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AppleMactablet

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 25, 2010
243
23
If anyone has used the beta or the recently released Gold Master of iOS 4.0 on the iPod touch 2nd Gen, could you explain what features that come with iOS 4.0.

As we all know 2nd Gen users will not get multi tasking, but what about background wallpapers, battery life percentage, and others?
 
Can you get Battery Percentage?
What happens when you double tap Home?
Photo Application-any different?

Thanks:)
 
Okay, I'll explain a little bit more.

I'm running build 8A293. I don't know if this is Gold Master or not. I am running it on a 2G iPod touch (8GB) and I noticed a couple of things:

* the icon animation after sliding to unlock is similar to iPad now. It's a very neat animation

* the system overall is much faster. I've compared it to an iPod touch 3G running iPhone OS 3, and mine is notably faster. In fact, I believe this iPod is technically very capable of multi tasking. Apple is deliberately disabling the feature to make you upgrade. This is good news to iPhone 3G users, because I always felt the iPhone 3G was sluggish. This update should improve its performance

* the dock is now similar in appearance to the one in OS X. Actually, I remember it looked like this on every 1G iPod touch before iPhone OS 2. It just returned

* folders work, and very well too

* there is NO home screen background possible in any way. If this is the Gold Master I'm using, then I'm sorry for all iPod users (including myself:D)

* dubble clicking the home button does not bring up the multitask menu. Instead, it does what it has always done: bring up the iPod quick controls

* some of the icons have slightly updated, including weather, safari, calculator and I think clock too but I'm not sure

* Game Center is a new app, but since I don't have any friends I can't check it out. My username is Cloudsurf3r

* there is no battery percentage indicator as far as I'm aware
 
Thank you very much for all that info.Hopely the OS on the 21st get wallpapers at least
 
The 2g don't get wallpapers or multitasking. Watch the April keynote.
 
The iPod touch 2nd generation essentially has all of the features of any other iOS 4 device, but no multitasking or background wallpaper functionality's. You may jailbreak the device to get these features, however.
 
* the system overall is much faster. I've compared it to an iPod touch 3G running iPhone OS 3, and mine is notably faster. In fact, I believe this iPod is technically very capable of multi tasking. Apple is deliberately disabling the feature to make you upgrade.

This is good to hear.

However, the reason multitasking is disabled probably isn't due solely to marketing. The 3G touch, as well as the iPad and iPhone 4 have double the amount of RAM that the 2G hardware does. IIRC, the iOS doesn't use VM, so every application that is loaded has to be loaded into RAM, which then becomes a real limitation.

Another poster here has mentioned that hacking iOS 4 on a jailbroken touch to activate multitasking, though very simple, results in a very poorly performing device. Since Apple gives priority to the user experience, substandard performance likely would not be acceptable.

All in all iOS 4 still gives a lot of something, for nothing.
 
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