I installed iOS 4 on my iPhone 3GS this afternoon. The installation took longer than I had anticipates (over 1.5 hrs), but a big chunk of that time was taken up by photo optimization. This tells me that although the photos had been optimized for iPhone OS 3, there must be some more sophisticated photo optimization going on now. Or, iTunes just forgot and re-optimized the photos.
My first task was to stack some apps. Stacking allows us to group apps into a single icon that you can organize any way you like. I made some stacks in iTunes, and found myself frustrated by how hard it is to actually get apps to stack. Dragging an app on top of another one is supposed to highlight the target app (or stack), and when I release the app, it joins the other apps in the stack or creates a new stack. I found that dragging the app near a stack or another app caused the target to move out of the way. Some apps always accepted another app, while others just wouldn't join, no matter what I did. This drag and drop works better on the iPhone itself, but it is easier to select multiple apps and move them around in iTunes. I hope this improves.
Apps don't quit when you hit the home button anymore. Now, they drop into a tray that you can see when you double-tap the home button. The tray only shows four apps at a time, so you may need to slide it to the left or right to see the hidden apps. Unfortunately, apps now don't close. They collapse into the tray, and in order to quit them, you must open the tray and then press and hold one of the apps, then click the minus sign that will appear when they all start to shake. This makes me a little nervous, as it feels like force-quitting rather than an orderly shutdown.
I enabled notifications for email, and told email to run every 15 minutes. gMail doesn't push (or, perhaps it needs to be configured to push), so I have turned off push notifications for email. I like getting the email notice like my colleagues get on their Blackberries. Other apps are receiving push notifications just fine.
It is unclear to me what the impact of multitasking will be on my battery life. I will ramp my email notifications back to 30 minutes or an hour most likely once I understand the battery life situation.
I do appreciate the unified email boxes. I have two email accounts, and used to spend a lot of time switching between the two in Mail. Now, I can choose to look at each account separately or together. In addition, when replying to a message, I can select from which account I want to reply. This is super useful for me, since I often get mail on one account that I want to respond to from the other account.
I'll report more impressions as I use the phone over the next couple of days. So far, so good...
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