It looks like Apple is planning to allow background processing in a future iPhone, perhaps deciding its planned push-notification system for the iPhone was not the best solution. The company will most likely drop its objection to having iPhone applications run in the background at some point in the future.

Last June, Apple announced iPhone users won’t be able to run more than one application at the same time in order to preserve battery life and performance, but that surprised many developers who were used to creating smartphone applications for other platforms with that capability intact.

However, Apple is proposing quite a different thing: a push-notification service that would route notifications from one application to another over Apple-hosted application servers. Basically, this would look like an instant-messaging application that would interrupt your game with an IM window.

Anyway, the service was supposed to be released last September, but Apple seems to have completely forgotten it ever promised such a thing. The next iPhone will most likely receive an upgrade, with faster application and graphics processors. This way, the phone could easily sustain multiple applications without a notable performance drag. Technically, if Apple does that, we could see this as part of an iPhone 3.0 software release in June.

In related news, Apple and AT&T Mobility are facing two new lawsuits claiming the speed and infrastructure of the 3G is insufficient, and these were filed in the United States District Court of the Southern District of Florida and in the United States District Court Eastern District of Texas Sherman Division this week. It remains to be seen if Apple and the carrier will win this fight.