If you have read about the new iPhone OS 4.0 released by Apple you may have noticed some similarities with the way good ol’ Palm OS deals with apps. I wonder how much iPhone OS 4.0 is inspired by Palm’s OS.

Among all the nice and long awaited features of the new iPhone OS 4.0, Apple introduced also multitasking, which is served to users in the form of services: these services have been turned into APIs to the developers, and will be evoked by them to mimic multitasking while preventing battery drain.

The new services are:

• background audio;
• Voice over IP (VoIP);
• background location;
• push notifications;
• local notifications;
• task completion;
• fast app switching.

If you are an iPhone user this sounds good: no more Pandora going silent when switching app, no more having to quit the turn-by-turn app to launch another app (never, if you are alone driving your the car).

However, when Apple announced the new OS on the April 8 event I turned up my nose, as I suddenly remembered two things of my (now gone) Palm OS days:

• Palm OS has been criticized many times because of its lack of multitasking: the system was simply recording the state of the app you were leaving, and was then resuming it once you were launching it again
• Moreover, I remember about the wonderful Chatteremail for Palm OS, the only email program in Palm OS (with support for direct PUSH, yeah!) able to send and download emails in the background despite the mono-tasking structure of the OS. This was done by the way of a clever solution adopted by its developer, which made use of the background audio service used to allow pTunes and other media player to play music while doing other stuff.

Someone could prove me wrong, but the above Palm OS memories remind me of the “fast app switching” and “background audio” services now introduced by Apple.

Everyone is aware of the tough moment Palm is currently experiencing and many voices are giving Palm on the market. As a Palm OS satisfied user I would like Palm to be on its own, deploying on the market new and a** kicking devices, and I wonder if maybe some Palm’s intellectual property (IP) on the aforementioned new Apple services would offer the chance to sue BigA and to raise again the creator of PDAs.

On the same line, if this “sue Apple thing” is something that can be started, I wonder if other big names that may be on the market to buy Palm IP, have been evaluating the opportunity.

I am not a developer and I could make some trivial mistakes because of my knowledge of the field. Do you think this could be possible?

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