Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Four unlocked iPhone 4Gs, stacked up. I thought the effect was nice:

If you’ve been following the “thin metal strip” antenna debacle, you’ll be happy to see that Bloomberg recently revealed the topic to be internally controversial inside Apple itself, up to a year before the iPhone 4 was released. In Apple Engineer Told Jobs IPhone Antenna Might Cut Calls, Bloomberg News reports:

Apple Inc.’s senior antenna expert voiced concern to Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs in the early design phase of the iPhone 4 that the antenna design could lead to dropped calls, a person familiar with the matter said.

Last year, Ruben Caballero, a senior engineer and antenna expert, informed Apple’s management the device’s design may hurt reception, said the person, who is not authorized to speak on Apple’s behalf and asked not to be identified. A carrier partner also raised concerns about the antenna before the device’s June 24 release, according to another person familiar with the situation.

So the plot thickens. The biggest outstanding question is, “What will Apple do next?” Well, just now I plugged in my iPhone and got the following software update notice:

iOS 4.0.1 Software Update for iPhone

This update contains bug fixes and improvements, including the following:

• Improves the formula to determine how many bars of signal strength to display

Products compatible with this software update:
• iPhone 3G
• iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 4

For feature descriptions and complete instructions, see the user guides for iPhone at http ://support.apple.com/manuals/iphone

I did the update and I don’t see any differences on my 3GS….

I just came home from work and immediately attached my iPhone 3GS to update to the iPhone 4 OS, loving dubbed by Apple as “iOS4.” For some information about the new features offered, check out Apple’s iPhone update page or the Ars Technica review. Immediately, I started organizing all my apps into folders, and ended up with this lovely screen:

I think it’s going to take me some time to sort out (and remember) exactly where everything went. The little icons-in-an-icon are nice, but they only show you 9 of the 12 things inside. And there’s no way to make any particular icon folder stand out from the other folders. Being able to give folders differently coloured borders would go a long way to differentiating your app folders, in my opinion. When you click on a folder, you get a great launcher screen, though:

Any of the folder apps are a quick touch away from launching, it’s a great experience. You can find recently / currently running apps by simply double tapping home, and they show up in a swipeable menu bar along the bottom. Another great feature is a combined email inbox with threading:

Here you see my two accounts are combined into one!

Do you see the threaded message? NICE!

Some of the smaller things I noticed to complain about are:

• The sliding in/out of elements is now bouncier.
• The UI in general seems slightly slower, probably because of fancier rendering.
• The lock screen hasn’t improved. I was hoping for apps to have some way of adding themselves to the lock screen, so you could perhaps control Pandora without having to unlock your iPhone, much like you can double-tap while locked to get music control bars.

Note: if you have an older iPhone you may be disappointed. Here’s an iOS 4 compatibility chart (upgrading newer iTouches are free):