Apple iPhone to soon get long-sought multitasking

Apple Inc.’s iPhone and iPad accessories anon will be able to run added than one affairs at a time, an adeptness that phones from Apple’s rivals already offer. The changes, advancing this summer to iPhones and this abatement to iPads, beggarly that users adeptness be able to accept to music through the Pandora affairs and analysis a coffer annual online simultaneously. Currently, users accept to acknowledgment to Apple’s home screen, finer abandonment the accessible program, afore starting a new task.

Although Apple is authoritative the updates accessible to all iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad models, the multitasking action will plan alone with the newest devices. So you won’t be able to run assorted programs with the aboriginal iPhone or the iPhone 3G — alone the 3GS versions that came out endure summer. For the iPod Touch, you’d charge the models that came out backward endure year.

But added new appearance will be accessible to earlier models as well. They cover the adeptness to accept letters from assorted e-mail accounts acreage in a individual inbox, abutment for folders abounding with applications and a way to affix an iPhone with a approved keyboard application Bluetooth wireless technology.

“We weren’t the aboriginal to this party, but we’re traveling to be the best,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said Thursday as bloggers, software developers and others in the admirers greeted the account with applause. The iPhone already permits some multitasking, but that’s abundantly bound to Apple’s own programs. Apple had not accustomed users means to seamlessly about-face a part of all the software “apps” accessible from alfresco software companies, the way phones from rivals Palm and Google already do. That will change with the updates accepted as iPhone OS 4. Apple about makes such updates accessible free, and generally automatically, as a software download.