Were you one of the 1.7 million people across the globe waiting patiently (or perhaps impatiently) in queues, drooling over Apple's newest mobile device?  Whether you're a big fan of the Jobs-inator or not, the iPhone 4 is here to stay, and some are even saying it's the best smartphone on the market right now - period.

The Pogoplug has always given the iPhone lots of love, and if you watch this community, it's no big secret I'm in love with its music streaming feature - both from the Pogoplug official app (App Store link) and the HTML5-compatible browsing client.

iPhone 4 users will be happy to know that the Pogoplug web client has some more surprises in store for you in iOS 4.

Retina Display and the Web Client

First of all, the Retina Display - which sports an insane pixel density of 640x960 pixels - really helps with the readability of the small fonts in the HTML5 web client on the iPhone 4's smaller screen.  Depending on how good your peepers are, you might not even have to zoom in to read song titles.  This is very hard to show in a screenshot, so if you're skeptical, ask somebody with an iPhone 4 to let you try it out.  You'll instantly see what I mean!

Speed

Second, the client just works faster.  When you select a song to play, you'll see the web player pop up in the lower left hand corner as you always would with any iDevice - it's just that the operations work more quickly and My.Pogoplug is just plain smoother with the expanded RAM and A4 silicon in the hardware.

Note that when you play a song, sometimes you have to tap on the play/pause button a few times to get it to start.

Multitasking

This is, by far, the sweetest part.  iOS 4 has a fast app switching tray built in, which features iPod controls if you swipe to the left.  You can see this in action above; the tray is brought up by clicking the dashboard button on the bottom of the iPhone.  When you aren't playing music through My.Pogoplug, you'll see an iPod icon here.

However, start playing a song through the HTML5 app, and bring up the app tray once more.  The iPod icon will be replaced by a Safari icon as shown above.

Now, hold on to your seat - not only does the My.Pogoplug service in Safari continue to stream in the background, but you can fast app switch to anything you have running without interrupting the music - AND change tracks, pause, and play... right through the tray.

I find myself using this feature all the time now when using my iPhone, whether just chilling at home in the living room chair or out and about.  I'm not exactly sure how this works, but the mini player in the web app must interface with the iPhone somehow - one way or another, it's just yet another reason to love my Pogoplug.

(This article was inspired by a video over at PaulColligan.com.  Kudos to him for discovering and demoing this awesome feature.  He's also written on how it works with iPad.)

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