As it seems several tentpoles of the iPhone OS 4.0 unveiled earlier this month are inspired by the Palm WebOS. The Web OS had a major advantage over the iPhone with multitasking with a few more goodies and UI tweaks thrown in. Since the beta 1 of iPhone OS 4 is already out with developers many speculations about what more features Apple is playing with are coming out now.
As it seems, Apple is getting Facebook integration to the next gen iPhone going head on with the Palm feature that pulls your contacts from across different locations on the web and merges them (they call it synergy.) With the growing importance of Social media (there 4 times more facebook users out there than iPhone OS users), its no wonder that Apple is working hard to integrate several features / services right on to the iPhone OS while maintaining stability and agility of the platform. Recently announced iAd platform is integrated to the Apple OS for the same reason – better experience, faster performance!
Apple’s integration of social media contacts to the regular iPhone contacts seems to be via a “Linked Contacts” tab thus allowing users to chose contacts to be linked during the unified view. Lets see what more rabbits Steve pulls out of his hat during the iPhone 4G launch expected in June!