Apple disappoints developers again
THE GLORIOUS and faithful Apple religion which can do no wrong has been a bit too optimistic about when it was going to get the Iphone's background processing working.
Apple had promised to deliver that capability by September and now it is October and there is no sign of Apple releasing this blessing to the faithful.
There were dark mutterings when Apple revealed that Iphone applications would not be allowed to run in the background during its March SDK event and in June 2008 at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple promised to give developers a workaround that involved using Apple's own servers to notify Iphone users running one application that fresh data was available for another application not in use.
Now it looks like that will not be the case. The next update to version 2.2 is expected to be cosmetic.
Dan Moren a hack at the official organ of the Apple press office, MacWorld said that given all the problems that Job's Mob had with the 2.0 software update, fixing those bugs with the 2.1 release took precedence over rolling out the notification service.
True, having a phone that cuts out whenever you move is a bit of a handicap.
Of course the handset has got by with out background processing so far but developers need it to get anything interesting going on the gizmo. µ
L'Inq
News.com
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My good old trusty Psion series 3 organiser had background processing capabilities back in the 1990s. 

There were system calls that would wake the application, and if necessary, turn the PDA back on so the app could do its processing and then go back to sleep.

Yes, this required hardware that had the ability to turn the unit on when a timer expired. 

One would expect any PDA to have the ability to wake up/turn on when it is time to ring an alarm.
I know the Inquirer is about getting the scoop first, but this article is pure misinformation.

Apple was promising push notifications as a work-around for background processing, NOT background processing itself. Apple's hardware/software is capable of background processing, but they won't allow 3rd-party developers to run applications in the background for their various (not necessarily good) reasons.