Apple may or may not give us the ability to run applications in the background when the iPhone OS 4.0 is released sometime in the coming months. If they do, much of the criticism of both the iPhone and the upcoming iPad will be removed. If they don’t, people will continue to complain — and for good reason. There is no question that the iPad can more than handle having three or four applications running at the same time. In fact, (as the jailbreak app Backgrounder proves) there’s little doubt that the iPhone 3GS would be able to handle it just fine already.

If they don’t add background apps, it isn’t the end of the world. (Yes, it makes the iPad far less attractive for many but let’s not go there today — okay?) The truth is, Apple’s push notification system works quite well. It isn’t the same thing, but it DOES work.

That doesn’t mean, however, that there are ways in which it could significantly be improved. Here are a few thoughts.

1. Multiple notifications at once

Apple needs to make it possible to view multiple notifications on the lock screen at one time. The fact you can currently only see one of them means that if you get three or four at a time the first few won’t appear.

The end user should be able to decide if they want one, two, three or four different messages to appear at a time when notifications come in. Moreover, the end-user should be allowed to decide if they want to have just a notification, or the notification with a user selected number of words so that you can tell what the notification is without even going into the application.

It’s obnoxious that you have to jailbreak your iPhone in order to get this capability.

2. Automatic change of settings based on time of day

Some of the best notification systems thus far are the ones that allow the end-user to automatically determine whether or not the program pushes information based upon time of day. For example, (thanks to Larry) Dan is currently using echofon as his twitter client of choice. One of the best features is that he has set the application to stop push notifications to his iPhone between 10 PM and 9 AM.

We should be able to do this for all applications automatically. Because we currently are not able to, there are times when, if we forget to turn off notifications at night, as We’re falling to sleep we’ll be reminded that they are still on because of notification pings through. If echofon can do this within the application itself is no reason this can’t be implemented as a global setting.

2. Geography-based Notifications

In addition to being able to automatically set notifications based upon the time of day, it would be great if we could set notifications in such a way that they were different settings depending upon our current location. For example, if one of us were making a hospital visit, it would be great for the iPhone to know that we were at a specific hospital and automatically turn off audible notifications so that we don’t disturb someone. If at home, it would be great if the iPhone would recognize the location and begin to give audible notifications so that we wouldn’t necessarily have to have it on our person to know something new has come in.

We can’t imagine this would be difficult to implement.

Those are a few ideas regarding how Apple could make the Notification system better. Can you think of any additional ones?