We’ve all done it. Downloaded an app and then decided that it was so bad it wasn’t even worth taking up the space on one of your 9 iPhone home pages. So after determining that this app is so terrible and deleting it we get the familiar pop up asking us to “please rate before deleting”. Well . . . I’m deleting it, how do you think I feel about it??

It seems to me this is setting that app up . . . continue reading

As beta testers have more and more time to play with OS 4.0 they are discovering a myriad of little difference between 3.0 and 4.0. And of course many of these will likely apply to the forthcoming iPad update. Gizmodo is building a great collection of these “hidden secrets”.

The team over at TiPb did a run down on what is still missing from the platform. Many of the features and functions they highlight are available on Android and Palm devices so why not Apple? While it is important to note that by the time 4.0 launches some or all of these could be included, for now they were not highlighted in Steve Job’s keynote.

Still missing:

• No new Home Screen/SpringBoard. We understand that Apple has 85,000,000 legacy users now trained on the iPhone Home Screen system (aka the same app launcher metaphor going back to the days of PalmOS). We knew when Apple said as much during the iPad announcements that they weren’t going to confuse that “already trained” customer base. It’s the price of being an established OS, after all. So Apple didn’t radically re-invent the Home Screen. They did make it layered — it can lift up to show you multitasking apps and slit open to show you apps inside folders — but that’s it. And part of “that’s it” means…
• No themes. You get wallpaper and that’s where your customization ends. You still can’t remove built-in apps (though you can hide them in a folder so they take less space). You can’t chance the look of icons. There’s no animated backgrounds to be had. More disappointingly, however…
• No widgets. Want to know the latest weather, Facebook or Twitter updates, or stick a big clock on the screen? There’s an app for all of that, sure, but you have to go into and out of each individual app and the Home Page remains a giant grid of uninformative icons. Android and Nokia have had widgets for a while now, webOS lets you flick between live Cards, and Windows Phone 7 will have live tiles. iPhone… will be waiting on 5.0?To read the rest of the article you can go here.

Apple’s announcement of the iPhone OS 4.0 brought some much needed updates to the iPhone operating system, a few surprises and some disappointments. 4.0 is available right now in a beta form for developers, it will be available for iPhones and iPod Touches in June and for the iPad in the fall.

While we won’t know every single update and enhancement until OS 4.0 is ready Apple did announce the highlights and the 7 “tentpoles”:

• Multitasking
• Folders
• Unified Mailbox
• iBooks (for iPhone)
• Increased enterprise support
• Game Center Social Network
• iAd

Apple will be previewing the highly anticipated iPhone OS 4.0 on April 8th and likely releasing it sometime in June. Of course the assumption is that any OS enhancements would make their way onto the iPad as well. While, the timing of this announcement seems odd as it lands just days after the launch of the iPad, it is exciting. There are a myriad of predictions, but we won’t know for sure until Thursday. In the meantime lets take a look at two of the serious possibilities:

Multi-tasking: Or at the very last allowing third party apps to run in the background. This is a key missing feature that is already present in the Palm Pre and the Droid.

iTunes streaming: iTunes recent partnership with Lala made this look like a distinct possibility. This would allow us access to our full iTunes library over the internet without eating up precious memory on our actual devices.

What else do we expect/hope to see?

To whom ever said “If  you try to do two things at once, you do neither” I whole heartedly agree. In this day an age if you’re not doing at least four things at once you’re not accomplishing anything. We are a society of multi-taskers like it or not. Although I do agree that there are just some things that should not be done together. I’m looking at you, lady who got arrested for shaving her bikini line and driving. Put the razor down.

So if the iPad is “revolutionary” than shouldn’t it be capable of multi-tasking? . . . continue reading