More like a desktop?
Rising to the challenge proffered by rivals like Palm, whose iPhone-reminiscent Palm Pre lets users run apps concurrently, armchair speculators suggest Apple may develop similar technology for a future version of its mobile unit.
The iPhone has been hailed as a boon to both brands and consumers. Marketers can develop apps to disseminate freely to iPhone users — a model that gives companies an opportunity to be more useful to mobile mavens, and that significantly broadens iPhone's feature set with little R&D cost to Apple.
Salesforce.com, for example, launched an app that lets clients track CRM data from their phones. Prior to his induction to Presidency, Obama's team created an app that let left-leaning fans stay in contact for campaigning purposes. And recently, shopping rag Lucky released an application that lets women locate stores that carry shoes from Lucky's March issue.
Here's a setback: iPhone can only run one application at a time — with the exception of built-in apps like Mail, which can operate in the background while users play with something else.
Enabling the concurrent execution of multiple apps may sweeten the iPhone for multi-taskers: "[You] could leave an IM app open — like you do on a computer — and it would keep collecting messages while you're reading a Web page. Or you could leave a mapping app open to track your location while running and listening to music," Silicon Alley Insider proposed.
It could also change marketers' approach to iPhone marketing: users would be more likely to explore multiple offerings at once, but their attention will also be splintered. That is, they'll spend less time focusing on a single app if they can do something else at the same time — reducing brand exposure, and making app effectiveness potentially harder to track.
If Apple implements the concurrent-running app technology for future units, existing iPhones will probably be updated to support one or two concurrently-running apps, said Silicon Alley Insider.
As of December 2008, 300 million apps had been downloaded for iPhone, with consumers paying an average of $3.12 per app, according to 148Apps.com. Gaming and Entertainment were the largest categories, followed by Utilities.
