The iPhone will receive one of most expected updates later  this year with the addition of Multitasking support. If Apple can't sue its rival smartphone makers out of existence, it appears that Apple plans to at least catch up to them. According to AppleInsider that iPhone OS 4.0, likely scheduled for release this year alongside new handset models. It is understood the upcoming software development kit will enable developers to create applications which run in the background of other apps – something the iPhone has been lacking for some time. The report, however, offers no details on how this will be implemented beyond noting that it will take advantage of interfact technology used in Mac OS X.

Like Mac OS X on which it is based, iPhone OS is fully capable of running multiple processes at once. There have been a few major exceptions.  Currently, the iPhone's phone, SMS, email, iPod, voice recorder, Nike+ apps and a handful of others can run in the background. In fact, it does run multiple processes --- but only using Apple's built in apps.

Apple has given a number of reasons for enforcing this limitation. The company claims that multiple apps running simultaneously will run down the battery faster, or could lead to more out-of-memory errors as apps contend for the constrained resources of the iPhone. Also, since non-Apple apps can't run in the background, there's virtually zero chance that malware could run without a user noticing. Finally, limiting the iPhone to one app at a time keeps things simple enough for even the most tech-averse users to understand how it works.

It seems that many iPhone users have required multitasking, though there are some shortcomings. We have heared lots of rumours about Multitasking for a long time, but Multitasking never came neither in iPone OS 2.0 nor iPhone OS 3.0. Thus its reasonable to be cautious about whether iPhone OS 4.0 will truly bring Multitasking to the table at last.