Matthew Knott

Okay, I promise not to gush while writing this... ah heck, it's incredible! So weird having apps remain available after closing them, zooming on photos, having music streaming apps continue to stream after I close them.

I'm really tired so I'll try to sum up quickly. iPhone OS 4 is so impressive, if nothing else, as someone who trialed the first beta of iPhone os 3, this is ultra stable, incredibly fast, much faster that the 3.1.2 build I was running, and everything seems to work really well. (Apart from wallpapers).

Multitasking

The gripe of choice amongst mainly non-iPhone owning people, is that the iPhone, and more recently the iPad can't multi-task. Well that's one off the list, it's got multi tasking now, and it, well, multi-tasks. The double click to access the task bar interface is neat, though I thought they might have been able to come up with a different trigger, I often use double click to bring up phone favourites. 

One side of the multi-tasking, the ability to have the apps stay active without impacting performance is great, but largely un-interesting after your first app switch. The real magic is in the background processing of audio and other tasks.

One good thing is that if an app goes bad, which does happen, you can "end task" it. No need for a reboot!

Camera Zoom

You now get a simple intuitive slide bar at the bottom of the screen. Quality degrades as expected with digital zoom but it works, that's the important thing. I've taken two photos, one showing the zoom mechanism, one at full zoom on my keyboard.

Wallpaper

Although the interface benefits from having a wallpaper, it, err, doesn't work. I can't set a wall paper no matter how hard I try.

*update* It's only images in my camera roll I can't use, standard wallpapers are fine, unfortunately the raindrops wallpaper it defaults to isn't among them.

Folders

Apple have created an excellent UI mechanism to create a new folder, just drag and drop one app onto another. It's a wonderful system.

Gallery

Now with events and faces, looks good!

Mail

Unified mailbox is great, but fairly un-interesting.

Any questions? add a comment and I'll get back to you. Off to bed now :)