iPhone OS 4.0 to deliver mulit-tasking support - report

 

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Posted on 11 Mar 2010 at 16:43

Apple's next major update to the iPhone OS, version 4.0, will support multi-tasking if a report on fruity rumour site AppleInsider holds true.

Presumably, this will finally allow iPhone users to run several third party apps in the background and will silence a lot of the iPhone's critics, although we're sure they'll find something else to complain about. There's still no expandable storage and its App Store approval process has come under some criticism recently.

The sources say that Apple has developed a "full-on solution" to multi-tasking in iPhone OS, but offered no specific information on how the technology would optimise available resources, conserve battery life and allay any security fears.

Apple will reportedly deliver a "multi-tasking manager" that "leverages interface technology already bundled with its Mac OS X operating system".

Despite the iPhone being second in market volume behind only Research in Motion's BlackBerry devices, it has started to fall behind competing handsets on spec sheet comparisons. Other mobile operating systems - such as Symbian, WebOS (on the Palm Pre) and Android - have proper support for multi-tasking.

Apple had previously said that running apps in the background presented a security risk, but a number of its apps (and selected third party apps) are permitted to run in the background. If it's not an app pre-selected by Apple, the iPhone currently kills open apps when you accept a call or return to the home screen instead of sending them into the background, making it harder for spyware, adware or viruses to run on the handset undetected.

The only way to get around this has been to 'jailbreak' the handset by running software to hack the OS and remove Apple's restrictions. This does violate Apple's user licence agreement though, so you're potentially running the gauntlet of you choose this path.

Given that this isn't the first time we've heard these rumours - multi-tasking was a rumoured feature in both iPhone OS versions 2.0 and 3.0 - we greet them with a fairly large bag of salt. We'll continue to treat this as such until Apple says otherwise. AppleInsider says that Apple will launch the new version of the OS in the summer.

Author: Tim Smalley