webOS comes with backgrounding, iPhone OS 3.0 doesn't
As soon as Palm unveiled Pre, its new high-end mobile phone, most of the market watchers and industry analysts considered the device a great competitor against Apple's iPhone. The handset looks good, has a lot of capabilities, and also includes a brand new operating system, webOS, which is reportedly capable of doing a wide range of things.
Since the Palm Pre was so acclaimed, it was certain that Apple would come up with some ideas to compensate for the popularity the still unavailable handset enjoyed, and the newly announced iPhone OS 3.0 seems to be one of the steps the company took in this direction.
Enthusiasts from both sides have certainly jumped on the news right away, so as to make sure that things are indeed as reported, namely that the iPhone is back with more power and that the Palm Pre won't be able to outpace it after all. And we already saw that the new OS 3.0 for iPhone comes around with a lot of improvements and new features, around 100 of them, as Scot Forstall, senior vice president, iPhone Software, said recently.
When announcing Pre and its OS, Palm said that it offered “a rich open development environment that's familiar to tens of millions of web developers,” and about the same thing is what Apple says about its new iPhone OS, “iPhone SDK for iPhone OS 3.0 beta provides you with an amazing range of technologies to enhance the functionality of your iPhone and iPod touch applications.”
Among the new capabilities brought by the iPhone OS 3.0, we can also see cut/copy/paste, MMS, and push notifications, which is a service that should run in the background to alert the user whenever he/she receives a message on a third-party application such as IM. This new feature is meant to offer the device some sort of multitasking capabilities, something that other devices, including the upcoming Palm Pre, already have.
According to Apple, it chose to add the Push Notification Service to iPhone so as to offer an extended battery life. Compared to other smartphones and operating systems, says the company, this approach won't drain as much power from the battery as expected. On the other hand, undoubtedly, this solution does not solve all the problems the iPhone has with notifications.
At the same time, it seems that it is not exactly the solution that users were expecting to see for applications that require multitasking. And we already know that Palm's Pre is able to run more applications at the same time, allowing users to change the focus between them, and send apps like the IM to the background.
Furthermore, the new Push Notification Service could see some problems when having to notify users about several things at the same time. Not to mention that it would rely heavily on the third-party apps that it would notify about, and they should also be able to provide enough power efficiency to back Apple's statements about the battery life.
When it comes to Pre's webOS, the multitasking capabilities, as well as backgrounding functionality are all there, and it seems that they are a little more advanced than what was already available on the Palm OS until now. And that card-based UI that would allow us to shift between applications looks more than appealing as well.
For the time being, Apple hasn't released the new iPhone OS 3.0 to users, and it won't do so for the next couple of months either, at least not before Palm Pre is already available on the market. And while this time we can only talk about what the two will offer, in the summer we should also be able to see both of them at work. Yet, considering the current state of facts, Pre might still prove itself an iPhone killer.
As for backgrounding capabilities, Apple is aware of the fact that other mobile platforms include the feature. And given the fact that Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Google's Android and Palm's webOS have it, it might after all reconsider its position on the matter and offer its users a solution able to meet their needs.
[Originally posted at softpedia.com]
