So adding to the rumour blogs about the potential innovations of the 4.0 update, I will weigh in here about the potential cost for the update, what features and innovations it will add and how it will compete with the Android.
Firstly lets discuss cost. Will Apple change a fee for iPhone 4.0 upgrade? I would bet on a yes. Only if they do bring what many of predicting, a multitasking OS. Apple will market this as a must have upgrade and will charge a nominal fee of around $10 for the upgrade. I would love it at 0.99 cents and wouldn't hesitate, but at $10 I would wait a few days or a month or more. Still there is a good chance that phone subscribers will receive the free upgrade.
So what will OS 4.0 bring? Many are predicting multi-touch gestures OS-wide. This would be a reasonable assumption, especially if they offer iWorks for the iPhone to replace the Mickey mouse productivity apps that came with the original iPhone. Although the iPad has a more powerful CPU (1Gh A4) the iPhone is no slouch and some tweaking to the OS will make it just as responsive. The introduction of background multitasking has been a much anticipated and advertise short coming of OS 3.0. I think Apple was smart to not official add multi tasking too soon, for two reasons. The first being stability and second being developer support. Stability is important, nobody wants another Windows especially on their phone. Developing for a new platform is difficult, and less options and more structures is useful in the initial stages of development especially for stability.
The last and most important rumour is that the iPhone 4.0 update will make the iPhone 3G and 3GS more like a real computer than any other phone. A pretty bold statement. Is this a shot at the Google Android? The Android OS is built on modified version of the Linux kernel with applications built using managed Java code. How can the iPhone OS beat an application frame work twenty years in the development? Well Apple has a few years of OS development under their belt and I think they have been preparing the iPhone OS for this particular update for some time. Originally marketed as being the "iPhone [that] uses OS X" jailbreak versions of the iPhone OS demonstrated that multitasking is already possible. What seemed to have happened was that the geniuses at apple were busy working on the iPad rather then spending time tweaking the iPhone OS for general release. Now that the iPad has an official release, the developers have time to concentrate on the much needed interface tweaks and OS upgrades.
Google Android
iPhone OS 3.2
