With home wifi networks being common, the iPod touch could be used as an iPhoneHome.

When the 1st generation touch came out, it lacked any sort of microphone input, there was no external speaker, skype wasn’t available, and there was no such thing as backgrounding an application. This meant that you couldn’t talk to the other person, and your iPod wouldn’t let you know when someone was calling.

The second generation touch offered a mic-in by way of the headphone jack, came with an external speaker, and skype was available at the time too. There was still no non-jailbroken way to get apps to run in the background, but push notifications came around to let inactive apps know that someone was trying to connect. In my experience the push notifications came way too late, and the other person had already hung up. I could always call them back within a few minutes, but that’s not quite acceptable for every day use.

With the 3rd generation and iOS4, we finally got backgrounding. Your VOIP app could sit in the background and let you know instantly that someone was trying to call, just as a regular phone would. Furthermore, iOS4 allowed the wifi to remain connected, even when the device was asleep, which would ensure that your incoming calls got through.

Now, with the 4th generation iPod touch, we finally have an external mic to go along with the external speaker thanks to facetime. So long as you have a wifi connection, you should be able to install a good VOIP client and have your new iPod touch run transparently as a phone. This is a great option for people who live in cities with free public wifi, students who spend most of their time on campus, or for people who want a home-only iPhone.

Of course with other apps, you can use the touch as a remote to control your HTPC through something like Apple’s Remote app, or the new and amazing plex media center app. I could easily see someone spending a few hundred dollars on a single device which can sit in their house, act as their phone, universal remote, music player, and hand-held game system. iPhoneHome indeed.

• There will be multi-touch gestures OS-wide. (Would make sense for that as the rumored OS for the iTablet is close if not the same as the iPhone)
• “A few new ways” to run applications in the background — multitasking.
• Many graphical and UI changes to make navigating through the OS easier and more efficient. We haven’t had this broken down, but we can only hope for improved notifications, a refreshed homescreen, etc.
• The update will supposedly be available for only the iPhone 3G and 3GS, but will “put them ahead in the smartphone market because it will make them more like full-fledged computers” more than any other phone to date. Everyone is “really excited.”
• The last piece of information is the most vague, but apparently there will be some brand new syncing ability for the contacts and calendar applications.

This has some pretty big implications for VOIP applications such as Skype.

As of now, if you want to run a VOIP app on your iPhone or iPod touch, you must use an app which supports push notifications such as Fring or Truphone. Skype still does not support push notifications, despite having recently released a new version. Push notifications allow apple servers to “push” information to your device, as opposed to having your device “pull” the information from the internet. A quick example of push versus pull is mail versus telephone. When someone mails you a letter, you generally don’t know about it until you check your mailbox to see if there is something waiting for you. A phone will ring as soon as someone calls you – it doesn’t wait for you.

Of course this doesn’t matter if your application is running – Skype will tell you immediately that someone is calling you if it is running and active on your device. The problem is that Apple only currently allows users to run one app at a time. If the app doesn’t support push notifications, then as soon as you close it, you lose the ability to receive an incoming call.

Allowing apps to run in the background will allow app developers to not have to include push notifications, which seems to be something of a burden considering how many apps still lack this functionality. As backgrounding is one of the major draws to jailbreaking your iPhone, this might reduce the number of people jailbreaking for functionality reasons.

This doesn’t make push notifications obsolete of course. Apple’s intent when they decided to prevent backgrounding and instead use push notifications was to improve user experience by ensuring running apps had the full hardware capabilities of the device available to them (probably one of the reasons backgrounding is rumoured to be restricted to the iPhone 3G and 3GS and similarly-capable iPods), and to conserve battery life.