Today Apple CEO Steve Jobs previewed the iPhone OS 4 software at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, ending months of speculation. How good does it feel to finally get some solid facts and figures at our fingertips!

Jobs started his presentation by saying that the iPhone OS 4 beta release will include an updated SDK with over 1,500 new APIs and more than 100 new user features, including create playlists, 5x digital zoom, tap to focus video, gift apps, birthday calendar, persistent Wi-Fi, change home screen wallpaper, Bluetooth keyboards and iPod-out to name just a few!

Multitasking has been one of the most speculated about of OS 4’s features, and Jobs confirmed that it will offer users a new way to quickly move between apps, giving developers several new multitasking services to easily add multitasking features to their apps. These include background audio, so that apps such as Pandora can play music in the background, and VoIP, so that VoIP apps can receive a VoIP call even when the iPhone is asleep or the user is running other apps. iPhone OS 4 provides multitasking to third-party apps while preserving battery life and foreground app performance, no mean feat!

After Multitasking, the second of the seven main new features, which Jobs calls the “seven tent poles”, is Folders, which help users organize and quickly access their apps. Simply drag apps icons on top of each other to instantly create folders. iPhone Folders can also be created and managed on Macs or PCs using iTunes 9.2.

Enhanced mail is the third tent pole, with a new Unified Inbox which will enable users to see messages from all their email accounts in a single inbox. You can then quickly switch between inboxes to see messages from any single account with just a few taps. Messages can also now be threaded by conversation, and you can open email attachments with compatible apps from the App Store.

Next up we have iBooks, with the ability to wirelessly sync your books between platforms, and including free Winnie the Pooh, apparently!

Enterprise is the fifth tent pole, and new enterprise features in iPhone OS 4 include improvements in security, scalability and compatibility. The new Mobile Device Management service can be integrated with third-party servers to wirelessly configure, query and even wipe or lock managed iPhones. iPhone OS 4 also enables enterprises to securely host and wirelessly distribute their own in-house developed apps to employees. The new Data Protection feature uses a user’s passcode as an encryption key to protect mail messages and attachments stored on the iPhone. There are also several other important new passcode options to further enhance security.

Game Center is the sixth tent pole – a social gaming network with Achievements, Leaderboards, Matchmaking and the ability to invite friends, with apps created by GameKit.

And finally, tent pole number seven – iAd – mobile advertising, which Jobs says will have “interaction and emotion”, and will keep you in your app rather than taking you out of it like other in-app ads tend to do. Apple will sell and host the ads, as iAd is built into the iPhone OS, and developers will receive 60 percent of iAd revenue. iAds will display full-screen video and interactive ad content without ever leaving the app, letting users return to their app whenever they want.

At the end of the presentation, Steve Jobs confirmed that iPhone 4. will be released this summer as a software update for iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 3^rd gen. iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2^nd gen will run many of the new features, but not all of them, such as multitasking.

Over to Steve for the last word:

“iPhone OS 4 is the fourth major release of the world’s most advance mobile operating system. We’re delivering over 100 new features, including multitasking, folders, a unified inbox, deeper enterprise support, and an iPhone version of our iBooks reader and online iBookstore.”

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