Apple announced the immediate availablility of a developer preview of the next version of the iPhone OS yesterday, with plans to bring the update to iPhone 3G & 3GS and late model iPod Touch users “sometime this summer”, with the iPad lagging behind “sometime this fall”.

The announcement hinged upon seven major features, with well over 100 features for users and thousands of APIs added for developers to bring a richer experience to their applications. I’m not going to go over all the features mentioned during the announcement, you can read about all that on Apple’s website here and here or even watch the keynote coverage itself.

Multitasking

Apple is late to the game with multitasking, but as Jobs said during the keynote: “We might be late to the game, but we’ll be the best”. Being the best is fine by me.

Apple brings multitasking to the iPhone platform by exposing core functionalities to iPhone developers through additional APIs. This means that iPhone applications will have to be written to make use of these new technologies and will most likely be iPhone OS 4 compatible only.

The new APIs expose functionality for background audio, so Pandora radio can continue to play in the background while you use another application for example, Voice over IP, so Skype can receive calls while the application is not in use and even continue a conversation while using another application, and support for task completion, which just let’s a developer schedule a long operation to be completed even after the application exits. A good example of this is uploading photos (or any web related work really) so that closing Flickr doesn’t stop the upload. Some built in applications that make use of this functionality include Mail, as you can quit the application and it will continue to send your emails, and iTunes, as it will continue to downloads purchases even if you quit the application.

If there was a service not exposed for developers to take advantage of, and I’m sure there are plenty, then those applications won’t have the ability to use “multitasking” in the general sense.

I plan to read the technical docs for this release, but have a feeling that the pretty animated dock for switching between applications is just a visual representation of what’s going on – i don’t think the phone is providing anything new in terms of multitasking support here. I wouldn’t even be surprised if developers have to “request” their application have multitasking, so that Apple and the phone know which applications make use of these new technology.

iAd

Apple also introduced a new mobile advertising framework for developers to leverage in their applications. This is a huge deal. Huge.

Imagine if Microsoft had taken the time to bundle an ad framework in Windows, so that anyone could easily push ads to your desktop. How would you feel?

Granted, the ads that Apple demoed were very cool (and all written with HTML5, CSS, & JS). And this will be great for advertisers to get their ads on the 85 million devices available today relatively easily. And developers will even make good money off of it i think. But for the end user, there will be even more ads since developers will have an easy way to integrate the ad framework and get paid.

Is this a big deal for users? Maybe. If you’re too cheap to even buy the full version of the app, then you’ll just have to deal with some cool ads. Surely if you have a paid app, it will be ad free. We’ll just have to wait and see how this one plays out.

Other Announcements

Apple also announced better support for Exchange servers, several enhancements to the built in Mail client, and also announced a social gaming network available to users later this year.

Overall, this was a pretty action packed release for Apple, laying the foundation for another great set of devices and applications to run on them.