How do you make the point that the iPhone has changed the
world? The easy answer is “use statistics”—70 million sold,
250,000 downloadable programs on the iPhone A pp Store, 5 billion
downloads… Trouble is, those statistics get stale almost before you’ve
finished typing them.
Maybe it’s better to talk about the aftermath. How since the iPhone came
along, cell carriers (AT&T, V erizon, and so on) have opened up the calcified,
conservative way they used to consider new cellphone designs. How every
phone and its brother now have a touchscreen. How BlackBerry, Palm Pre,
Google (Android) phones, and even Windows Mobile phones all have their
own app stores. How, in essence, everybody wants to be the iPhone.
The thing is, they’ll never quite catch up, because A pple is always moving,
too. I n June 2010, for example, it introduced the fourth iPhone model,
the iPhone 4. I t’s slimmer, narrower, faster, cooler-looking. I t also has a few
new features, including a screen with better contrast and four times the
sharpness, a better camera (with a flash), a second camera on the front for
making free video calls, a longer-life battery, and so on.
More importantly, there’s a new, free version of the iPhone’s software,
called iOS 4. (Why not “iPhone O S” anymore? Because the same operating
system runs on the iPad and the iPod Touch. I t’s not just for iPhones
anymore.)
iOS 4 adds all kinds of new features people have been pining for: multitasking
(running more than one app at a time), folders for organizing all
your apps, a 5X zoom in the camera, iBooks (an electronic book reader), a
spelling checker, a desktop picture for your Home screens, and so on.
Why is it so important? Because you can run iOS 4 on older iPhone models
(the 3G and the 3GS) without having to buy the iPhone 4. (Not all features
work on the older models, though.) This book covers both the iPhone 4
and the iOS 4 software, even if you’ve installed it on an older phone download here