Skype on iPhone OS4

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...

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Apple iPhone to soon get long-sought multitasking

Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iPad devices will soon be able to run more than one program at a time, an ability that phones from Apple's rivals already offer and that iPhone owners have long sought. The changes, coming this summer to iPhones and this fall to iPads, mean that users might be able to listen to music through the Pandora program and check a bank account online simultaneously. Currently, users must return to Apple's home screen, effectively quitting the open program, before starting a new task. "We weren't the first to this party, but we're going to be the best," Apple CEO Steve Jobs declared Thursday, as bloggers, software developers and others in the audience greeted the news of such "multitasking" with...

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