Apple To Preview iPhone OS 4.0 Thursday

Apple on Thursday will apparently reveal details of iPhone OS 4.0, the next version of the platform for its uber-popular iPhone. The 4.0 reveal all but ensures Apple will spend another week in the tech headline spotlight, following this past week's frenzy around the release of Apple's iPad.

Apple on Monday sent out media invitations indicating an event Thursday, April 8. The invitations didn't explicitly say that Apple would reveal iPhone OS 4.0, but they show an image of a number "4" in dramatic shadow and offer a one line statement that reads, "Get a sneak peek into the future of iPhone OS."

According to the invitation, viewed by Channelweb.com, the event will be held on the Apple campus in Cupertino, Calif. at 10 a.m. PST, Thursday.

The latest buzz around iPhone, for the most part, hasn't so much been for the operating system upgrade as it has been about Apple's long-rumored carrier expansion in the U.S. Since iPhone was first released in 2007, it has been carried exclusively by AT&T. But rumors of Apple expanding the iPhone to other carriers -- notably AT&T's archrival, Verizon -- began anew last week following a report in The Wall Street Journal that Apple was developing a CDMA cellular version of the phone.

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

True to form, Apple hasn't officially let slip any of the details of iPhone OS 4.0. Various rumors in recent weeks have suggested the updated OS will offer iPhone features related to Apple's Expose, which in Mac OS X lets users view all open applications at once and move between them with greater ease.

Apple last updated the iPhone OS, to version 3.0, in March 2009. New features unveiled at the time included copy-and-paste for iPhone, although iPhone 3.0 itself wasn't made generally available until Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference three months later.

Apple has spent much of the past week dominating headlines with iPad, the new touch-screen tablet computer that officially went on sale Saturday and of which Apple said it sold 300,000 units as of midnight on Saturday.