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It seems that while Apple's iPhone 3G is still the smartphone to beat, it's also very quickly losing to smartphones offering more processing power, better secondary features, and open-source platforms. But Apple's rumor mill is ever-churning, and rumor has it that Apple is currently developing background app support for its iPhone 3.0 firmware upgrade, which will come a few months from now.

What does this mean for iPhone users? Simply the fact that they can now keep two or more Apps running in the background -- something that many other smartphones in the market today have let their users do for a while. Apple, on the other hand, hasn't been that keen about letting users run more than a few Apps at a time, for fears of compromising battery life or security.

Of course, users had to grudgingly deal with that limitation. After all, who wouldn't like to have an IM program running in the background of their iPhone?

This upgrade may extend the iPhone's dominance over the iPhone market by a little, but may not do so for long. As I've said, other smartphone manufacturers are slowly but steadily getting used to the way Apple does things, and are now coming up with features that Apple's iPhone has been slow in offering. Apple will definitely need a new game-breaking upgrade to stay on top of the smartphone market, and while background App support is a step in the right direction, it's just a step.

This upgrade is more of a hurdle than we may think -- perhaps the reason why Apple didn't include background App support in the previous iPhone firmwares may be because it CAN'T. The iPhone's RAM capacity is only 128 MB, and there's only so much you can do on 128 MB. Playing music and a video game App at the same time can cause massive slowdowns on an iPhone already.

The fact remains, though -- Apple has to find a way to let their users run multiple Apps on their devices, without relying on a clunky, unreliable "Task Manager." The question is whether the iPhone 3G will be the device to see this feature.