Folks who have been hankering for a proper voice over IP solution on iPhone and not some lame web-based workaround will be happy to hear that at Apple’s OS 4.0 announcement today, Skype was shown running happily in the background. That means you can leave that kitten purring while you’re doing other stuff, and have it pop up with phone calls as they come in.
I’ll try to reel in my “Congratulations on catching up to five year-old smartphone, Apple” (woops, or not), but this is a pretty significant gap to plug. Multitasking in and of itself is a baseline requirement to become a respectable smartphone, but the implications for VoIP with services like Line2 and Skype mean great things for end users and bad things for carriers like AT&T, whose networks are hurting enough from data demands, and can potentially take a bit out of their voice revenues (that is, unless, some kind of deal is hashed out).