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):

This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2010 at 10:25 pm and is tagged with control bars, 3gs, compatibility chart, email inbox, iphone, music control, menu bar, launcher, folders, ars, pandora, apps, new features, tapping, borders, ui, hasn, elements, apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

One Response to “iPhone 4 iOS4 Review”

1. Paul says:

   7/6/2010 at 5:03 pm

   If pandora is playing and you pause to take a call then lock home screen, double tap home button will give controls for pandora or whatever music program was playing ( not only iPod anymore!).

   Reply