On Thursday last week Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs gave a sneak preview into the future of the iPhone operating system.

The one thing that hits me about these phones is they don’t do everything – but they do most things and everything they do – they do extremely well.

OS 4 will be bringing lots of new features to the iPhone including the ability run multiple applications at once.

“It’s really easy to implement multi tasking in a way that really drains battery life these apps start running in the back ground and there goes your battery and it’s really easy to implement it in a way that reduces the performance of the foreground app and makes your phone feel really sluggish.... We have figured out how to implement multitasking for third party apps and avoid those things – that’s what took is a little longer but I think we nailed it’” Steve Jobs - Apple CEO

For the business user we see better email support and features including being able to access more than one Microsoft Exchange Server account from the phone. Data encryption keeps all your data safe should you lose your phone. There is also mobile device management – making it easy to roll out and look after iPhones across an organisation.

For the consumer there are features like iBooks (download and read books on your iPhone) and a completely new Game Centre – there are now over 50,000 games in the App Store. Apple are adding a Social gaming network, invite your friends and play!

For the App Developer – iAd – Apples advanced advertising platform, making adverts more interactive and rich in multimedia while keeping the user within the application they are running. Apple sells and hosts the ads and pays the developer.

You can watch the whole hour long presentation by clicking here