for product support, then I would want I might want to be able to access both in the same view, as opposed to having to check one closet, open up a set up a client to check the

second one. That kind of thing. Um. Another thing, uh, probably more popular with iPad users is the Bluetooth keyboard support, which which is kind of the only way I can see myself buying an iPad. I still haven't done it. I don't as beautiful as Chris as iPad is and ladies and gentlemen. It's within my my site right now. Um, I still have not felt the need to buy one. Ye, yep, um,

let's see. Let's see what home screen customization customizing? But now you can, um, and not on all of the devices either, but on certain devices, Yes, you can customize the home screen. You can also create folders on the home screen. Yeah, you can group applications into folders, although you're limited into as to the number of applications you can do that. I think it's up to twelve of

per folders. So let's say that you have a whole bunch of games, for example, and you don't want all those games cluttering up your home screen, or you don't want to have, like, you don't want to have to scroll through like five or six home screens in order to find a particular application. You could group all those games into one folder for games, and then you click on the folder, and then that would allow you to choose the individual game you're interested in without you know so.

So it makes a one click into a two click. And Apple eats to add clicks to stuff if they can avoid it. But when it comes to organizing, it does make it easier. Yeah. Um, the camera for the devices that have cameras now have digital zoom, right, That's true, they do. UM. And as a matter of fact, speaking of that, UM, you can use the faces feature uh and I fellow if you have a Mac computer, UM,

it will which basically helps you it has face recognition. UM. The iOS four will also allow you to you uh, identify people certain people in photos. So if I have a bunch of folders with pictures of Jonathan in different uh you know, different events. For example, I could say I want to see just pictures of Jonathan and it

would bring them all together where I could actually do that. Um. And you can also do that on as far as geo tagging too, because if you've taken, if you have photos that have been tagged by location, UM, it will allow you to h to identify, say, you know, pictures of Detroit. Um, you would be able to uh be able to do you had to pick Detroit. I'm needling you, um So anyway, so that's that's sort of nice too because if you if you're somebody who has a lot

of photos on the different devices. UM, and I'm not somebody who takes a lot of pictures with my phone, but I know lots and lots of people do. Um, those are some some nice features that might be useful to you in that regard. Yep, you can also search text messages now the same way you can search email before. So yeah, when you go into text messages, if you if you're one of those people who have issued talking on the phone for texting, UM, seems to be happening

more and more often. Yeah, I'm doing it more often. Actually, I found that the thing that the deciding factor for me was adopting a phone that had a keyboard as opposed to having you know, the numeric pad, because with the numeric pad, texting is a bit of a chore when there's a keyboard, whether it's on screen or it's a physical keyboard. In my case, it's a physical keyboard because I don't have an iPhone. I've got the Android phone. But either way, it just makes texting easier. And so

that's what you know, I'm old, I don't. I didn't adopt texting like the like the kids do, get off my lawn. Um, but now you can. You can search those texts, which is great because if you remember, hey, you know, so and so texted me, like the other day, what time the movie was, and you don't want to have to search through thirty or forty text to find it. It's a good way of of zeroing in on that information.

They also have a universal search feature, oh yeah, which allows you to search the Web or Wikipedia in fact for information about specific topics. It's just a little universal search. Um. So that's that makes uh, finding specific information a lot faster than it used to be. You don't have to you know, go into Safari or whatever to be able

to activate it. And a little bit related to the the folders situation is you can now use create your own playlists, which you kind of could before with the on the go but um, I think they've revamped the ability to do that a little bit and refined it so that you have more control over the playlist. Well,

you also don't have to go through iTunes anymore. Well, you could create an on the go thing with it with an old iPod because you know my my four g iPod, which by the way still works black and white screen scrorell wheel, you could create a playlist with that, but you basically, you know, it would call it on the go playlist, and you didn't you know, it was pretty limited to what you could do. But you could add stuff on on the you know, on the fly.

I use on the go again, but now you have a lot more control over you can you can name them, you can edit the playlists right there on the device, and you have a lot more freedom with with regard to what you can do there. Um iBooks also as coming to these smaller devices, not just the iPad. Um I could say using it on the iPad is is nice because it's it's got a larger screen. I'm not sure that I would be using e books much were I able to do that on my iPod Touch just

because the screen is so small. Um, you know, I like to do more reading on the screen real estate. I do know people who use their I who have been using their iPhones and iPods with the Kindle app stuff and Stanza too, which is an excellent uh freewhere app. So for people like that, it would you know, I

Books is probably a welcome feature. Then there's there's I Movies, which is really for the iPhone for but it's part of iOS four right, yeah, but I Movies allows you to actually do some minor media editing on your iPhone. So when you're capturing video from your iPhone, you can actually after after you've captured it, you can you can snip off the beginning or end or insert even transitions and stuff like that, um, which is kind of cool.

It's it's certainly a much more skilled down version of media editing software than you would find on a full desktop. I mean, obviously you wouldn't expect to find anything really sophisticated on it, but it allows you to, you know, if you're gonna make a quick video and uploaded to YouTube, it allows you to cut the dead space out of it, which is kind of cool. Yeah, that's actually yeah, it's actually I movie singular. Sorry but my bad. Uh, well,

somebody will right in, so that's true. But they still will because they paused it. Yeah I'm sure they probably did, but thank you. But yeah, it's a it's a version basically, a really scaled down version of the one that you would see for the Mac. That's part of the I Life Suite. Um, let's see what else? Oh, spell checking? Yes,

I know you're saying spell checking. You gotta be kidding me, know, Um, if you want to be off the automated suggestions so that you don't send people nonsense messages that can can sometimes be really really embarrassing, spell check is a great feature, yes, because I've seen some messages from people who use their iPhone and they had the automated uh, you know, the suggestion thing going, because you know, you're using that touchscreen keyboard, so sometimes you know, you fat finger a couple of

buttons and then the iPhone or iPod touch or whatever suggests the spelling for whatever word you're trying to spell, and you accidentally selected and it turns out it wasn't the word at all, or even better, what happens more often with me. Is I type in a word and UM, I the the iPhone OS, which is what I'm still running. UM will suggest another word that has the same you know, it has essentially the same letters as the beginning, and we'll go ahead and auto complete it for you. And

it wasn't the word I meant to do at all. Now. On the other hand, the way it's done now, if you want to type i'm and you want to skip the apostrophe, you can just type I am and it will go ahead and do that. Of course, you wanted to type i'll I am you later, then you have to go back. You either have to click the or tap the X thing no, I don't want to use that, or go back and manually enter the apostrophe yourself. Um.

The new version of spell check doesn't do that. Uh. It does what Microsoft Word and so many other word processors do now and underlines it and read basically saying, are you sure this is the word the word you mean? And we'll give you if you tap it, it will give you other options, so it will not automatically complete things for you and and try to respell things UM a different way. There's also a dedicated birthday calendar. Really

you haven't anyway. Yeah, there's a dedicate you can keep track of upcoming This is from c that you can keep track of upcoming birthdays with a designated calendar. It's accessible directly from the main calendar option, so you can have a separate birthday. So I said it comes directly

from sen That's why I quoted it. Um, But yeah, that's the the that's kind of a useful feature if you want to have one calendar just for things like appointments and that kind of stuff your schedule, and you don't want it to be filled with stuff like you know, as well as stuff is like Bob's birthday. I can see the usefulness of having a separate birthday calendar. That's kind of cool. Um. One of the things I thought was neat with iOS four is that you can send

apps as gifts to other Apple customers. Yes, so you can. You can purchase it. Let's say that you absolutely love this one app and you want to send it like it's you know, it's maybe it's uh, I don't know, plants versus Zombies or a how Stuff Works app. You think, Hey, my buddy Bob would love this. There's there's Bob again talking about Bob a lot. Um. We was such an important part of Microsoft's history, and yet now he's using Apple products for some reason. But Bob would love this.

I'm gonna buy this app and send it to him as a president. You can do that now, which is pretty cool. Yep, that's a very very nice within iowas four. Yeah, as opposed to telling Bob's that it's an awesome thing and then giving Bob and iTunes you know, gift card or something so that Bob can give it for himself. Because we know that Bob's lazy and he's never going to get around to it, so it's much better to

do it this way. Oh, Jonathan Loo, Bob did not come to my birthday party, so and I have all right he and I. Things are cold between me and Bob right now. I understand. I understand how that works. All right. Wow, there's gonna be later this year, there's gonna be a game center really yeah, as part of ioas four. Yeah, it's a it's gonna have social gaming network type features and um, it's gonna give you the

ability to invite people to play games with you. What's gonna have leaderboards, um, that kind of stuff, A lot of the stuff that you see in in things like Xbox Live. The whole idea about leaderboards and achievements things like that, that's gonna come to the iPhone, which our iOS four rather, which is phenomenal because I could tell you as a as someone who now has an Xbox

three sixty, achievements are like crack cocaine. If you get an achievement in a game and then you're thinking, hey, that's kind of cool, and you get rewarded by points um, which really just kind of become bragging rights, but it gives you the incentive to try and hunt out the other achievements and earn them. It's it's like earning badges.

It's cool. It's a cool little uh incentive. So what's sort of like a social network then, yeah, it's it's another way for for people to kind of interact within within using games. So before in order for that to work, um, they actually have to have that baked into the software. Right, so like an existing app will not instantly be able to connect. Now you would have to you have to get like maybe an update to the existing apps, and you'd have to update your your applications or to implement

that new feature. UM. So a lot of developers are already looking at the applications they've already developed that are already in the Itune store. It's saying, well, how can I adjust these to incorporate these new features uh, because you know it'll it's just one of those things where um uh you know, you could just not touch them

and the apps will still work just fine. It's just they won't be as robust as some of the new stuff that's taking advantage of these these new capabilities, right right, Well, they That's one of the big stories that's probably not as interesting to the mainstream consumer is that Apple has released a number of new A p I s UM, which are programming interfaces for the UH for developers to use, and it basically gives them a lot of UH technology

they can use to access functionality and the operating system that they wouldn't have before. One that is going to matter more I think to the to the consumer is i ads UM, which is their advertising platform UM. And what that's gonna do is probably for most people, going to reduce the cost of some of the software some of the applications, maybe offered now for free or for less than they would have beforehand, because it's going to be um, it's going to offer the developer a source

of incremental revenue. It's kind of given them an opportunity to make a little bit more money than they would have otherwise because they're gonna have advertising along with the game or the other application that they're running. Um. I'm sure a lot of people are going to find that irritating to have advertising mixed in with that. And I've seen on some of the discussion boards about it. I've seen Android fans uh laughing about it, and I'm thinking

they shouldn't laugh too hard because Google is all about advertising. Yeah, that's I think once this becomes the mainstream thing and Google, we know the Google is interested in that too, because Google snapped up a few mobile advertising companies already. So it's from have from under Apple's nose. Yeah. So I mean, and I'm an Android fan, don't get me wrong, but I have no I have no illusions about where we're headed. Oh I And I don't think it's limited either to

those two platforms. I think that's it's going to become more common, although it will also give people an opportunity to access more applications then they would they might necessarily have been willing to pay for. You know, now that it's going to be subsidized, at least partially with advertising, I think, you know, it'll just sort of open the doors a little bit more, and we'll also foster more development if developers feel like they can make some more well.

And and it's also opening up new problems for Apple and that in the sense that this is this specifically relates back to the iPhone four, but uh, the whole geolocation aspect where you can target ads based on someone's location. So let's say that that our friend Bob over there who likes that app so much. Let's say he also happens to have a particular shoe store and he wants to advertise to iPhone users who are living in the

general area of where his store is. Um, because the way iOS four works and the way the iPhone four works, and the fact that Apple is constantly keeping track of where you are, that's a pretty big deal. You could theoretically purchase targeted ads to people within that area who are Apple customers, which sounds great for business owners, but for iPhone users It's kind of scary because now you're thinking, wait a minute, what do you mean that Apple is

tracking me wherever I go? There's no way to turn this stuff off so that Apple doesn't know where I am. And that's actually become a pretty big uh issue within the whole technology sector right now. Is the fact that is Apple is what Apple is that policy even legal for Apple to to follow it where they are essentially keeping track of you through geolocation data on your iPhone device, your iPhone four, let's be specific. UM. But you know

that's that's unfolding as we record this. In fact, by the time this podcast goes live, I'm sure there'll be more information about it, and we may end up doing a more thorough podcast, not just about the iPhone four, because Apple is not the only company that's looking into this. Again, Google has very similar issues. UM. We might actually have to do another, yet another privacy podcast, but we'll talk more about privacy and geolocation, which is a much more

specific topic than say Facebook privacy. UM and UH. I've I've seen some seeing some basic reviews of iOS four UM and some more through ones like the harsh Technico. When I mentioned earlier, UM and for the most part, people seem to be pretty pleased. I would say that most people say that it's been a very very good evolutionary step. It's not necessarily revolutionary, and that some of the advancements like multitasking probably don't go quite as far

as some would like them to go. But you know, you've got to remember that Apple's balancing out not just the functions, but the experience and especially battery life. They want to make sure that, you know, they don't sacrifice battery life just so that you can run more applications

in the background. Um well, that's that's one of the things that people, uh, you know, to cry about Apple is how it's a closed system and Apple does keep quite a bit of control over the advices, but they can also, um use that to improve their the experiences that their customers. They may not always use that to

improve my experiences. They might be using it for other reasons, but right, but in this in this case at least, Apple has said that its intention is to maximize battery life and to keep it from being a problem for people. And um, you know, well, speaking as someone who owns a phone, that the battery does rarely less longer than a full day's use. In fact, usually I have to charge it at least once throughout the day in order

to maintain that use through for the whole day. I can certainly appreciate the notion that they want to extend battery life as long as possible. To be fair, though, how long have you had that? That HTCG one coming up on two years? So, yeah, which is about when, in my experience, the lifetime of a phone battery starts to go down to even on day one. So so the thing about it is that the more features you turn on, the faster and drains the battery. No surprise,

there SOPs turned on. Yeah, GPS and WiFi and three G and all that kind of stuff. That's exactly why Apple wants to be able to control that experience to all a certain lope level. Good lord, I need I almost got all the way through without completely stumbling over myself. Well, one problem that our tech Stuff listeners have had with iOS forum on certain devices, on certain devices is a likelihood that you won't be able to listen to tech stuff.

Yeah that actually, or any health Stuff Works podcast for that matter. And it's not It's not limited to just the how stuff works podcasts either I've seen from the research I have done online. It's not all podcasts from the iTunes store. It looks like certain podcasts, and apparently it clears up if you actually download the podcast to your computer and then sink them. It looks like it's

a sinking issue. Like if you're trying to get the podcast directly to your device without sinking your your device to your computer, then you run into the problem. But if you download it to the computer first and then sink it seems to work fine. Yeah. Um, and by the time this podcast goes live, that may not even be an issue anymore. Yeah, but it's it's pretty strange

and I don't know why. Um, somebody thought we actually changed the format and nope, it's an MP three yea, the same as so same as it ever was, same as everyone. I wonder why it's only unsumming on on others one of those things. We're still taking a look at it. Well. That wraps up our discussion on iOS four.

Hope you enjoyed this companion podcast to the iPhone for podcast And if you have any questions, whether it's Apple related or not, me not, you can write us are address is tech stuff at how stuff Works dot com and Chris and I will talk you again really soon if you're a tech stuff and be sure to check us out on Twitter text stuff hs ws R handle, and you can also find us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash tech stuff h s W for more on this and thousands of other topics because it how

stuff works dot com. And be sure to check out the new tech stuff blob now on the house stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you