Apple iOS 4.2 Review

Apple iOS 4.2 was finally released for the iPhones, iPod Touch and iPad on 23rd November 2010. This is our review of this new iOS release. We were not planning to review this release because it is fairly minor but, some interesting new features are included if you own an Apple TV device. The software was made available through Apple's iOS developer program several times but the final release to the public suffered a number of delays, due to bugs.

Air Print

AirPrint is the biggest new feature for iPhone and iPod Touch users. It allows wireless printing via a shared printer, or directly through some HP branded printers. The functionality is delivered via a new Print Center application. It is only available on iOS devices that can multitask (i.e. not the iPhone 3G).

iOS 4.1 finally brings content rental support for iTunes. The key driver for this is actually the Apple TV service though.

In addition, iOS 4.2 for the iPhone will debut a new icon for the Voice Memo application, a new version of modem firmware, and some new font additions for the Notes app. It will also add support for importing .ics files directly as a way to add events to the native Calendar application.

iPad

iOS 4.2 provides many features on the iPad that are already available on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The main ones being multi-tasking and folders. On the iPad users will be able to store up to 20 apps in each folder (it's 12 on the iPhone).

Find My Phone

Apple has made this a free service. Looks like a cunning ploy to get people to sign up to Mobile Me but, rumour has it that this will be a free service soon. It's very good.

New Spotlight Preferences

Apple has added a new Spotlight Search preference pane under the General Settings panel with options to include or disallow search results based on the following categories: Contacts, Applications, Music, Podcasts, Videos, Audiobooks, Notes, Mail and Events. Users can also reorder those categories to force search results to display in the order of their liking.

AirPlay

AirPlay provides new features when playing content on an iPhone or iPod, which allow you to select an Apple TV device on the same network as the target output device for audio and video. Essentially a remote pair of speakers and a remote video display. Unfortunately, this functionality doesn't work for all apps. Firstly they need to be enabled to take advantage of this capability and secondly, iOS 4.2 only seems to support native apps and not web apps like BBC iPlayer, the You Tube web app, etc.

In fact it is probably worth listing what doesn't work first to get the disappointment out of the way:

You can push photos from the Photo app to Apple TV and play a slide show but, you can't push video clips from your camera roll.
Web apps like BBC iPlayer and YouTube can be pushed to Apple TV but only the audio component reaches the device.
The native YouTube app only pushes audio to Apple TV.
The VLC app only pushes audio to the Apple TV.
TV Catchup supports pushing of audio only.
iMovie doesn't seem to play out video clips to Apple TV.
Spotify is enabled to use AirPlay but, only when your phone is docked. The AirPlay icon is 'hidden' behid the [i] (for info) button for the currently playing track.
Apple's own Gallery app can only push audio component of video clips to Apple TV.
iTunes video previews only push the audio component to Apple TV.
Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity by Apple was not enabling Facetime calls to be pushed to Apple TV.

Whilst AirPlay has made Apple TV a million times more useful, Apple still have some way to go and iOS 4.3 is rumoured to be released in December 2010. Hopefully it will take on board the user feedback and add some of the obvious, missing features above.

iTunes

In this latest version of iTunes you can push all video in your library to the Apple TV device and still control it when using the iPhone remote app. This is a really useful feature as you no longer need to keep a PC near the TV, or even in your lounge. Your iPhone can now control an out of sight PC streaming content to your Apple TV. Better still, iTunes can output to multiple speakers and devices, so you now have multi-room support too.

Another way to do something very similar (but a subset of your library) is to simply push iPod output to Apple TV. This is a hugely powerful and convenient feature for casual listening without having to plug in some headphones. In this respect the Apple TV is acting like an Airport Express device and I'm very tempted to put on in my bedroom, with a new TV, as a second screen to watch movies and TV content on.

It's a shame iTunes can't import other video formats and transcode them :-(