• 2-D physics. In the amazing Crayon Physics app, you draw things with your finger—and they come to life, responding to real-life gravity and physics. It’s enchanting, and an addictive puzzle game. Or try Rolando, an insanely popular puzzle-physics game. • Remote. This amazing free program from Apple turns the iPhone into a WiFi, whole-house remote control for your Mac or PC’s music playback. Remote can also control an apple Tv. in fact, it’s a great match for the apple Tv, because whenever you’re supposed to enter text on the Tv, the keyboard pops up on the iPhone’s screen automatically. (it’s a lot easier to type on the iPhone than to pluck out letters from a grid on the Tv screen.)
Multitasking Yes, it’s true: In iOS 4, you don’t have to exit one program before opening the next. The iPhone is, more or less, a multitasking phone now. (On the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, anyway. Earlier models are considered too slow.) The big benefit here is speed. You can duck out of what you’re doing, check some other app, and return to where you left off—without having to wait for your apps to close and then reopen (which often takes several seconds), and without having to reconstruct how you had things when you left. But in iOS 4, switching out of a program doesn’t actually close it. Instead, it’s just suspended—frozen in the middle of whatever it was doing—and therefore not using up any battery power or slowing down your little iComputer. That, of course, is not real multitasking. Just freezing a background program isn’t the same as letting it run. That, however, is just how Apple wants it. If you left a bunch of apps running in the background all the time, they’d run down your battery in no time (see also: Android phones). There are some exceptions, however: special cases when Apple permits actual multitasking to take place, where programs are allowed to keep processing away, even in the background. These happy, authorized exceptions: • Internet audio. At long last, you can keep listening to an Internet music service like Pandora or Last.fm, or listen to the game on an Internet radio station, while you tap out some email, surf the Web, or whatever. Just start the radio app playing, and then switch into a different program.
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