Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 Event Starts in 30 Minutes

Here’s a link to Gizmodo’s live coverage, which seems the best so far. (Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica is doing a great job, too.) I generally follow Macworld’s live coverage of these events, but they’ve switched to some new dingus called ScribbleLive, which I presume is using Flash since it requires a dedicated iPhone app, which app is, alas, not iPad-native. And on my Mac it just renders as a big empty white box.

Anyway, if you want predictions, here are my predictions, based purely on my own speculation and few coin tosses. iPhone OS 4 will introduce background processing for third-party apps (expect demos from developers like, say, Pandora and Skype), and, perhaps, some sort of suspend-resume model for going right back to where you were when you re-open an app. iPhone OS 4.0 will only be for the iPhone and iPod Touch, not the iPad. The iPad, like any such project at Apple was developed by a team that was locked away in secrecy, so the team working on iPhone OS 4.0 only found out about the iPad when the rest of us did, on January 27; Dalrymple has it exactly right: OS 4.1 will be the unified OS for all these devices. (My spidey-sense tells me that iPhone OS 4 is going to drop support for first-generation iPhones and iPod Touches, and some of the features may only be available on the 3GS and this year’s new models.)

Apple will not announce new iPhone hardware at this event. Just like the last two years, this is only about the OS and the new stuff for developers in the SDK. But there might be hints about next-gen iPhone hardware features. If I’m right that the next-gen iPhone will have a 960 × 640 display, they might start talking about higher-res iPhone apps today, and spin it as a way to make iPhone apps look sharper when run on iPads.

★ Thursday, 8 April 2010