The first good thing about the app is it’s free. Unfortunately though you’re not able to browse through Audible’s selection of audio books or purchase books directly. This still has to be done from the website. Audible claims to have over 75,000 titles available.

You do have to be connected to a WiFi router to download files larger than 20mb as there’s a cap on large downloads. Although this limit isn’t a surprise to most as most applications have a similar limitation imposed by Apple.

Audio book playback is where the new app really does come in great. The app provides a much better experience than listening to audio books through the iPod player and with the newly released iOS 4 multitasking, this gives you the ability to mutlitask and listen to an audio book whilst running another application at the same time (providing that both apps are iOS4 friendly of course).

The app has some great features like a bookmark system, ability to set a sleep timer so that the book pauses at a desired time and rewind and fast forward functions.

The Audible app also works with the other audio books you have previoulsy purchased and synced from iTunes.

• Improves the formula to determine how many bars of signal strength to display

Products compatible with this software update:

• iPhone 3G
• iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 4

For most people there’s no need to download this update unless you want to enlarge your iPhone signal bars at the top left of the device.  There are no additional fixes included in this update from Apple.

Still loving Gowalla over Foursquare even though its the under dog, it also has much nicer designed pins and buttons too

For checking into over 1000 places, I’ve also earned myself a Epic Voyager pin

If you haven’t checked out social networking apps like Gowalla or Foursquare then you should. They give you a good indication of where you have visited (or checked in to) and you can trade items you pick up at locations where other people have dropped items and also drop items for others to pick up (all virtual of course).

If you do use Gowalla and Foursquare why not check out http://m.check.in which is a web app that allows you to check in to both Gowalla and Foursquare locations at the same time. The downside is that you can’t create new locations like you can in the native Gowalla and Foursquare apps. Likewise if Gowalla has a location but Foursquare doesn’t, you can’t then check into both but you could check into another place close by in Foursquare.

Installing the latest update has now fixed the launching problem which is great to see. However, I am still seeing some problems when downloading magazine, when its partway through the download process and you start to swipe through pages it has downloaded, it hangs. If you try to relaunch you then get the splash screen and it hangs again. If you then take the extra step to close the running program and relaunch, then it gets past the splash screen freeze.

So if you experience any freezes or hangs on the latest Zinio update, ensure you wait for the magazine to fully download before trying to read it and don’t try to read it whilst pages are still downloading.

1. First screenshot shows the ability to have background wallpaper showing on the iPhone
2. Second screenshot shows the use of folders to manage your icons to reduce the amount of screens icons/apps take up
3. Third screenshot shows the multitasking window at the bottom of open apps (you get to this by double tapping the HOME button).

Currently to get apps and games on iOS4 to properly multitask every single application developer for the iPhone will need to update their app/game and resubmit to Apple to enable the new API calls to allow the app to multitask properly. So out of the box, most apps don’t fully support multitasking and it will now be up to each iPhone developer to add support into their applications to fully support this and other iOS4 features.

Unfortunately on iOS4 when you launch Zinio you can’t get past the app splash screen as it just seems to freeze and not crash back to the springboard. I tried to uninstall, reinstall from appstore, power cycle iPhone but still won’t load.

Hopefully Zinio can provide a fix soon as this is a must have app for me!

iOS4 is already so nice, I am already missing it on the iPad this morning . iOS4 for iPad is slated to come later the year, so I guess we’ll have to wait to get it on the iPad. If you think about it the iPad is almost a hybrid somewhere between iOS3 and iOS4 anyway as you do have features like background wallpapers etc. For now I am very happy with the iPad, for me I don’t know what the multitasking will really add to the iPad, might be better for copying and pasting perhaps but probably not something i will really need that much for the iPad.

To close an app you can hold down the app icon like you would to delete an app, and you then get the no entry minus sign which you can tap to close the application.