iOS 4: five surprises about installation, email, Twitter and libraries

iOS 4 has been released for iPhone and iPod touch, and early hands on experiences with the new operating system have revealed some surprising relevations:

Installation takes forever: Apple warns you up front that the installation could take an hour, and in fact it only took about a half hour. However, following the installation you’re in for a complete restore of all your apps and content. Suffice it to say that if your iPhone or iPod touch is full or music videos, you could be looking a couple hours from start to finish.

Unified inbox really is that awesome: Seriously, what could possibly have caused Apple to take three years to get this feature out the door? One of the iPhone’s original sins, forcing each email account to be viewed in a different inbox and placing a landline of taps in between each of them, has finally been solved in an effortless fashion, and all is finally right with iPhone email. Don’t worry, those who want to do it the hard way still have that option.

Speaking of email… It might have been limited to just my iPhone, but after installing iOS 4, none of my third party email accounts worked at all. In fact they were so thoroughly hosed that my iPhone couldn’t help but throw half a dozen consecutive email related error messages (there were only two accounts in question) the second my iPhone booted up in iOS 4 for the first time. Not exactly the kind of welcome greeting you’re looking for. The only way I could fix this problem was to delete both my third party email accounts from my iPhone and set them up from scratch. I’m not sure what’s worse, the fact that I had do that, or the fact that the iPhone OS, despite its advancements, is just as capable of being ignorantly computer-like in its spewing of error messages as an actual computer?

Updating library…Those who would patiently wait for their iPhone or iPod touch to finish syncing in the OS 3 era, only to unplug it and be stuck staring at the never-explained “Updating library” message in the iPod app for several minutes before any content was playable, may be in for mixed news: it happened to be right out of the gate, but this time the message only displayed for a few seconds before allowing me to access my content. So what was thought to be a never-fixed OS 3 bug is still here with us in the iOS 4 era – the only question is to what extent.

Twitter works!That caching problem that some users had with Tweetie 2, which continued on with the official Twitter for iPhone app, may finally be fixed with iOS 4. It was never clear whether the glitch, which saw some users leave the app only to launch it again a short time later and suddenly be missing days worth of already-loaded tweets which would then have to be loaded again, was a bug in the app or a bug in the OS. In any case it seems to have gone away, at least in my case. Fingers crossed.

These are just random musings. Beatweek’s full iOS 4 hands on review by Christine Chan is right here.

About Bill Palmer

Bill Palmer is Editor in Chief of Beatweek Magazine. His editorial contributions include interviews with musicians and iPhone industry coverage.