iPhone Software 3.1, iTunes 9, other Apple announcements

For as many years as I can remember, Apple has held an event in September to announce new iPods.  Yesterday, Apple's Steve Jobs hosted this year's event at the Yerba Buena theater in San Francisco to introduce the new iPod lineup for the 2009 holiday season.  Because one of the most popular iPods is the iPod touch, which is in many ways just an iPhone without the phone, iPod events are increasingly also becoming iPhone events.  There were a number of important iPhone-related announcements yesterday, so let's get to them.

Impressive Numbers

Steve Jobs loves to announce impressive numbers when he gives presentations, and yesterday was no exception.  He noted that there are over 75,000 apps in the App Store.  (Over 21,000 of them are games and entertainment apps.)  Users have downloaded over 1.8 billion apps.  iTunes is now in 23 countries and is the #1 music retailer in the world, with over 8.5 billion songs sold.

iPhone Software 3.1

The new iPhone operating system, version 3.1, is now available and includes many new features.  Steve Jobs focused on only two of these at the event (the App Store Genius and the new ringtones), but here are all of the new features that I have found so far.

1. The iPhone can now recommend apps for you based on the other apps that you own.  Once you enable the Genius feature on your iPhone, you see a list of suggested apps, and for each one you are told that the suggestion is based on another app that you already have.  Jason Snell, the editor of Macworld, stated on Twitter that Apple will use app metrics to monitor your app habits including which apps you own, how many times you have launched the app, the duration of use, etc.  In my tests so far, the feature recommended apps to me based on apps that I rarely use, but I presume that after it monitors my usage for a while, and after Apple collects more information from iPhone owners about the apps that they use the most, this feature will improve.  As Jobs said yesterday, "this will only get better and better and better as we get larger databases of people, what they buy, what they like, the recommendations will get better and better, just like they have [with the similar Genius feature] for music."  Considering the enormous number of apps on the app store, anything that helps you find the apps that you will find most useful is a great feature.
2. If you sync with Microsoft Exchange, the iPhone now does a better job of syncing the calendar and handling invitations, and some potential security flaws were fixed.
3. You can now purchase ringtones for $1.29 a piece.  Apple previously let you use iTunes to create your own ringtone from many songs or use GarageBand on a Mac to create your own ringtone from any song (both of which you can still do), but with 3.1 you also can buy a ready-made ringtone right on the iPhone itself from a selection of over 30,000 ringtones.  So now if you feel the immediate urge to hear Frank Sinatra sing "Start spreadin' the news..." every time your client calls from the corporate headquarters in New York, NY, Apple has you covered.  I don't use ringtones myself, but given the mini-concerts I hear around me when other cell phones ring, it appears that I am in the minority.
4. If you use MobileMe, you can now remotely lock your iPhone.  For security reasons, I have long recommended that everyone enable the Auto-Lock feature on their iPhones.  That way, if you misplace your iPhone, someone else cannot pick it up and use it without entering the code.  With 3.1, if you misplace your iPhone and even if you have Auto-Lock turned off, you can jump on the MobileMe website and send a signal to your iPhone to lock it.  The four digit code will override any Auto-Lock passcode that was previously set on your iPhone, which could be useful if someone gets access to your iPhone and knows your prior passcode.  I tested this feature and it works great; a fraction of a second after I told MobileMe to lock my iPhone, my iPhone immediately went into Auto-Lock mode and wouldn't allow access until I entered the new code.
5. If you have an iPhone 3GS and you record some video, you now have the option to trim the video and save it as a new file.  So now you can take a long video, trim it to a nice small clip that is suitable for uploading to YouTube or MobileMe or for e-mailing to a friend, and still retain the uncut long version for transferring to your computer.
6. If you have an iPhone 3GS, you can now use Voice Control with Bluetooth headsets.  I've been testing a very nice Bluetooth headset that will be the subject of an upcoming review on iPhone J.D., and I look forward to putting this feature through its paces.
7. With 3.1 you can triple-click the home button to activate certain accessibility features such as turning on the VoiceOver system, changing the display to the high-contrast white on black view, or activating the iPhone’s zoom feature.
8. The iPhone has long allowed you to tap on any number that looks like a phone number and iPhone would offer to dial that number.  Now, you can also copy a number and paste it into the keypad on the Phone app.  And if you copy a phone number that includes letters, such as 1-800-LAWSUIT, the phone will correctly translate that into numbers. 
9. You could previously use the iTunes app on the iPhone to redeem gift certificates, promotional codes, etc. for both songs and apps.  Now you can also do so within the App Store app.  And related to this, both the App Store and the iTunes app will now show you your account credit if  you have previously redeemed a gift certificate or otherwise have money in your iTunes account.
10. If someone sends you iPhone-compatible video attached to an e-mail or a MMS message, you can now download that video to your camera roll.  (And by the way, AT&T says that MMS support is coming on September 25.)
11. Thanks to anti-phishing features, Safari will warn you if you visit a suspicious looking website.
12. If you have an iPhone 3G, you will now get better Wi-Fi performance when Bluetooth is turned on.  I didn't even realize this had been an issue.
13. Finally, there are other miscellaneous bug fixes and security improvements, such as a fix to a bug that caused some app icons to display incorrectly.  Macworld has more information on these if you want the nitty gritty details.

There may be even more new features that I haven't discovered yet, but these are some really nice improvements for a .1 update.

iTunes 9

There's a lot to love in the new iTunes version 9 including a slick new interface.  There are a few new features that will be especially important for iPhone owners.  First, you can now manage your iPhone apps using iTunes.  Finally!  It is so much easier to use the large screen of a computer and a mouse to move apps around between pages on the iPhone rather than using  your finger on the iPhone itself to drag apps, one at a time, to reorganize them.  You can even move multiple apps at one time.  I had essentially given up on organizing apps on my iPhone because I have so many of them and was instead using the Spotlight search feature to find and launch apps by just typing in the first letter or two.  But now that I can easily manage my apps using iTunes, I look forward to having everything neat and organized.  If only iTunes could also help me organize my desk...

There are improved options for syncing with iTunes making it much easier to select the music, video, podcasts and (if you use a Mac) photos that you want to sync.  For example, you can now choose to sync all of the music from a specific artist and you can now choose to sync a specific season or even a specific episode of a TV show.  If you sync photos on your iPhone with a Mac, you can now select specific events or albums to sync, and can even use the Faces feature to sync all of your pictures that contain a specific person.

iTunes 9 also includes a new Genuis Mix feature.  The old Genius Playlist feature allowed you to select one song and have iTunes select similar songs.  With the new Genuis Mix feature, iTunes collects songs of a similar genre on your iPhone and plays them in a random order.  It will take me some time to warm up to this feature; I find it odd that you can't see a playlist to see what song is coming next.  Regardless, the iPhone angle here is that any Genuis Mixes that iTunes 9 creates on your computer can be synced to your iPhone.  (They are not synced by default; you have to select them under the "Music" tab when your iPhone is connected to your computer.)

There is also a new Home Sharing feature that allows multiple computers in the same household to share music.  If you have multiple iPhones in your household, this feature might make it easier for different people to sync their iPhones with different computers.  My wife and I both have iPhones and up until now, we've needed to sync with the same computer to sync songs.  Now that songs can be shared with multiple computers, perhaps she can instead sync with her laptop, but we haven't tested this yet.

iPod Touch, and What It Means for the iPhone

Apple spent a lot of time at yesterday's event discussing the new iPod touch.  The iPod touch runs the iPhone OS and while it lacks some of the features of the iPhone—obviously it lacks a phone, and it also lacks a camera, microphone and GPS—it is a great alternative for anyone who wants an iPhone but doesn't want to switch their cell phone service to AT&T.  It is interesting that Apple now includes a video camera with the new smaller, cheaper iPod nano but not the iPod touch; Steve Jobs told David Pogue of the New York Times that the camera was omitted to reduce the price of the iPod touch and make it the most inexpensive way to get a device that can access the App Store.  Apple has reduced the prices on the iPod touch so you can now get an 8 GB version for only $199 or a version with a faster processor, iPhone-like earphones with a remote and the Voice Control feature of the iPhone 3GS for $299 (32 GB) or $399 (64 GB). 

With the iPod touch now available with 64 GB, this is a sure sign that the next generation of the iPhone will also include a 64 GB model.  I also see that the new iPod nano includes an FM radio receiver and a pedometer to keep track of your steps.  I think it far less likely that we will see those two features on the next iPhone.  The iPhone already contains a bunch of other radios and this one could cause unnecessary interference considering that you can already access Internet radio.  Moreover, the addition of the pedometer to the iPod nano reflects that many people use the nano when they workout; far fewer people use the iPhone to workout, and if they do they can already use Nike+ devices if they have an iPhone 3GS.  [UPDATE 9/11/09:  According to Chris Breen's well-written review of the new nano for Macworld, the pedometer simply uses the accelerometer to measure every bump as a step.  Since the iPhone already has an accelerometer, it would be a simple software change to add a pedometer to the iPhone.  I'm still not sure that it makes sense for an iPhone to contain this exercise-centric feature, but it would be simple to add and the iPhone does have another exercise feature (Nike+), so maybe we'll see it in a future software update.]   Anything is possible, so maybe the next iPhone will have 64 GB, an FM radio and a pedometer.

What I found most interesting about the iPod touch announcements was the sales.  Apple has sold 20 million iPod units.  Combine that with 30 million iPhones sold and there are now 50 million devices out there that run the iPhone OS.  That's a huge market for iPhone app developers.  And while I think of the iPhone when I think of the iPhone OS, these numbers reveal that a full 40% of the people using the iPhone OS are not using an iPhone, but instead just an iPod touch.  That's fascinating.  I know that there are many attorneys who read iPhone J.D. and who own an iPod touch instead of an iPhone, but it never occurred to me that the number could theoretically be as high as 40%.  (It's not, of course; I'm sure that many of those iPod touch sales are to kids and young adults who use them for music and games, which is confirmed by comments made by Steve Jobs in his interview with David Pogue.)

In Summary

The focus of yesterday's Apple event may have been the iPod, but iPhone owners will find a lot to love in the free iPhone 3.1 and iTunes 9 updates.  Looking ahead, in light of the timing of prior updates to the iPhone, I suspect that we will see another iPhone update with new features (presumably called 3.2) before the end of this year.