R/GA was invited to attend a special event on the future of the iPhone OS; presented by none other than Mr. Steve Jobs himself! My colleague, and our resident iPhone developer guru, Bill, was the lucky man who made the trip (I’m so jealous). After the presentation, Apple posted a video of the event on their website.  As I watched the video, I felt compelled to jot down the key points about what to expect from the new OS. For the most part, it ounds very exciting indeed.

Summary: over 100 user features and over 1500 new developer APIs

The 7 New Functionality 7 “tent-poles”:

1.       Multitasking APIs:

7 New multitasking services

• Background Audio – eg. Pandora can continue to play music even as you switch apps.
• VOIP- eg. Skype can run a phone call and a user can still switch around between apps.
• Location – Continue to track location with GPS in background – eg. Loopt listens to user location, can detect when you’ve moved, update friends. OS4 adding fine-grained settings to check/set which apps are asking for your location.
• Push Notifications (i.e. server-based).
• Local Notifications (don’t need server, app-to-app).
• Task Completion – eg. Flickr can continue to upload photos in the background, even after you switch apps.
• Fast App Switching – as you switch, application(s) status is preserved.

2.       Folders

• Drag apps ontop of eachother to create folders. The folder name is set, by default, to the category name of apps as set in app store. Eg “games.”

3.       Enhanced Mail

• One inbox: all mail accounts dump into unified inbox.
• Fast inpbox switching.
• Threaded messages.
• Open attachments with iPhone apps (by clicking on attachment).

4.       iBooks

• Just like iPad. Buy once read anywhere; sync page and bookmarks between devices.

5.       Enterprise

• better data protection (better encryption).
• providing APIs to developers to control encryption.
• Mobile Device Management.
• Wireless app distribution.
• Multiple Exchange accounts.
• Exchange Server- SSL VPN support.

6.       Game Center

• More than 50,000 games on app store (more than 10x competitors: sony psp, Nintendo DS)
• Social Gaming network.
• Challenge your friends to games.
• Automatic matchmaking. If you’re playing a game, if it requires other people to play, it will find “similar players”
• Leader boards.
• Achievements (what I’ve won).

7.       iAd

• Steve: ”Mobile users do not use Search, they use Apps.”
• Steve: ”Average iPhone user spends over 30 min everyday.”
• 1 billion ad impressions per day.
• Steve: “Emotion + Interactivity”
• Keeps you within your app
• Built into the iPhone OS, developers can add ads via API
• Apple sells and hosts the ads
• Apple will give developers 60% to developers