Will Apple Address The Multitasking Issue With iPhone OS 4.0?
Posted 02/19/2010 at 5:35am
| by J.R. Bookwalter

As much progress as Apple has made with the iPhone OS in just three short years, there’s one enormous elephant in the room that gets a lot of press but which the company stubbornly seems to ignore: Multitasking.
AppleInsider has a detailed look at the problem, mostly in the context of what multitasking could do for the iPad, but the situation certainly applies to the iPhone and iPod touch as well.
So what would multitasking bring to Apple’s mobile devices? The most obvious is the ability to run more than one app at a time -- something that’s already possible with several of the Apple-created apps, such as Phone and iPod. Those apps allow you to continue a call while you go into Maps, for instance, to find a nearby restaurant, or to listen to your music while using another app.
Apple claims that multitasking is a battery killer and that’s why they’ve chosen to avoid it, but the reality is that it works pretty well on competing mobile operating systems such as Google Android and Palm’s WebOS. Where Apple created background notifications to help call your attention to closed apps with new activity, the aforementioned competitors have done that and full multitasking to boot, without a significant hit to the battery life.
“Outside of notifications, there are other features related to multitasking that iPad users may want to see addressed,”
AppleInsider notes. “One is local background services such as Pandora Radio. Apple's forthcoming iPhone OS 4.0 is anticipated to either allow users to select specific apps to run in the background, or roll those services into the system, or to enable specific background tasks.”
AppleInsider also theorizes that the absence of a few key iPhone apps during the iPad’s unveiling in San Francisco last month may be an indication that Apple is indeed busy working on some form of multitasking. “The fact that the iPad was demonstrated without the iPhone's customary Stocks, Weather, and Calculator apps may be an indication that those apps have shifted on the iPad from being full screen utilities into desk accessory widgets that can be called up within other apps, such as Apple's own iWork,” the report reads.
We can only hope that Apple will unveil something in March, which is traditionally when they take the wraps off a new iPhone SDK so developers can ready their apps by June when the new OS might accompany a new handset.