elusivemind

Having read about all of the advanced functionality in iPhone OS 4.0, I was eager to get my hands on and begin using it. While my phone is not capable of multitasking, the universal inbox on mail and the ability to group applications into "folders" were serious selling points. There are a bunch of things that were added to the OS, but I'm only really going to cover the ones that apply to the iPhone 3G and how I personally use the phone. Keep in mind, that this is the first beta release of the OS - which means that some of the things I am covering here may be improved, modified, or otherwise altered before the final version ships.

Organizing Applications
The ability to take your applications and place them in groups is extremely handy. I have been able to take nearly four pages of applications and condense it onto my primary screen. You can also place groups of apps in the main dock area of the phone. You can have up to nine applications in a single group and you cannot place groups inside of groups. The groups are name after the type of applications as they are categorized in the iPhone store. So my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIN applications were placed into a "Social" group. My iPod, App Store and Contacts apps were put into a "Lifestyle" folder. It's a little confusing at first but you can change the name of the group, so this really isn't a huge problem. It's important to note the current LinkedIN iPhone app does not work at all in iPhone OS 4.

Universal Inbox
This is the single biggest reason I wanted to try the beta. I am now able to have both my personal and work emails viewable via a single folder inside of iPhone's new mail application. So as emails come in to my work or personal email boxes, I am able to review and respond to them in a single location.

I'm not a huge game player on my iPhone, but there is a new social media/matchmaking service for online game playing called Game Center. I haven't worked with this much but my impression is that it enables an Xbox-Live style of online game matchmaking within the iPhone. This has the potential to be huge - especially as it is migrated to the iPad later this year.

With the positives are some steep negatives. The battery life on my phone has been cut nearly in half. In fact, If I leave it on my desk without putting it on the charger at night, I wake up to a phone that is at 20% of charge. This is bad.... really, really bad. Especially since I take real good care of my rechargeable devices in terms of not charging them until they're empty and always charging to 100% to keep optimal battery performance. I used to get 2 days of charge out of my iPhone battery and now I barely get a full day. This could be due to the beta nature of the software, but my guess it also has to do with all the additions made to the OS.

Coupled with the battery point above, my phone is dramatically less responsive. In some cases, I have been unable to dock the phone to my computer without rebooting it. On two occasions so far, I went to charge the phone using a car, wall-based, or computer sync cable and the phone did not detect being hooked up to any until it was rebooted. Once it was rebooted all was well, but this caused me several cold-sweat moments in believing there was a hardware problem with the phone. My phone is at the bottom end of support for the new OS, and multitasking is not supported at all - and it is easy to see why. With the performance and battery hit I've taken, I doubt even the 3GS will really run the OS all that well. This new OS is likely targeted for Apple's next generation iPhone and iPad devices and not the current generation.

Although I will continue to use the beta and upgrade to the latest version of the OS when released, I will definitely be waiting until the next generation iPhone is released before buying a new phone. I can't see the 3GS performing significantly better as it has similar processing and memory configurations. Granted that the double core nature of the 3GS will make it likely perform better than what I have now, I still see it being prudent to wait for the next gen device to get the optimal experience.