Along with the introduction of multi-tasking for iPhone apps, performance upgrades and mobile advertising, the iPhone OS 4.0 event Thursday also offered some insight for Wall Street. CEO Steve Jobs said iPhone sales had passed the 50 million unit mark, which translates to around 7.5 million Apple handsets shipped in the March quarter.
The figure had the Street rushing to compare Jobs’ statement with other Apple projections. High on that list was Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who had expected Apple to sell 7.5 million iPhones during the period. Munster’s right-on call for iPhone sales came on the heels of a wide miss on first-day iPad sales. The analyst, you’ll recall, told investors up to 700,000 iPads may have sold April 3. A day later, Apple announced 300,000 of the tablet devices were sold the first day.
Let's hope they work out these bugs before the summer!
iPhone OS 4.0 has been out for less than a day, but let’s dig a little deeper into the beta preview.
The home screen shot above captures what happened when I was trying to rearrange apps. The UI is still quite buggy and all hell can break loose when you least expect it. Moving apps around is even trickier now that folders are an option. Great way to organize apps, still the same horrible system for moving them around!
You’ve probably got your own preferred method of propping your iPad up on your work desk, whether that’s a cheap Staples’ laptop stand or a could of clip binders stuck in an ancient block of verdantly fecund cheddar (my preferred method). These solutions are for the plebs. Meet the Joule.
The Joule is simple: it’s a CNC-machined cylinder of polished aluminum with a velvet lined slot in which your iPad’s bottom lip can be ensconced, as well as a cut-out for your iPad’s home button and speaker. The Joule stays upright thanks to a metal rod on the back which can be repositioned magnetically for extremely fluid control of angle adjustment.
It’s a gorgeous stand that wouldn’t look out of place on the desk of Ive himself, but the price, alas, is horrible: $130.
It seems there’s a glitch with Apple’s new iPhone 4.0 OS beta.
Several developers are having trouble installing the iPhone 4.0 beta on the 3G iPod touch, according to a tip from an iPhone developer.
The developer says there are several posts on Apple’s Developer Forums complaining that the new operating system will not run on third-generation iPod touches. It appears the problem is limited to 32GB models, the developer says.
After loading the OS, programmers are getting the following error message: “The iPod could not be restored. This device isn’t eligible for the requested build.”
The error message is displayed after developers restore the device to firmware bundle 4.0 and try to verify it with Apple.
OPINION: The scuttlebutt was pervasive and we all hoped it was coming, so when Steve Jobs announced iPhone OS 4.0 multitasking at today’s event, it was more a pleasant confirmation than a surprise. It may have more than surprised Apple’s mobile partners, though: the addition of background VoIP functionality will, at the very least, finally force wireless carriers like AT&T to compete with companies like Skype on their own networks.
With typical modesty and restraint, Steve Jobs today downplayed the iPad hype. Pouring cold water on some of the hyperbole pundits have lavished on the device, he said:
“We think this is a profound gamechanger. We think when people look back some number of years from now, they’ll see this as a major event in personal computation devices.”
He was responding to a question about being surprised by the initial reaction. Here’s what he said in full:
Boy, Steve Jobs doesn’t mess around, does he. Not content with his Google throwdown, he’s challenging the entire telecommunications industry with the iPhone’s new Background VoIP.
We start the day with a deal on a leather case for your iPad. There are also some bargains on iMacs, starting with a 3.06GHz 21.5-inch model with LED-backlit screen for $999. To mark Apple’s introduction of 4.0 of the iPhone OS, we have some deals on iPhones, including an 8GB iPhone 3G for $49.
Along the way, we’ll check out the latest crop of App Store price drops, including a 99-cent deal for “PANDORUM,” the survival-horror game for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
Details on these and many other items are available on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page, which starts right after the jump.
OPINION: Steve Jobs saved the most important part of his iPhone 4.0 announcement today till last — the new in-app advertising system, called iAds.
The iAds system is important because it allows the App Store to create a completely self-sustaining app economy that is sealed off from the wider Web.
Tech guru Tim O’Reilly says the App Store is already becoming a rival to the web itself. The App Store, he says, is “the first real rival to the Web as today’s dominant consumer application platform.” Consumers will have no need to visit the web on their iPhones and iPads if they get everything they need from apps, which is bad news for companies like Google.
“This is a new phenomenon,” Jobs said about apps at today’s presentation. This is the first time this kind of thing has ever existed. We never had that on the desktop, so search was the only way to find a lot of things.”
The App Store economy is already pretty well developed. There is the app purchase mechanism itself through iTunes, and in-app purchases, which allow consumers to buy stuff from inside apps themselves. But there was a big hole: advertising. Ads are already a big part of the app economy, but clicking on them typically takes consumers out of the app and into the browser, an experience Steve Jobs describes as jolting.
But now Apple has built a sophisticated ad-serving mechaninsm right into the iPhone (and iPad, natch), which will make the App ecosystem like AOL in the early days — a walled garden. And one that has it’s own economy: in-app purchases, and now in-app advertising. There will be no need to go to the wider web anymore — and that cuts out Google.
“What’s happening is that people are spending a lot of time in apps,” Jobs said today. “They’re using apps to get to data on the internet, rather than a generalized search.”
No wonder Apple and Google are at war. Google swooped in a bought AdMob just to keep it out of Apple’s hands (so Apple snapped up Quattro instead). Of course, Google isn’t on the ropes yet. Android is Google’s attempt to keep it relevant in mobile, and so far it’s holding its own against the iPhone.
But if early numbers are any indication, the iPad is going to be an iPhone-sized hit. Combine the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, and that’s a lot of mobile devices in Apple’s walled garden.
Carrier T-Mobile has announced a bounty of sorts for iPhone switchers. The carrier will pay up to $350 when you trade in your iPhone for a HD2 from HTC. If your turn in a working iPhone, you could get $100 credit toward the Windows Mobile handset, according to a report Thursday.
To obtain the bounty, iPhones must be in working condition and the screen intact. T-Mobile retail locations are participating through May 19.
Right after the announcement of the many new and exciting features going into iPhone OS 4.0, Steve Jobs walked into a Q&A and, asked about widgets on the iPad, casually made this Old Testament reference:
Q: Why have you veered away from widgets on the iPad?
A: We just shipped it on Saturday. And then we rested on Sunday.
Q: So widgets are possible?
A: Everything is possible.
Interesting. You know who else rested on the Sabbath, right? Say what you will about Steve, but he always leaves his ego check in at the door.
I think I speak for everyone at Cult of Mac when I say that the last hour has been incredibly exciting. I didn’t expect much from a small, post-iPad event about iPhone OS 4.0: multitasking and iAds, sure, but I still expected it to be something of a snoozer.
Instead, Apple blew my socks off. iPhone OS 4.0 is a huge game changer… and it’s a massive challenge not just to Google’s Android operating system, but their whole mobile advertising business.
When Jobs took the stage, he promised the presentation would touch upon seven “tentpoles” of iPhone OS 4.0. Here’s a short breakdown of each.
Well, looks like that purchase of Quattro really paid off. Steve Jobs just announced iAd, Apple’s own mobile advertising network for app developers.
According to Jobs, an average person spends 30 minutes in an app each day. If an ad is served every 3 minutes, it’s ten ads a day. Multiply that by 100 million devices, and it’s a billion ads a day.
iAds will function in-app. You click on them, but you never get pulled to a browser: they work like innate features of the app. You can even make them games.
It’s a great idea: ads can be freely explored without stopping what you’re doing or psychologically breaking up the experience of an app with getting information.
This is such a simple innovation, but it’s huge. Apple’s done something truly unique here: they’ve figured out a compelling way to compete with Google in the mobile advertising space. I didn’t think it can be done.
And what do developers get out of this? 60% of the revenues, after Apple has sold the ads.
Holy cow. I think iAds just made “Free” the new “$0.99” on the App Store.
Boy, this one’s a mixed bag for guys like me with rather prodigious OpenFeint achievement scores: Apple’s just announced their own social network for gamers.
Think of it like Xbox Live for your iPhone (or a native OpenFeint, for that matter). You can use the app to make friends, earn achievements, compare scores and even invite friends to play multiplayer matches against you.
This is fantastic, but I feel really bad for the OpenFeint guys. They’d really made some headway, and now Apple’s just going to casually crush their business.
If you haven’t got an iPad, you’ve probably been depressed that iBooks isn’t available on your iPhone.
As if that was going to last for long.
Steve Jobs just announced iBooks support in iPhone OS 4.0. It works very similarly to the way it does on the iPad: in fact, it’s almost a one-to-one translation.
The real improvement here, actually, is the way that iBooks will now automatically sync your page and bookmarks across devices, just like the Kindle. What that means is if you leave your iPad at home, you can read your iBook on the iPhone from the page you left off.
Wow. Apple sure is getting serious about reading… given that the company’s headed by a man who once claimed people didn’t read anymore.
Sick of all your iPhone apps being arranged higgledly-piggledly across multiple screens? iPhone OS 4.0 takes care of that. Now you get folders.
The way it works is you just drag an icon from one app onto another app to create a folder containing both. For example, drag Plants vs. Zombies onto Sword of Fargoal and you create a games folder.
Now, when you want to play a game, all you have to do is tap on the folder, then tap on the game you want.
This is such a brilliantly simple, down-to-earth take on app classification. Say goodbye to the ten horizontal swipes it takes you to get to the end of your iPhone apps: folders will organize everything nicely under a single page.
The third tentpole feature of iPhone OS 4.0 Apple just announced isn’t as big as the last two, but is still quite nice: persistent location.
Basically, it’s just a setting you select under Location Services. When persistent location is on, a special icon shows up on the status bar.
The big deal here is the iPhone will save battery power by not enabling the GPS unit all the time, but by triangulating a phone’s location according to which cell towers it’s near. that’s good enough for most apps, and if you want to be more precise (like in Tom Tom or Foursquare), you just go through GPS like normal.
This doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me at first… but I can’t wait to see what developers do with the API. Things I haven’t dreamed of yet, I bet.
This iPhone OS event is turning out to be a lot less boring than expected. Apple has just announced the next major new API for the iPhone, and it’s a doozy: VOIP.
Skype demoed the concept. Essentially, now, if you want to run a VOIP program on your iPhone, it doesn’t have to be open: it just runs in the background. Want to get incoming calls while you’re on your iPhone through Skype? It’s not a problem… they just pipe right on in, and can be answered at your leisure like a regular call… right down to the same default ring.
This is big, and something I don’t think anyone expected. It also shows some maturity on the part of Apple’s wireless partner, AT&T: it seems like they realized that data’s data, and it doesn’t much matter how you make your call, as long as you pay them.
Sick of third party programs not being able to offer background audio like iTunes does on your iPhone? Guess what? Apple just changed that.
As one of seven new APIs being offered to developers, now anyone can make their app run audio in the background. The big winner here is Pandora, who takes the stage and shows how their music streaming app can now work in the background after only a day of work: the existing iPod controls on the lock screen continue to function and everything! Now let’s see Spotify!
Brilliant solution by Apple here: they’ve enabled multitasking by offering a very limited but comprehensive checklist of services that can run in the background.
Well, almost everyone called it, but almost three years after the first plaintive cries about the lack of the feature arose, Steve Jobs has just announced that the iPhone OS will be getting multitasking, come summer. Developers can start playing with the preview today.
It’s the biggest of the “tentpole” features Apple is announcing today for iPhone OS 4.0. It works as expected: Jobs double clicks the home button and loads an app switcher, which allows him to cycle through running apps. The app switcher takes the place of the dock. Smooth! Finally!
A great start to a great presentation. Let’s hope, though, that Jobs is being honest when he says they solved the battery drain issue for third party apps, and Apple hasn’t just caved to demand when the feature, while always possible, really wasn’t ready for prime time.
The iPad’s still fresh in every one’s minds, and there’s no shortage of analysts who have wanted to guess how many Apple’s sold yet, but Jobs doesn’t want us to forget how much the iPhone and iPod Touch are kicking ass and taking names.
Here’s the big numbers from Steve’s presentation:
• 50 Million iPhones sold to date
• 35 million iPod Touches
• Safari on he iPhone captures 64% of the US mobile browser usage space, with Android at 19% and BlackBerry at 9%.
• 4 Billion iPad Apps Downloaded through the App Store
Steve Jobs just took the stage for today’s iPhone OS 4.0 event and started things out with an overview of the pertinent iPad numbers so far.
• 450,000 iPads sold
• 600,000 iBooks downloaded
• 3.5 Million iPad Apps Downloaded
Then Steve showed the slide above, showing a happy little girl hugging her iPad. Enjoy it now, little girl: when the proletariat rise, the consumers shall be the first at the firing line!
