Well Apple didn’t disappoint, announcing over 100 new user features would be available in OS4, like Apple I’m not going to talk through all 100 here; just those that I think will be most useful to me…

Multitasking

Apple have finally got round to adding multitasking to the iPhone, meaning I can have multiple Apps running and quickly switch between them! No longer will I have to quit ‘DoodleJump’ to check my latest emails or stop listening to Radio 1 on ‘TuneIn Radio’ to read the latest news.

Apple of course claim to have multitasking nailed, they say it won’t affect performance or battery life. I don’t doubt they will have made it work great, just a shame it took so long.

Folders

Okay, so this is pretty basic functionality but it’s going to make life a lot easier on my iPhone. I currently have about 100 Apps on my iPhone, spread across 7 pages; three of the pages are just full of games!  I’ll soon be able to put all these games in one folder cunningly called ‘games’; instantly taking me down to 4 pages of Apps!

Instead of six swipes of my thumb to launch another frustrating game of ‘Impossible’ I can have the Games folder on my first page of Apps. Folders also means I can now have over 2,000 Apps visible instead of the paltry 180 in OS3.

Game Centre

This could be massive – basically Xbox Live for the iPhone! Games will be able to plug-in to the game centre for Leader boards and Achievements. You’ll be able to see what your friends are playing and challenge them to a game. With over 50,000 games and 50 million users this could be good.

One Inbox

At last, this has always been a bug bare for many; having to come right out of one email account to check another. Now all my emails can appear nicely in one list, who knows why we had to wait for OS4 for this one!

Exchange Server 2010 support

OS4 will support more than one exchange email account and Exchange Server 2010. SpiderGroup will soon be moving our own servers to Exchange 2010 so this is good news for all our customers using iPhones. Apple have also beefed up security in OS4, something they have previously taken flak for.

1500 new APIs

This doesn’t mean much at the moment to those of us who aren’t developers but later this year we can expect to see a host of new and updated Apps which use these APIs to deliver some great new features. The new APIs will give developers a great deal more flexibility and functionality to play – watch this space!

Roll on the summer

Apple have yet to announce if they’ll be releasing another generation iPhone in the summer, I’m betting they will and if the rumours are accurate we can expect a better camera with a flash, a forward facing camera and Apple’s new processor technology used in the iPad for a speed boost.  I don’t imagine the physical design will change much, but Apple could go crazy and release some more colours!

Most of Exchange 2007 appears to have been rewritten to better support large-scale deployments.

• Built-in archiving with retention policy and e-discovery support. Many 3rd party vendors who have built a business upon Exchange Archiving solutions have reason to be concerned. Coupled with Microsoft’s own Exchange Archiving Online, these 3rd party solutions appear to be going the way of the dodo…

• On-premise or Online? How about both….depending on the organisation’s requirements, the on-premise solution will integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Exchange Online.
• Policies for big business – There’s a centralised policy definition and management system. This is based on mainstream regular expression pattern matching and simple boolean logic, applying to message content and metadata, and for users and groups of users. Polices can be enforced manually or through user intervention. The policy framework is used in a variety of contexts, such as for data leak prevention, rights management, determining what is archived, and retention policy.

Other improvements that will have users and administrators looking pleased are;

• Windows Mobile experience steps ever closer to being the same as the desktop via Outlook.
• Anti-error/embarassment features with “MailTips,” users are automatically warned about potential faux pas when an an email is about to be sent, such as when a distribution list will cause it to be received by a very large number of people, or when the email is so large it’s likely to bounce, or when recipients are out of the office.
• Cross-browsers support for OWA – now supports all the main browsers including Safari and Firefox, not just IE.
• Google-esque Conversation view – Email conversations are much easier to manage via the updated Conversation View.
• Voicemail previews - Text previews are generated of voicemail in Outlook, OWA, and Outlook Mobile. This saves a lot of time when quickly scanning through voice messages.
• External Diary Access – Free/busy times can be exchanged with outside parties, not just internal colleagues, with due privacy controls.
• Press 1 to leave me a voicemail – User-customizable voicemail menu hierarchies.
• Much reduced I/O and much more flexible storage options. Continuous replication over WANs is now practical, and provides much faster recovery for damaged message stores. There is generally better resilience in case of system failure.
• Much faster mailbox moves; can be done while users are online, during regular business hours.

Microsoft points out that a number of these features help address the age old problem of mailbox overload, such as MailTips, Voicemail previews, the conversation management tools, the call answering rules, and the rich and consistent Windows/OWA/mobile experience. All of these are welcome and good developments.

However, don’t expect email overload to go away.