And so it is OS4…and what have you done?

And yay apple did release iPhones 4th OS, and there was much rejoicing.
After trying quite un successfully to update my own iPhone software last night I have finally had some time to play with it this morning. Over all I have to tip my hat to the apple bods and announce “good job sirs”. As I write this post on the iPhone with it’s new OS the new “spell checker” adds a familiar red dotted line under “finaly” to suggest I change it to “finally” with which I shall comply.
I have also managed to cobble together a play list in the iPod which allows me to play all 5 days worth of 80’s songs in one long, bright clothing filled, haze of joy. Should I ever be in the situation where I need to waste 5 days I now know I can do so in the utter freedom of not having to go back to the iPod menus to change albums- which would needlessly waste battery life for what I believe will already be quite a push at running it for 5 days.
Folders work. Nuff said- they are folders. Much like the ones your nan used to have to hold that old stuff made from trees called paper- I believe thats what it’s called, I saw some in a museum once. Suffice to say I have reduced my home screen from 7 pages to 3. Damn.
I happen to be one of those lucky million people that have the 3GS model and as such am allowed into the secret club known as “multi-task” (and if this phone changes that word to “multiple” one more time I soon will be the owner of a 3Gs with a fine dent in the middle of it’s face). This is what we have all been waiting for (apparently). Although I don’t remember actually thinking about it before it was announced in the keynote. Guess I’m just one of those folks that is just glad his phone screen isn’t green anymore and his ringtone doesn’t sound like a chorus of cats being used in an underwater piano. This multi-tasking lark will be excellent once the developers update their apps to work with it. At the time of writing all of my game apps re-set themselves when you switch between them and any other app.
A word of warning to those of you with the sonic game apps (1 & 2). This update seems to have changed the emulation software from megadrive speed to commadore 64 speed. Both games now run un-playably slow. Actually it’s probably about the same speed that they would run natively on the 3G model iPhone. Sure this will be fixed soon. It had better be- those apps aren’t cheap!
Other features go without saying- wallpapers are nice if you’ve always fancied looking at an image through a frosted window full of post-it notes. The new mail enhancements finally group emails by subject and you can now make your photos even grainier and blurry by taking full advantage of the “optical zoom” function in the camera. Of course the best thing about all this is it doesn’t cost you a bean- or money. Learn from this Microsoft- make things good, work and cheap. That is if you ever come back onto dry land from your massive yacht.