Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"Find out who's around, what to do, and where to go. Introducing background location sharing on the new Loopt so you can always stay connected with your close friends and family."

New in version 3.0.0 is the ability to constantly update your location as a background task, and to get push notifications from nearby friends. Also new with this version is a new, easier-to-navigate home screen, the ability to discover favorite places from the Loopt community, and the ability to keep track of "favorite" friends. A nice upgrade to an already free product.

"We all know that the iPhone 4 launches this coming Thursday. But on Monday, current iPhone users get an early treat in the form of iOS 4, the new iPhone operating system (formerly known as iPhone OS 4). It comes with several enhancements, but the ones people seem most excited about involve multitasking (or background tasks). A little over a week ago, Apple began urging developers to submit their iOS 4-ready app, and a number of them have. And actually, some have already been approved, or will be shortly."

TechCrunch has provided a "Best of" list of a handful of apps that are "iOS 4 Ready," that is, may support new new OS features at release (or soon after release), mainly multitasking, or as Apple refers to it, fast app switching. Not a large number yet, but expect to see new versions coming soon for many of your favorites. Oddly enough, several apps that have been reviewed have no apparent changes or enhancements to support iOS 4, so maybe this is an opportunity for developers to fine-tune their apps.

Just what did Steve Jobs teach us today? Well, initially what we learned about what the latest product to come out of Cupertino, the iPad. We learned 300,000 iPads sold on Saturday (with a total of 450,000 so far), 250,000 books downloaded on day one and as of today that total reached 600,000. We also learned that there are over 185,000 apps in the App Store with 3,500 of them specifically for the iPad. And we learned that the iPhone won the JD Power satisfaction award for 2010 making it three years in a row. They have also sold 50 million iPhones, and a combined 85 million iPhones and iPod Touches. For the iPhone OS 4.0 we learned that there are over 100 new user features, that include creating playlists, 5x digital zoom, tap to focus, home screen customizable wallpaper, file and delete mail search results and many others but Steve wanted to focus on just seven of those features.

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"Apple's new iPad is being criticized for lacking the capacity to run multiple third party applications at once, but the company has a variety of options to pursue in addressing the issue."

Lot of complaining without much to base it on. We still don't know what the OS is going to look like on the final product, and as the article says when comparing the iPad to the iPhone , "The iPhone OS is constantly running system processes that listen to the mobile network for incoming calls and texts, it runs an iPod process for playing back music all the time, it watches for background notifications being sent to idle apps, and there's a variety of other things always going on. This is the definition of multitasking."

For what I plan on using this for (book reader mainly and surfing the web), I don't see that expanded multitasking beyond what is already on the iPhone will be a deal breaker for me. What are your thoughts?