We wanted a better way to manage apps on the iPhone's Home screen. We weren't sure exactly how, but we wanted something more powerful than the current nine-screen, slide-apps-around approach, which just wasn't designed for a world in which there are 185,000 apps available. What iPhone OS 4 will provide is a way to create app folders: If you drag one app on top of another, the two are combined into a new folder; you can then add additional apps to that folder. Tap a folder, and a new view pops up displaying all the apps in that folder. You can even add folders to the dock, giving you a pop-up app launcher.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs pointed out that the new folders feature will allow you to view "over 2000" apps on your iPhone. (The current interface can display only 180 apps--16 on each of 11 screens, plus four in the dock. If you install more than 180, you can access them via the iPhone's Spotlight search, but you can't see them all.) We did the math: each folder can hold up to 12 apps, so assuming you can place 16 folders on each of the 11 screens, plus four in the dock, you could theoretically view 2160 apps!

We also hoped for some Dashboard-widget-like functionality: a way to make use of extra space on your Home and lock screens to display information such as weather info, stock numbers, and calendars. Apple didn't mention these features, although during the Q&A session after the event, in response to a request for such options, Jobs jokingly said, "We just released [the iPad] on Saturday. And on Sunday we rested." Which isn't a no. --DF

The current system for notifications--developers must use an Apple-provided notifications server, and the iPhone can display only the most-recent notification--has always felt like a stopgap, as if notifications were added to iPhone OS 3 to be able to say the iPhone had them. And while push notifications were mentioned during the event in the context of multitasking, it doesn't seem as though Apple made many changes to the existing framework for iPhone 4.0. The biggest single change was the addition of Local Notifications (see "Better multitasking," above), but that does little to fix our concerns about how to handle multiple notifications or the way a notification takes up all your attention. Some of this, admittedly, could be handled better by developers, but it would have been nice to see Apple take a page from Android and webOS. Instead, the company stuck its fingers in its ears and sang at the top of its lungs that nobody had managed to implement notifications as well as it has. Nice try, Apple, but your tune's off key. --Dan Moren

What we were hoping to see was an Apple-sanctioned way to sync our music, videos, personal information, and files over the air. What we got was nothing remotely close. For the moment, it looks like we'll still largely be stuck plugging our iPhones into our laptops at least every once in a while. We're disappointed, naturally, but an emphasis on the Internet and the cloud has never been one of Apple's biggest priorities, so we can't say we're surprised either. Progress: --DM