iPhone OS 4, a non-macazoid’s POV

It’s no secret that I’m not a blind follower of Steve Jobs and all things Apple. But the more I use Apple products, the more I find about them to like.  Not love, but like.
I seriously enjoy my iPhone, and my macbook and I get along remarkably well. I also enjoy my Windows and Linux machines, and I have several other non-Apple branded devices that are great. I don’t own any singular stock in any technology companies, so I don’t have any interest in how well any company does in sales, beyond the fact that a healthy company will be able to service its products in the future. I can be completely honest in my impressions of the latest operating system installed on my iPhone, and I will.

The first thing I noticed was that my wallpaper is showing behind my icons–an immediate plus for me, because my wallpaper is a picture of my Savior, it’s a picture I really like, and even though the icons obscure parts of the picture, I can still see it, and it still serves the purpose of reminding me to keep my eyes on Him.

Creating folders for my icons was very easy–just dragging one icon on top of another. Fortunately I did think to choose two in the same general category, and I ended up with a same-sized icon-looking thing that said Productivity with two mini-icons in it, one for Evernote and one for DropBox.  I followed the same procedure for six other folders and got five pages of icons down to two. Not sure yet how I’m going to like that ultimately, but right now it’s pretty cool.

Email has some cool changes. I can see the contents of all my inboxes in one list, each inbox separately, and each account with its own other folders separately. Additionally, this update corrected a condition that I alone may have experienced. We use a system called JIRA for our project management activities. When a change is made or ticket is created, an email is sent to each of the relevant parties. Previous to this update, I could see, in the email, only the header information for the ticket, and I would have to go to the JIRA program to see the ticket itself. Now the email itself is bringing in all of the information. My boss said his has always done this, and I didn’t know that, and I hadn’t thought anything about it, because there were several issues I had with stuff “working” on the iPhone,  like any Java-based websites.

The camera zooms now! It’s not a huge distance that it zooms, and it’s not a physical zoom. It’s a decent zoom for a phone camera, though, more than it had before. Let’s face it, it’s still a phone camera. If I need a high-quality shot, I need to use a real camera.
Now for the hot topic: Multi-Tasking! I saved this for last because it was the thing I was most looking forward to, and if anything spells anticlimactic in this update, Multitasking is it. I’m lukewarm toward it because the performance of the concept is lukewarm. The applications seem to be put into a state of suspension, not much more “live” than they are when you close them out. Bring an inactive app back to the front still requires it to come up out of that state of suspension. I haven’t noticed any real difference in opening the app from scratch and bringing it back up from a different app. I’m also so used to having to open it fresh that I’m not pulling it up out of the “tray,” but I suppose if this were my first iPhone, I would go to the “tray” first for my open apps, sort of like doing the “alt+tab” or “command+tab” to cycle through the open apps on your computer. It remains to be seen if keeping apps “open” in the “tray” will suck up performance or battery life.
Overall, I like this update. Previous updates have messed with the order the podcasts were listed in, and since I listen chronologically to them and do so as I drive, having them listed chronologically is something I appreciate. A couple of times I nearly put my podcast listening on hold while I waited for Apple to fix it. But given the amount of stuff that gets tweaked and played around with in an update or upgrade, once they fix it I’m a happy camper.

If you’re on the fence about this upgrade, find someone who’s got it and play around with it. I think you’ll find enough to like in it to justify going for it.