IPhone HD Likely to Air June 22; Hardware, Multitasking Detailed in Reports

From DailyTech: The fourth generation, iPhone, dubbed the iPhone HD will likely land on Tuesday June 22, based on the company's reservations at the conference center where it has announced iPhones for the past three years. The updated phone is expected to bring multitasking at last to Apple's customers. A CDMA version of the iPhone also is reportedly in the works and may be announced as well, though it is not expected to launch in the U.S. until early next year.

Apple's iPhone, available (officially) exclusively on the AT&T network in the U.S., is top end hardware in terms of features and packaging. It falls just slightly short of the newest handsets of a couple of its competitors, such as HTC's Nexus One Android handset, in terms of pure processing power. In terms of its application catalog, though, none of its competitors can come close to touching it.

There are 150,000+ iPhone-ready third-party apps available in Apple's App Store, while Android only has 30,000. However, Android and webOS have a key advantage over Apple: the ability to multitask (Windows Phone 7 Series, another key competitor will likely not support multitasking at first when it airs late this year).

Multitasking has long been prohibited on the iPhone to save battery life, despite the fact that the operating system supports it. As of the third generation iPhone OS, multitasking has only been allowed in a few select apps, most of which perform critical phone functions.

According to AppleInsider, a leaks site who first broke the news of multitasking in the fourth gen iPhone OS, sources close to Apple say multitasking on the new OS is fully enabled in pre-release builds. They say the OS will utilize an interface similar to Exposé on the Mac (similar to Windows+Tab in Windows 7) to switch between apps. Instead of resized windows, though, you'll get a series of scrollable icons for running apps, reportedly when you double click the home button. That makes it sound closer to the Command+tab key combo found on Macs. However, the Apple sources promised other aspects of the interface are very Exposé-like.

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