Much of the media buzz about iPhone OS 4.0 has focused on multitasking, home screen customizations and iAds.  While these changes are significant, at Cantina we’ve been wondering what other new features might emerge in 4.0 (and beyond) – and what new classes of applications they might enable.

While the full list of iPhone OS 4.0 features is yet to be publicly disclosed, there are a number of iPad OS features (referred to by Apple as “iPhone OS 3.2″) that could conceivably show up on our iPhones in the future.  Some examples:

• The ability to email an app-specific file to a friend, and have them open it up on their own device in the proper app (Document Support)
• The ability for an app to generate a PDF with text and images (PDF Generation)
• The ability to easily move app-specific files back and forth from your mobile device to your laptop (File Sharing Support)

None of these features is earth-shattering in its own right; certainly it would be possible to accomplish any or all of these behaviors today by using the iPhone app as a “thin client”, and pushing the hard work like generating PDFs, sharing documents, and managing files up to a web app server.

What is significant about having these capabilities on the device itself is how much easier it will be for developers to build apps that enable these behaviors, and for consumers to adopt them:

• App Developers won’t have to lease a server and pay bandwidth fees to enable these types of apps
• App Developers won’t have to leave the comfort of their chosen programming language and tools (XCode / Cocoa)
• Consumers will be able to leverage familiar collaboration and file management paradigms like email, attachments, and copying files to and from the desktop

Most apps today are focused around consumption – consuming content, data or interactive entertainment for a short period of time, and then closing the app.  Features like those above could enable creation and collaboration behaviors – where the activity spent in the app yields some tangible artifact, which can be exported, transformed, or shared with other app users.

The possibilities exposed for consumer apps are intriguing, but the biggest impact may be felt in the enterprise arena – where creation and collaboration are more fundamental to day-to-day operations.  This is a point that others have pondered with the iPad, where the large touchscreen presumably makes it a better fit for content creation.

Definitely will be an interesting area to watch.  Please comment if you’ve heard of particularly clever mobile collaboration apps in the enterprise.