Can iPhone 3.0 3rd-party notifiers access Core Location?

Ross Rubin raises an interesting point…

Yes, the iPhone does allow background processes – Apple’s. While every other music player for the iPhone will stop playing when you exit it, Apple’s iPod application will play in the background. Obviously, this consumes cycles, but Apple doesn’t seem to mind the tax on battery life here. This is defensible in a product that is branded an iPod, but makes too strong of a subjective decision in a platform like the iPhone where all applications should be equal.

As a newly committed iPhone user (I just couldn’t deal with paying 30 bucks a month for unlimited data and not have the breadth of applications the iPhone OS has enabled any longer…), I’ve notice this whole “iPhone doesn’t multi-task” argument to be somewhat misstated.  Of course it multi-tasks, but it only mutlis while Apple lets it multi.  No surprise here.  This is typical Apple behavior.

Keep in mind that it’s been less than 2 years since the first iPhone hit the market, and the user base has grown incredibly fast.  There’s huge risk in that.  So what did Apple do to mitigate this?  They controlled the release of features that could exacerbate the complexity of the solution they were dropping on the market, and in doing so have avoided any reputation damaging mistakes.  Take as an example, a lack of cut and paste has been a frustration, but after they demoed the solution at OS 3.0 last week, you can see they have launched a complete solution.  Not just a half ass solution.  Apple iPhone’s OS cut and paste is simple, and universal.  It’s damn impressive.  Another example is how they rolled out the SDK, first starting with web-apps only, then native, now with 3.0, opening up more of the hardware platform and OS capabilities to 3rd parties (e.g. Dock connector API, iPod library, streaming media, etc).

Perhaps this is how I rationalize why 3rd parties can’t multi-task…., and perhaps this is being an apologist.  But I also think that it without a doubt given Apple an unfair advantage and time window to develop the core apps that determine the platform.  It is their platform after-all.  The iPhone wasn’t created to be a Pandora-player or a Facebook communicator.  Coming from the accessory side of the Apple ecosystem, I can definitely say that none of this is suprising or even disappointing.  It just is.

To the Apple response that Rubin was alluding to, I would think one big reason why multi-tasking, specifically, has been limited is because Apple is already stretching the hell out of the existing hardware resources on the iPhone as it is.  With microprocessor cost and power consumption caps limiting what is economically and aesthetically feasible in a handset platform, by limiting the amount of multi-tasking, Apple has been able to keep requirements on hardware in check (or rather allocated to “design” related persuits like UI responsiveness and others), and thus their costs down, form factors attractive, and keep users focused on core applications.  As applications become more sophisticated, and multi-tasking more beneficial to users, hardware horsepower and power management will catch up.  Competitive pressures have a way of accelerating this as well.  Two years ago, you can’t point to Android or a looming Palm platform that touted their multi-tasking…

All that being said, I was left wondering… OS 3.0 will give 3rd party developers access to the push notification service, which will enable instant messaging, application alerts, etc, and essentially allow app developers to offload background processes to the cloud.  A long term attractive way to partition some MIPS-heavy tasks away from the constrained handset, and into the omnipotent cloud… with limitations of course.

Question:  Can 3rd party apps gain access to the Core Location API while running in the background?  This would be good to know, because then you can essentially have 3rd party location-based notifications. Does Apple serve up location info to the 3rd party via some intra-cloud API?

It was not clear to me how this would be enabled…  any thoughts?

Is this why Google Latitude doesn’t work yet for iPhone?