iOS 4 impressions

Apple's iOS 4, the latest version of the company's iPhone and iPod touch operating system, is out, awesome, and, on the iPhone 3GS at least, the company's smoothest-running new operating system in years.

iOS (previously iPhone OS, and kinda/sorta OS X before that) updates should be met by users with equal parts anticipation and skepticism. iPhone OS 2.0 brought the now-legendary App Store, but was stupid buggy. That's not even mentioning what Gizmodo dubbed the iPocalypse, when the iTunes activation servers went down and my phone was useless for half a day. It took multiple updates to feel solid, but eventually the 2.family surpassed 1.1.4 on pure stability while adding sneaky-cool improvements like Google Street View. iPhone OS 3 added a ton of smaller, nice day-to-day features (copy-and-paste, MMS, more prevalent landscape keyboard) but brought with it lag on older devices. (Makes sense; the first two iPhones had half the RAM of the 3GS, though they became smoother in later iterations of version 3.)

iOS 4? Well, perhaps it's too early to say for sure, but it's very, very good. Some highlights:

• Runs like a dream. The 3GS has only half the RAM of the iPhone 4, reportedly; still, the phone is responsive and everything works just as well as you'd expect. Special attention was paid to transitions and animations and that makes the whole experience feel right.

• Home screen wallpaper. This is exactly the kind of Apple update that makes an Android user laugh in derision, but it's cool. Honestly, changing the wallpaper, icons and sounds was the coolest thing I ever did on my O.G. after jailbreaking it, which should tell you how lame jailbreaking is for the average bear. It's nice to have a little variety.

• Multitasking. Everyone calls this the must-have feature for 4.0; outside of Pandora, I didn't think I'd care. And I sort of don't, though I'm getting used to double-tapping the home button to switch between applications quickly. Pandora's great, plus it works with the lock-screen music controls, which were previously iPod-only. Those controls still bring up the back, play/pause, and skip buttons, which is kind of weird as you can't go back on a streaming Internet station (touching the button does nothing), but, quirks aside, it works great. Pandora's so smooth that I keep thinking it's the iPod app, so now I'm getting in the habit of bringing up the multitasking menu and swiping left-to-right across it to get to the music controls there, which also show which app is playing audio. The number of apps in the multitasking menu is insane. Right now I have 23 down there, and you scroll through them four at a time. It's not like I'm going to remember that I was doing something 18 apps ago and use that menu to switch to it.

• Super syncing. My 3GS syncs in a minute or two; on 3.1.3, if I went a few days, it would easily take more than twenty. That wasn't the case when the phone was new, so it could have been some sort of issue with my phone or computer, but regardless, I no longer dread adding a new song.

• SMS character count. You can turn on a counter now to see how close you are to 160 characters. I can't articulate a good reason but I really wanted this. I guess I just don't want to send my friends messages that spill into two (though one friend recently sent me a text that was a mind-blowing seven messages long).

• iBooks. I don't know if this should count, since it's technically a separate app. iBooks is cool; I haven't decided yet if I will ever use it beyond reading Winnie the Pooh someday. The built-in PDF viewing is useless for the few page-sized PDFs I put on it. But I really like the page-style reading. I've tried a few self-contained book apps before that require scrolling and, ever since I read this article, they're really annoying to use.

• Bluetooth keyboard support. I'm considering buying one of Apple's sweet Bluetooth keyboards to use for long e-mails. I'm not proud of what a huge nerd that makes me (and I'm fast enough on an iPhone keyboard that I'm told I resemble a 13-year-old), but there you go.

And here are a few other things that aren't quite highlights:

• Global inbox. This is a cool idea, seeing all your new e-mails in one place, though it makes permanently deleting my work e-mails (I get a lot that I delete quickly) kind of a pain.

• Spell check. Don't really care. The phone already corrects for typos really well; if you would have spelled a word correctly, but hit the wrong key, it'll usually get it right. That's a bigger problem for me than spelling. (You know that means there's some horribly misspelled word in here that I've missed.)

• Faces/Places in photos. I don't sync with a Mac, so I don't get to use the facial-recognition that comes with iPhoto and now syncs to iPhones and iPod touches. However, at the bottom of my list of albums there is now a big "Places" button that takes me to a Google map of the U.S. with little pins everywhere I've taken a picture. This is stupid, since my pictures are already kind of organized, and since it places three pictures I took on a drive from Boulder to Longmont in Missouri for some reason. I would rather be able to see one more album on the last line without scrolling. But I'll live.