Apple's OS 4 and the new Game Center

Engadget has the live feed from Apple's iPhone OS4 event and Steve Jobs revealed the iPad has sold 450,000 units through today. So it's going well. Also, 1/3 of all iPad exclusive apps are games just in case you hadn't heard. Of course that is a lower % compared to the iPhone, but it is the highest single category on the iPad. On top of that they announced Best Buy is out of stock and 600k iBooks have been downloaded with 3.5 million iPad apps downloaded for an attach ratio of 7.78.

As for the iPhone, the first news is that Apple is now reporting 50 million units sold since the initial launch and on top of that another 35 million iPod Touches have been sold. That's a big market for a device that can play games.

But the big news is iPhone OS 4 that should be coming out this summer. Lots of interesting things for both developers and consumers, however Mr. Jobs highlighted seven of what he calls "tentpole" features:

1) Multitasking. It was hard to see on the website how well this worked, but it was inevitable that Apple would do this since Apple's competitors are all embracing multitasking as an essential smartphone ability as this class of devices is a defacto mobile computer. For gaming, this is essential to be able to automatically freeze your game when you take a call or check an email and then go back to where you were in the game. For some games this isn't really a problem, but others would reset when you left the app. They highlighted background audio which is really more music, such as being to continue to play Pandora radio music when switching to other apps. Nice if you use your iPhone as an iPod for music, though for video I suppose you could hear the audio from it but since it is video you'd probably want to stop so you don't miss it when you switch away to check something. Then for voice over IP things like Skype will work better for free phone calls. Wait, it's a cell phone... Anyway, they then talked about background location so for example, if you are getting turn-by-turn vocal driving instructions from a navigation app you could be in another app and still hear the audible prompts. That's neat. There were a few more examples of how this will be a benefit, but let's move on.

2) Folder. This applies to the pages of apps you collect. Counting all the apps in my iTunes that I have taken off my iPhone but still own, I probably have 10 pages worth of apps. Maybe more. Folder will allow you to put groupings of apps into folders so you can group things like games, social networking, media etc. I have to admit that is pretty sweet to be able to organize my sea of apps and especially all the games.

3) Unified mail inbox. Not really a benefit to gaming, but you'll be able to organize emails by thread like in gmail and open attachments using actual apps instead of the mail viewer. There are some other things for mail as well. Pretty clever.

4) iBooks for your iPhone. Nothing revolutionary here. They're taking what they did for the iPad and putting it on the iPhone. Nice, I guess.

5) Enterprise. Basically there are some new features for enterprise use of iPhones.

6) Game Center. This is the big one. Essentially Game Center is a gaming social network within the iPhone game universe. Apple showed a slide comparing the iPhone to the PSP and DS for number of gaming/entertainment apps with iPhone at 50,700, DS at 4,321 and PSP at 2,477. Yes, comparing games between the portable consoles and the iPhone is not apples to apples, but Apple was obviously proud to point this out, even if some of those 50k apps include farting and paper tossing apps for 99 cents else free. The best way to describe Game Center is that it is like Xbox Live or PSN: you can invite friends, do matchmaking, see leaderboards and, yes, track achievements. Think about that last one. Remember the Xbox Live achievement gold rush back in 2005, 2006 and even into 2007? The fervor over achievement scores isn't what it once was, but it is still is important in online console communities. It's huge in Warcraft mainly because when you get an achievement everyone around you and everyone in your guild hears about it and you often get "gratz" messages to you. Indeed that is a little emotional boost that does a lot. How this will exactly work on the iPhone wasn't fully explained, but it is safe to say it will be a lot like Xbox Live achievements. Mark my words, this will have a big impact on the iPhone gaming market and Apple is very smart to do this.

7) iAd. This feature will be built into OS4 and will allow developers to integrate ads into their apps that when clicked on, don't take the user out of the app to Safari. It's because of that issue that so many in-app (and yes, in-game ads) don't get clicked on because you leave the app. iAd will allow interactive audio/video ads to appear and then close that don't take the user out of the app. So the ad displays entirely within the app. Apple will sell and host the ads and keep 40% of revenues generated from the ads. The ads themselves can be very interactive and allow users to make purchases from within the ad, making them more like apps within apps. Mark my words, this will have a big impact on the iPhone gaming market and Apple is very smart to do this.