Using an iPhone & iPad in Thailand Tips, App Reviews and News for the iPhone and iPad by Richard Barrow

Apple iPhone 4G Release Date Could be June

Apple  today announced that its Worldwide Developers Conference will begin June 7, the likely date when the company will introduce its next iPhone.

WWDC, which will be held in San Francisco at the Moscone Center, will run from June 7 to 11, according to the conference's Web site, which went live earlier today. That is the same week in the month as 2009's WWDC, when Apple unveiled the iPhone 3GS and announced it would go on sale starting June 19, 2009.

Ezra Gottheil, analyst with Technology Business Research, noted that Apple has revealed its new iPhone at WWDC the last two years, and has no reason to change. "It's important, for one thing, to show [developers] what it can do," he said.

There will be fewer surprises this year when Jobs unveils the next iPhone. Last week, the Gizmodo technology blog posted photographs and analysis of a prototype of the iPhone that Apple is expected to launch this summer.

If Apple sticks to the pattern of the last three years, it will launch the next iPhone on a Friday. Assuming the company repeats the schedule of 2009, when it revealed the iPhone 3GS on June 8 and launched it June 19, Apple could start selling this year's model on Friday, June 18 2010.

Original and full story - Computerworld

Is this Apple’s Next iPhone?

A prototype of the next iPhone has apparently been found in a bar. Gizmodo bought the iPhone from the finder and then did a review on their website. Here is an overview:

What's new

• Front-facing video chat camera
• Improved regular back-camera (the lens is quite noticeably larger than the iPhone 3GS)
• Camera flash
• Micro-SIM instead of standard SIM (like the iPad)
• Improved display. It's unclear if it's the 960x640 display thrown around before—it certainly looks like it, with the "Connect to iTunes" screen displaying much higher resolution than on a 3GS.
• What looks to be a secondary mic for noise cancellation, at the top, next to the headphone jack
• Split buttons for volume
• Power, mute, and volume buttons are all metallic

What's changed

• The back is entirely flat, made of either glass (more likely) or ceramic or shiny plastic in order for the cell signal to poke through. Tapping on the back makes a more hollow and higher pitched sound compared to tapping on the glass on the front/screen, but that could just be the orientation of components inside making for a different sound
• An aluminum border going completely around the outside
• Slightly smaller screen than the 3GS (but seemingly higher resolution)
• Everything is more squared off
• 3 grams heavier
• 16% Larger battery
• Internals components are shrunken, miniaturized and reduced to make room for the larger battery

Full story at Gizmodo.com

New Features for iPhone OS4

Apple today previewed its iPhone OS 4 software with over 100 new features that will be available to iPhone and iPod touch users this summer. New features include Multitasking for third party apps; Folders to better organize and access apps; improved Mail with a unified inbox, fast inbox switching and threaded messages; enhanced Enterprise support with even better data protection, mobile device management, wireless app distribution and more; Apple’s new iAd mobile advertising platform; and iBooks, the new ebook reader and online bookstore recently debuted on the iPad.

iPhone OS 4’s new multitasking offers users a new way to quickly move between apps, and provides developers seven new multitasking services to easily add multitasking features to their apps. These services include background audio, so apps like Pandora can play music in the background, and VoIP, so VoIP apps can receive a VoIP call even when the iPhone is asleep or the user is running other apps.

Folders help users better organize and quickly access their apps. Simply drag one app icon onto another, and a new folder is automatically created. The folder is automatically given a name based on the App Store category of that app, such as “Games,” which the user can easily rename. Using folders, users can now organize and access over 2,000 apps on their iPhone.

iPhone OS 4 delivers the best mail experience on a mobile phone with its new Unified Inbox, allowing users to see messages from all their email accounts displayed together in a single inbox. With just a few taps, users can quickly switch between inboxes to see messages from any single account. In addition, users can now thread their messages by conversation, making it easier to stay on top of email discussions, as well as open email attachments with compatible apps from the App Store.

iAd, Apple’s new mobile advertising platform, combines the emotion of TV ads with the interactivity of web ads. Today, when users click on mobile ads they are almost always taken out of their app to a web browser, which loads the advertiser’s webpage. Users must then navigate back to their app, and it is often difficult or impossible to return to exactly where they left. iAd solves this problem by displaying full-screen video and interactive ad content without ever leaving the app.

The iPhone OS 4 beta release includes a developer preview of Game Center, which contains a set of APIs that allows developers to create apps with the ability to invite friends to play a game, start a multiplayer game through matchmaking and track achievements and compare high scores on a leader board

Other new features include:

• Spell check
• Larger fonts for e-mail, texts, and alerts
• Persistent Wi-Fi
• Tap to focus video
• Customizable wallpapers for the home screen
• Search text messages
• Choose image size in mail messages
• Recent Web searches
• Create playlists
• 5x digital zoom in camera
• Bluetooth keyboards
• Gifting of apps
• iPod out
• Birthday calendar
• Wake on wireless
• File and delete mail search results
• Web search suggestions
• Rotate photos