BREAKING: iPhone OS 4.0 Preview

Not even a full week after the iPad hit stores and doorsteps, Steve Jobs returned to the stage in all his black turtlenecked glory to discuss, among other things, iPhone 4.0.

This isn’t a new phone (yet), merely an upgrade to the existing software. However, this upgrade is very significant for iPhone and iPod Touch users (who will, from here on out, be referred to as simply “iPhone users”). With iPhone OS 4.0 comes seven “tentpole” features that are sure to improve the quality of life for iPhone users (me included) everywhere.

Multitasking

It’s finally here. Multitasking. You can now listen to Pandora and check your e-mail at the same time. Apple has built in several APIs that can make just about any application “background aware”, allowing it to run alongside other apps without draining battery life or slowing down performance.

How does it work?: Double-click the home button while in any app to bring up a “dock” at the bottom of the screen that shows you which apps are currently running. Tap on an app’s icon to switch immediately to that application, which has been in suspended animation since you switched from it in the first place.

Enhanced Mail

Navigating out of one e-mail account’s inbox only to drill-down into another accountâ’s inbox is tedious and frustrating. Apple’s fixed that by enhancing ’s built in Mail app with a unified inbox to collect all your e-mail in one location.

Additionally, users can now have more than one Exchange account active at a time and Mail supports threaded messages, so you can see relive the journey a topic has taken throughout the 30-40 e-mails still sitting in your inbox. Why haven’t you implemented Inbox Zero yet?

Folders

Drag one app’s icon onto another to create a “folder” of applications on your home screen. If you create a folder with apps of the same genre (games, utilities, etc…), the OS will automatically rename the folder to match the types of apps within.

Each folder’s icon consists of insanely small versions of the enclosed applications’ icons in a grid pattern, so you can try and guess which apps are in each folder from the outside. Tap on a folder to expand it and select your desired app.

Fun Fact: You can even put folders in the dock!

Game Center

Get ready to post your achievements, kill stats and other ego-stroking information to Apple’s Game Center – an XBox Live-esque social gaming network for iPhone and iPad gamers.

Features included: Leaderboards, achievements, matchmaking, friend invites.

iBooks

The iPad’s famous book reader now comes to the iPhone complete with the new iBookstore, wireless syncing of pages and bookmarks across platforms (iPad) and – free Winnie the Pooh! Count me in!

Fun Fact: Buy your books once and read them on either your iPhone or iPad. You don’t have to re-buy books on the iPhone if you’ve already downloaded them to your iPad.

Enterprise

Expect much better data protection from your office-issued iPhones (if you’re that lucky). Also, mobile device management, wireless app distribution, multiple Exchange accounts, compatibility with Exchange Server 2010 and SSL VPN support.

Essentially, your iPhone can now truly become your mobile office.

iAd

Rather than let developers work their own specially-made advertisements into their applications, Apple’s taken care of the hard part for them with iAds.

Developers will now have the option to place HTML5-driven advertisements within their own apps and gain 60% of the revenue generated by said ads.

These ads can (and most of the time will) be completely interactive – like sub-apps running within the main applications. Jobs demoed an iAd for Toy Story 3 that contained mini-games, wallpapers, local theater lookups and the movie’s trailer. It sure beats the “spank the monkey” banner ads of yesteryear.

Expect iPhone OS 4.0 to drop this summer, though a developer preview is available for members of the iPhone development program ($99/year). The iPad version of the OS update will be available this fall.