New iPhone OS Brings Ads

The Apple iPhone is getting an update to its operating system and Steve Jobs just presented all the new details.

Multitasking, background wallpapers, icon folders, a game center, a unified inbox and other new features will be coming our way with the latest iPhone operating system version 4.0. It is impressive and something to look forward to, until we get to the part about iAds.

iAds is Apple’s new scheme to bring integrated advertisements into the iPhone. Originally, the annoying presence of ads can only be encountered within the web pages you visit and inside certain applications, iAds could potentially bring ads to everywhere on your mobile phone.

The odd thing about this is that Apple seems like it expects users to be happy about the new development. While companies would certainly appreciate the value of such a revolutionary new method of advertising, this is hardly anything that an average user would really want in the first place.

Another major concern is how ads will be sent to our phones. If Apple will be piggybacking 3G connections in order to pre-load ad content, that would be a serious problem for people who are trying to conserve bandwidth. Also, the ad selection would mean that the device would be monitoring a user’s preferences and activities in order to get relevant ad content. Now that is just plain creepy.

Aside from the issue about the iAds feature, the OS announcement also revealed some key fact that people are not too happy about. In regards to the 4.0 SDK agreement, it turns out that Apple will be banning the use of Adobe Flash content completely –even for the creation of apps. This would render Flash to iPhone compilers unusable and discourage some developers as well.

Read more about the iPhone OS update’s ads service at the Guardian UK.