So barely a week after Jobs announced it’s release, iOS4 has gone out for the millions of iPhone and iPod touch users to download and consume, but just what are you getting for that 250mb download?

iPhone 3G owners beware
As many other blogs have pointed out (and indeed Steve Jobs at the release) iPhone 3G owners will not get the benefit of backgrounding, apparently it’s all to do with the processor power, however there’s a few other things your not going to get either,
- Backgrounds on your screen (don’t worry you can still get backgrounds on your lock screen)
- Screen rotation lock feature

We cant really see why you won’t get the screen rotation lock feature neither can we see why you won’t get a background image either since hundreds of thousands of people jail broke their phones so that they could do just is without a problem (amongst other things)

Still what we can tell you is that you do get some neat little features as well. Digital zoom on the camera for one thing is a welcome addition, although its not the best quality, but speaking as a photography nut, you cant really get anything decent from digital zoom anyway (although the iPhone does seem to do the zooming job a little worse than the others out there)

Still, you guys do get some nice little features to top it off that make the iPhone, somewhat more complete.

And a final point before I begin with a relatively short roundup, Apple have clearly learned from their mistakes and distributed the iOS download over thousands of servers making it easy to download rather than falling over every twenty minutes.

So, onto the first point

The Look And Feel

As you can see, apple put a huge emphasis on making the iPhone OS look a little bit fresher and a little big cleaner. They’ve changed the dock to something that more closely resembles OS X and allowed 3GS users to apply a background to both their home screen and the dock. It can be the same, it can be different, you don’t have to have it but it’s nice to know you can finally make the phone a little bit more personal to you.

On the whole the new look does freshen up the device, and whilst it does nothing for the performance it certainly adds an element of consistency and cleanliness. One thing to note is the calculator app icon has changed. Presumably because the old one looked like their new folder icon which we will talk about later.

As for the feel? The new OS is certainly snappier in parts. It’s not quite as fast as the previous 3.x generation but that is presumably to do with the extra features (although at this stage, we haven’t actually restarted the phone)

Folders

Next, lets talk about the one thing that many of us have been waiting for since the iPhone first came out. Folders. Having come from a blackberry, folders were sorely missed since it was an easy way to categorise your applications and save space.

Each folder will hold a maximum of 12 applications which is Just enough for your applications although I found it a little constraining since I have multiple applications for the same catagory.

Luckily it’s very easy to create folders, drag and drop an icon onto another and it automatically names it for you, and all you need to do is keep dropping them in. At last the iPhone has finally gotten to the blackberry level of organisation. Tap your folder and they will fly out (as per the screenshot) it’s a fairly simple change that apple have needed to do for a while, and I personally think they’ve done it well.

Next up is the biggie….

Backgrounding

Double tap the home button on the 3G S and up will pop another ‘dock’ style box. Slide left or right to see your applications and just tap to go in them, scroll all the way to the left (as in the screenshot) and you’ll find some new icons. Screen rotation lock (Which is an absolute godsend already!) rewind, play/pause or fastforward icons for your iPod and an iPod application. It’s useful to note that if you have a background aware application like TuneinRadio, it’s controls will appear here instead.

If you have application issues, just tap and hold on an application, and press the minus symbol to exit out of the app and take it out of background. Of course, all you need to do to swap applications is tap, and they will fly into focus in a sort of ‘cover flow’ esq way.

At the time of writing, there were not many iOS4 applications that supported backgrounding, but those that do, worked brilliantly.

Unified Inbox

Again this goes back to the blackberry game. Finally you can see all of your emails in every one of your inbox’s in one place. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but if you have more than one email account, it saves valuable time from switching between your inboxes, and sorting by thread, like Microsoft Exchange does, can make things much simpler.

Camera

People have long since complained about the iPhone cameras resolution, lack of features and lack of zoom. At last both 3G and 3GS users get a digital zoom. Sure it’s not great, digital zoom never is, but it at least gives you the option.

Location based services

At long last you’ll soon be able to run location based applications like TomTom and CoPilot in the background, meaning you can take a call and won’t loose your route. Finally! it’s all categorised by a single ‘arrow’ icon in the top right of the screen.

Camera Roll

Yes your photos get a small upgrade as well, you know that every picture you take on your iPone is geotagged right? Well now you can see just where you took them on a places map. Sync from your Mac using iPhoto and it will include the Geotag information there,

This is just small roundup of features, but the best is yet to come with the iPhone 4! In the meantime, tell us your thoughts and how well you’re getting on with the iPhone OS update!