iOS 4.3

 While your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch are incredible pieces of hardware, it's the iOS operating system that drives the powerhouse, Its latest update, iOS 4,3, delivers significant improvements to the platform, adding personal hotspots, home sharing, Airplay, faster web browsing and restoring the orientation lock switch, touch takes an in-depth look at the new version,.,


The new iOS 4.3 brings a couple of significant enhancements - Personal Hotspot and Home Sharing - as well as some smaller niceties. But, as with iOS 4.0, those improvements will be available only with certain iOS hardware: In this case, you'll need an iPhone 4 or 3GS, an original iPad, an iPad 2, or a third- or fourth-generation iPod touch to take advantage of the new features.

PERSONAL HOTSPOT Personal Hotspot lets you share your iPhone's 3G data connection with other devices via Wi-Fi, USE, or Bluetooth. For iPhone 4 users, it replaces -and is more attractive than - the limited tethering functionality that debuted in iOS3.0.

The Personal Hotspot is simple to set up: You enable the hotspot feature under Settings

> General > Network. A new Personal Hotspot submenu appears in the top level of Settings; there you can turn the feature on or off and set a password. Clients can connect via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, or you can plug your iPhone into your Mac via USB. (Note that iPhone 3GS users can share network connections only via Bluetooth and USB, and not by Wi-Fi.)

In ray testing (with a MacBook hooked up to an iPhone 4), USB appeared to provide the best download and upload speeds. Bluetooth was by far the worst - no surprise, given that Blue tooth's transfer speed is in most cases slower than the phone's 3G connection,

HOME SHARING Introduced in iTunes 9, Home Sharing allows you to (among other things) play media stored

on one computer on your local network from a different computet. In iOS 4.3, that feature gets extended to iOS devices as well.

Once you've set up Home Sharing on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, you can play media stored on Home Sharing-enabled computers on your iOS device, and you can play the stuff stored on your iOS device from Macs.

Setup is easy: You just enter your Apple ID in Settings > iPod. But accessing shared libraries isn't always so simple.

On the iPhone, you tap the More button in the iPod app's toolbar, then select the new Shared option. You'll see all the shared iTunes libraries on your network (as well as your iPhone itself). Tap the shared library, and all of the media you see in the iPod app refers to the shared library; a title bar at the top displays the name of the computer you're connected to.

On the iPad, though, you tap the library header in the top Seft of the iPod app to access shared libraries. In the iPad's Videos app, a new Shared toolbar option that lets you browse shared libraries on your local network appears. If you have more than one device, these different interfaces can be confusing.

Streaming performance is good: Music and short videos start playing almost immediately. Longer videos (or HD ones} can take a little time to buffer before they start playing back. Streamed music sounds nearly indistinguishable

from that on the local device. Video is clear and watchable, and playback is smooth.

AIRPLAY

Home Sharing does have one big drawback: You still can't stream content FROM an iOS device to another one or to a Mac. That said, if you have an Appie TV or AirPort Express, you do have another option; Airplay.

AirPlay (which debuted in iOS 4.2 and iTunes 10) replaces the old AirTunes feature that let

you stream music from your iTunes library on your Mac or PC to Apple TVs and AirPort Express devices.

AirPlay extends that by letting you stream audio to those aforementioned devices directly from your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch; in some cases you can stream video too.

In iOS 4.3, AirPlay also lets you stream video from compatible websites, third-party applications and the Photos app. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work right out of the box.

Third-party apps need to add support for AirPlay video; expect a slew of updates over the next few months. And web video needs to be in a format that iOS devices can play (think H.264-encoded MPEG-4 videos). Video providers, too, will have to explicitly define their videos asAirPlay-compatible,

 Iran into a few glitches and inconsistencies while trying out AirPlay support. For example, while you can use AirPlay to play videos from the Photos app, you can't do so if you access your photos and videos via the Camera app. Also, though AirPlay worked fine from the Air Video app on my iPhone 4, it didn't work at all on my iPad.

iOS 4,3 contains some other nice tweaks as well. If you have a Ping account, it's now available in music-player apps as well as from the iTunes app.

Also, you can now choose how the switch next to the iPad's volume control works: You can configure it as a button to lock the iPad's screen orientation or as a mute button. Safari performance is improved, too, thanks to a new JavaScript engine.

Also, parents get more fine-grained controls over what their kids can and can't do on an iOS device. And Slideshow transitions, text messaging and accessibility have all been enhanced.

THE BOTTOM LINE. All told, iOS4.3 is asolid update, far more than you might expect from an iterative release. While it won't fulfil every wish-list item, it undoubtedly makes iOS devices more capable.

"...the best sounding pair of headsets you can get for your iPhone 4'

Gadget mec 5/5(USA in 2011)

Award-winning earphones. Flat tangle-free cable. Internationally acclaimed.

Visit www.jays.se to find out more about the a-JAYS Four.