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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Well, folks, it happened.  Palm has put themselves up for sale, as reported by Shaun at PDA-247 and just about everyone else with an eye on the company.  So, with Palm and WebOS being what it is, what should a company buy it for:

- It’s patents and intellectual property, that could be used by some already established phone makers, to further their own portfolio?

OR

- To continue with the development of WebOS and phones running it?

I’m afraid I can’t weigh in until I sleep on it… but we’d love to hear your thoughts on this!  Hit the comments and let us know what you think.

• Cumulative update for cities database and timezones
• Fixed bug in bio alarms dismiss feature

• Cumulative update for cities database

• Cumulative update for cities database

Version 2.3.1 | Aug-12-2010

• Fixed: Call Log records the modified number for outgoing calls. It should record the original unmodified number
• Fixed: “Change dialed number” uses modified phone number as {phone}

Version 2.3.0 | Apr-8-2010

• Now supports user-defined profiles
• Added option to filter call state
• Added new action “Send DTMF” for incoming calls
• Added feature to replace numbers in SMS with names
• Able to filter contact’s name for calls
• Able to use RegEx for filtering numbers and names
• Added command line parameter “-noprof” and “-prof” for profiles
• Improved “Change dialed number”. Now USSD can be handled flawlessly.