I've Been Organizing and Multitasking ... iOS 4.0

As most dedicated and addicted iPhone users, I anxiously waited yesterday for the 'midnight hour' (which ended up to be about 1PM Cupertino time) yesterday.   This was the time that the new iOS 4.0 for the iphone/ipod touch devices was made available for updating.  I was able to install and update without any problems and within less than 8 minutes was up and running iOS 4.0.  I had preplanned for days, backing up and syncing my iPhone on days prior to the release, so that everything was fast and without problems.

I immediately started arranging my apps in folders.  What a nice feature and long overdue.  Not sure if I can wait until September to have that feature as well on my iPad.  I arranged most of the apps and then tested the resync to iTunes and that worked as well.  I then, did the fine tuning in iTunes of the folders and apps, and was amazed at how smoothly the opening, editing and moving of folders, apps and folder names and all worked smoothly.  I choose to arrange my apps by category on the left-hand side of the Apps Tab (with iphone connected) in iTunes.  It was easy to select a folder on a page, open the folder and then click on a similar type app in the left-hand side and see it drop seamlessly into the folder.  I feel that I am becoming OCD playing with this new feature.  I decided to tackle the multitasking feature this morning and it was not so apparent or visible as to how this would work on my 3GS iPhone.  Once I had gotten it working, I realized that I had 20 apps actually available in the multitasking mode that I had been running.

To access multitasking:  Run a few apps, then from any of the pages including the search page, you can push the home button quickly two times (the home button is the round physical button on your iPhone) and you should see below a dock (not to be confused with the duck I was viewing from the photo album on my iphone).

In this dock you will see the apps, that you have available and are currently running.  You can swipe left to see more apps also running if you have more than the default 4 icons on the dock visible.

If you wish to close any app, you merely touch the icon of the app in the dock, until it wiggles and a minus sign will appear.  This is the means to close the apps you wish to close up.

Along with these two features, the new all email inbox is nice.  I like being able to access all my incoming emails from all my accounts on my iPhone at once.  It is also nice how you can move them to the folders for each particular account. 

I haven't tried but understand that I should be able to hook my bluetooth keyboard for my iPad to my iPhone.  Now that is novel.  A keyboard that is bigger than the device.

There are supposedly 100 new features in iOS 4.0 (not all available for all devices).  It will be fun finding them.  Let me know if you find any interesting features. Tweet