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Comment by cpr | Hacker News Reader

iPhone OS 4.0 addresses some of the email limitations (unified inbox), 3.x had tethering (apparently, it's coming to AT&T with 4.0), 4.0 has a form of battery-saving multitasking, etc. It's a horse race and there's going to be endless one-upsmanship back and forth.

What Froyo has that's great is over-the-air download & built-in intents-over-the-air (e.g., send a URL or a map to your phone, something I've longed for on the iPhone since forever; I guess someone should make an app for that plus a browser extension).

It'll be interesting to see if Apple can shift quickly enough in the two weeks before WWDC to address some of the remaining advantages that Android has over iPhone OS. I suspect not. They're known for establishing a course and pretty much following it inexorably.

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iPhone OS will never have the ability to do the things like Android like push-intents until Apple admits that what iPhone OS 4 brings is not even remotely close to multitasking and that their model wouldn't allow for push intents. They claim battery and stability but my phone is stable now with multitasking and my battery lasts a full day.

An iPhone application has no way of having a long living listener for something that would resemble a push intent. The only thing you can do is register small bits of code as video/voip/audio services that can run in the background. Anything more advanced than that is reserved for Android or true multitasking OSes.

Oh horseshit. Apple's model could easily be extended to allow apps to register code that is executed when something is pushed to the phone.

The more I think about this, the sillier your assertion seems that having your application running in the background is a necessity for functionality like push-intents. Its like you are saying that without all your apps running code running all the time, Windows or the Mac won't know what app to use when you double click on a file. And if you want an example of how to offer a range of network services without having to keep all of them running all the time, try reading about inetd. Its a pretty new idea, but I'm sure you can find something about it.

I can d/l over the air with my iPhone. I can send a map link around as well. I guess you are talking about something else altogether.

All hail Google?

In a year everyone will remember what a nightmare Google really is.

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