
The tantalizing combination of full-throttled Skype on the iPhone moved a giant leap forward Thursday with Apple’s announcement that the handset’s next operating-system upgrade will support multitasking for third-party apps. Multitasking is good for all sorts of apps that you’d like to keep “awake” but not to the exclusion of all others, like mail — a core app that already runs in the background. But there are plenty of others that needn’t be immersive and yet must be, like instant messaging, and social media apps like Twitter. One ramification of OS 4 leapt out at us immediately: Skype’s app could now run in the background, waiting for incoming calls while you do other things. And it should be possible to continue to use the iPhone app to...