Gadget Venue

Yesterday when the new iPhone OS 4.0 was unveiled by Apple [AAPL], the announcement about multitasking was right at the top of the list and it sounded great until we then heard it only works on the Apple iPhone 3GS. This isn’t too bad as many people own the newer iPhone 3GS, but some people are still on the older iPhone 3G.

Some kind of good news has appeared today (unofficially) that says by a bit of hacking around you can actually get the iPhone 3G multitasking. This is achieved by making a setting change in a preference file called N82AP.plist where you set a value for multitasking to TRUE. Once done the service then becomes available.

To achieve this hack you’ll of course need to have access to the internals of the iPhone by jailbreaking it and the ability to know what to do although someone could probably create a simple program that can enable it for you in the near future. [Read more…]

Within hours of iPhone OS 4 being made available to developers for download it appears that someone has already managed to jailbreak the new OS. This was achieved by MuscleNerd who is from the iPhone Dev Team.

A video has also been uploaded to YouTube showing Cydia running on the new operating system. Details of how to perform the jailbreak I suspect will be kept secret until the iPhone OS 4.0 release date which we have now as just sometime in the summer.

MuscleNerd also comments that the new developer release of OS 4 is quite buggy and recommends it not be installed yet unless you want to test it’s features out. [Read more…]

Engadget managed to get OS 4.0 installed on their iPhone 3GS to test what all the new features are like. Overall it looks very impressive and although not the final version of the OS, it seems to run smoothly without any issues at the moment.

Engadget demonstrate all the new features such as multitasking, folders, mail, the camera and various other functions. Some things worth noting are that the camera now has zoom. Zooming the camera unfortunately doesn’t use pinch to zoom, but the slider is more responsive than any other mobile phone zoom slider we have ever seen – ie, it has no delay to the zoom when dragging in and out.

The folders function seems to work very well in that you can easily create a new folder, give it a name and simply press and hold to grab an app and drop it in (or out) of the folder you created. Once done, a mini icon appears in the folder icon to show you how many apps are in there and perhaps, which apps are in there if the mini icon is clear enough). [Read more…]

Update: Apple has just announced that iPhone OS 4.0 (which has been renamed to iOS 4) will be launched on June 21. Click here for details.

Earlier today Apple [AAPL] announced iPhone OS 4. In the presentation they said the iPhone OS 4.0 release date was to be summer while the Apple iPad will get it in the fall, a few months later.

Reasons for the iPad delay are still unknown although we suspect they are tweaking iPhone OS 4.0 for the iPad to work things a little differently such as how the multitasking tray works.

With Apple only specifying summer as the iPhone OS 4.0 release date, that obviously puts it somewhere in June, July or August. We currently believe that the next gen iPhone (aka iPhone 4G or iPhone HD) is going to be announced early in summer, so we suspect that the iPhone OS 4.0 will be released along with the next gen iPhone. [Read more…]

We just mentioned iPhone OS 4 and it’s new features that Apple [AAPL] announced today.

We just came across a video showing exactly how multitasking works on the iPhone. The video is below and shows the double tap on the home button where the running apps then slide up from the bottom of the screen. The option of sliding left and right is then given allowing you to choose which application you want to load.

Although it’s not the most ground breaking feature to hit a mobile phone, praise seems to need to go to Apple due to how they say it functions in that it doesn’t cause issues with the CPU or with memory limits from what we understand. Steve Jobs best described multitasking as follows… “It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager… they blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it.” [Read more…]

Today, Apple [AAPL] announced iPhone OS 4 and along with that, the ability it brings to the iPhone 3GS to multitask. Note that we say iPhone 3GS as the older iPhone 3G and below will not support multitasking. Also OS 4 will work on the 3rd gen iPod Touch (ie, late 2009 models).

Another interesting step for Apple here is that they are delaying iPhone OS 4 for iPad owners till fall rather than when the rest of the Apple products will get it in the summer. We are not sure the reasons for this but if we find out, we’ll provide an update.

Before we mention all the new features of iPhone OS 4, we thought we’d also mention that 450,000 Apple iPads have shipped since it’s launch last week. That’s quite a success. [Read more…]

Finally last week (March 30), Motorola DROID users in the US finally started seeing OTA updates arriving on their phones bringing the version up to Android 2.1. We expected to see that all DROID’s were updated by the end of the week although it seems like updates are still happening over a week later.

If you are still waiting for an OTA update then we hear that all phones should be running it by tomorrow April 9 as Verizon have commented that updates will arrive by the end of this week. [Read more…]

Android is enjoying some good growth at the moment with a whole range of new phones opting to use Android as their operating system.

This growth rate also has developers excited it seems as in March this year there were 9,308 new applications added to the Android Market which is streets ahead of any previous months and approaching double what it was the previous month.

In fact, numbers have been counted since July 2009 for this particular chart where in that first month 1557 apps were added to the market. Every month since then has been an improvement and looking at the shape of the graph it seems like April’s numbers should easily beat it. [Read more…]