Apple iOS 4.2 Hands-On 212
adeelarshad82 writes "Apple's highly-anticipated iOS 4.2 update for iPad, iPhone, and the iPod touch finally arrived this morning, along with an update for Apple TV. The update includes Airplay, which enables wireless streaming of video, photos, and music from your iOS device to Apple TV. AirPlay is an exciting new development for iOS device owners who also have Apple TVs. As long as the devices are on the same wireless network, they automatically detect each other. AirPlay also lets users multitask while streaming video to an Apple TV. Unfortunately though, AirPlay is a one-way street. Users cannot stream something they rented on Apple TV to their iOS device. The iOS 4.2 update also included the introduction of AirPrint, which is the wireless printing solution for the iPad. (The ability to print to a printer attached to a local PC or Mac was dropped from the release, however.) Other minor changes Apple squeezed into this update were: better Word document fidelity in iWork, multi-tasking, and Game Center."
Re:Been running a dev build for a few weeks now (Score:2, Interesting)
"In multitasking, if you see a task manager... they blew it" - Steve Jobs.
Re:Been running a dev build for a few weeks now (Score:5, Interesting)
It's been there since iOS 4, and Apple says that you should normally not have to fully quit the apps anymore due to how multitasking works. They shouldn't consume much resources when not being in use. So that's probably why quitting stuff has been moved out of the way a bit.
I can confirm that Apple isn't bullshitting on all this, since until my pretty rare iPhone 3Gs resets, I often end up having 15 apps running at a time with no noticeable impact to battery life or sluggishness.
Re:Been running a dev build for a few weeks now (Score:3, Interesting)
My personal experience with older apps on iOS 4.2.1 is that they don't go to sleep nicely. They basically just close. Two examples I have of this are the Huffington Post and USA Today apps. If you leave them (say to change what you are listening to in Pandora) and come back via the quick app switching bar (double click home button) they will simply restart as if you just launched them. Other apps, like Twitter, deal with the switch beautifully. It is going to be a bit before iOS apps deal with multitasking properly.
Re:Does not require extra purchase (Score:3, Interesting)
It doesn't, because you can AirPlay to any Mac.
How?
This is the first anyone has mentioned this. Also, none of the people on the iOS developer forums seem to know how.
Are you sure you're not confusing AirPlay and AirPrint?
I want AirPlay Reverse (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems really pretty dumb to stream media (except when on travel or sharing a few recent photos) from the smallest device you own in terms of storage space, and battery life. I want to be able to stream from my Mac (PC whatever) TO the iOS devices. I'm perfectly fine with limiting the formats so I have to transcode on the sender. That would make the appleTV a perfect media center thin client. It would also give me all sorts of music when mowing the grass for instance with my phone. I could watch a movie in bed that I just downloaded from the net without adding media that might be a one-time viewing into my iTunes library and syncing.
Apple already does this with the airport express and DAAP (and friends: DMAP, DPAP), this should not be a big leap to treat my iPhone as an airport express of sorts.
Sheldon
Re:I want AirPlay Reverse (Score:3, Interesting)
That "except when on travel or sharing a few recent photos" is huge. These are mobile devices after all! Visit your parents, hit a button on your phone and you can pop a video on their TV. Go to a party with a cool song no one's heard, you can play it to the hosts speakers with no cables. AirPlay solves the problem of everyone huddling around the tiniest screen in the room. Now you can amazingly easily play and share your stuff with other people's equipment. It's a shame it's Apple device centric.
Re:Been running a dev build for a few weeks now (Score:3, Interesting)
I would agree with everything you said, but....my experience with the HTC Evo was that in Eclair, having a task manager was a must. Before the Froyo update, I had to regularly kill applications by hand because the phone would become sluggish to the point of being almost unusable and battery life would plummet. Killing apps that I didn't want/need made an immediate and noticeable difference. After the update though, I disabled auto-kill on my task manager and found that everything was pretty much fine.
Is it possible that there was some other change that happened around the time of Froyo that would account for this? I suppose so, but my feeling is that Eclair just didn't manage resources anywhere near as well as Froyo does.
Re:Still not available to everbody ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Beware that the user agreement for iTunes gives Apple permissions you probably don't expect, like gathering data on how you use you machine. Expect that they see app log files. Many of the disc ripping and burning utilities, as well as video conversion utilities such as HandBrake log the files or disks processed. ClamX AV keeps a log of files scanned. Note the use of "verfiy compliance" below:
It's absolutely absurd to think Apple is reading your Handbrake or ClamAV logs. This sort of wording is about how iTunes tells Apple what kind of iPhone you have and what apps you have so it can tell you what updates are available.
Apple is very keen on privacy. I'd be extremely surprised if they did anything even remotely as far-reaching as you are implying.
Re:Still not available to everbody ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Welcome to Slashdot, where Apple collecting technical specs on your device is something to beware, but don't you dare criticize Google for driving WiFi-snooping vans around your neighborhood to gather emails and passwords.