Apple ships iOS 4.2 update for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch

By Rob Pegoraro

The iPad can now walk and chew gum at the same time, digitally speaking, thanks to the iOS 4.2 update Apple released Monday.

This upgrade of Apple's mobile operating system, which Apple previewed at its early September press event, gives Apple's tablet computer the approximation of multitasking that newer iPhones gained with June's iOS 4 update.

As before, iOS doesn't help an iPad run multiple third-party applications at once. Instead, it provides an excellent simulation of that by quickly suspending and resuming them -- and allowing them to hand over background tasks like Web-radio playback to Apple's operating system.

And as with earlier updates, you can't install this one by downloading it directly to an iPad. You first need to connect that or any other compatible Apple mobile device -- an iPhone 3G or newer, or a second-generation iPod Touch or newer -- to a computer running the current, 10.1 release of Apple's iTunes to download and install this download. Budget some time for that task, as this requires a 551-megabyte download, followed by a complete backup and restoration of your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch's contents.

Beyond multitasking, iOS 4.2 adds two other long-awaited features, each of which comes with potentially frustrating restrictions.

AirPlay, allows you to sling a video you're watching on an iPad over to an Apple TV, as if the two were connected by a video cable. (Some other audio devices also support AirPlay music streaming.) But not all iOS programs work with AirPlay. Hulu Plus, for example, apparently does not.

The other, AirPrint, does away with complicated workarounds by letting you print directly from an iDevice to an AirPrint-compatible printer. But for now, only a small set of newer HP models support this feature.

In other respects, iOS 4.2 serves as a catch-up release for the iPad, adding features that arrived on the iPhone and the iPod Touch in September's iOS 4.1 update: the ability to rent TV shows from the iTunes Store, a "unified inbox" view of new messages in multiple e-mail accounts, the GameCenter hub and the ability to organize applications in separate onscreen folders, among others.

But this update brings an unexpected benefit for some customers: free use of the "Find My Phone" feature that Apple debuted last year as a component of its $99/year MobileMe service. As Apple's press release clarifies, only the newest iOS devices get this freebie: the iPad, the iPhone 4 or the fourth-generation iPod Touch.

My own WiFi-enabled printer is not on among the models that support AirPrint, but I do have a review Apple TV, so I'll be updating this post with a recap of how AirPlay works. In the meantime, what else would you like to know about iOS 4.2? And if you've installed it yourself on an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch, how do you like it so far?