Every iPhone developer has been downloading the new iPhone SDK to get their hands on the new tech that Apple's released, while also thinking about the features the company has announced for future deployment.

New York publisher Freeverse has more to ponder about that most. It's been releasing games using the Plus+ social gaming network - and is now owned by ngmoco, which runs the network.

We caught up with chief engineer Mark Levin (pictured) and marketing director Lydia Heitman to get the studio's take on Apple's announcement.

Pocket Gamer: What's your reaction to iPhone OS 4.0?

Mark Levin: We're very excited about the new focus Apple has put on gaming. In the past, it hasn't been as supportive of game developers as it could be, but a unified open-access social network is going to have a huge impact.

Everyone's saying Game Center is Xbox Live for the iPhone, and the Xbox platform is defined by the features available through Live even more than by the contents of the box under your TV. As far as gaming goes, the same could become true of the iPhone if Apple plays its cards right.

Specifically how will the Game Center change things?

Lydia Heitman: For us the Game Center means a larger user base and thus a larger audience for our games. We're really happy that Apple is accelerating its iDevices to become major contenders in the gaming world.

Still, we think Plus+ remains the best social gaming network out there, so until we see how everything pans out with the new OS, we're going to continue implementing it.

Do you think the iAds advertising tech will change things in terms of the viability of ad-funded games?Mark Levin: There are already popular and widely-used advertising frameworks on the iPhone, so for app developers, this is just one more tool in the box.

What it will really change is the user experience of ad-supported apps and games. Being presented with more streamlined and capable but less obtrusive ads should help remove the stigma that ad-supported games have to bear today and pave the way for more experimentation with that business model.

More generally, considering the iPad launch, how have you found it to-date as a games platform?

ML: The iPad is everything the iPhone was, only more so.

Right now, the vast majority of games available were designed for the smaller screen and lower capabilities of the iPhone, so we're not seeing what it's really capable of. But I'm excited to see what games built from the ground up for the iPad will bring to the table in the coming months.

The iPad seems especially suited to strategy games and other genres that display large maps of dense information. It's been historically difficult to design such games on the iPhone without them feeling cramped.

Although now minor, iPhone 4.0 OS marks further fragmentation of the iDevice platform. At what point does this becomes significant in terms of developers having to write code for specific devices?

ML: The big disruptive feature in OS 4.0 is multitasking. There are many types of apps for which that feature is such a game-changer that doing a 3.0 version will be either a significant engineering challenge or not worth doing at all.

But it's just an expansion of the field, and only in certain areas. For most apps, OS 4.0 will be no more of a challenge than OS 3.0 was.

Thanks to Mark and Lydia for their time