Multitasking In For iPhone 4.0?

The latest word on the iPhone is that the 4.0 OS will finally have honest-to-goodness multitasking. This could hopefully lead to things like a real chat client, and dangerous battery consumption. I still hope it's true.

Comments

ipad might be worthwile

[Vectormatic]

this would be AWESOME for the ipad, might even make it worthwhile.

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[Vectormatic]

the only mod i get is overrated, on a non-modded post... GO MODS GO

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[PFactor]

It's a valid moderation. You probably had a karma boost and the mod thought the post didn't deserve the boosted score. Or s/he disagreed with your point and had mod points to burn ;)

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[infaustus]

Over and underrated mods don't get metamodded, so they're a safe way to be an asshole.

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[roc97007]

I'd say multitasking on the ipad is a dead on requirement. This isn't the 1980's anymore, guys. The cheapest generic Netbook will multitask. Most smartphones will multitask. Wristwatches will multitask. Winders has had multitasking since... Oh, I dunno, 1993, or 1996 or 2000 depending on your definition of "multitask". Still a long time ago.

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that it's a troll doesn't negate the fact that he's right.

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[uberjack]

As a dedicated Android user (and programmer), I still don't see the value of multitasking in a mobile app. The runtime can automatically clean up and restart the application with all the state information necessary if it ceases to run anyway. It's a lot easier to just assume that it's _always_ going to be cleaned up upon suspension, instead of writing code that accounts for the possibility that the app just may be resuming from a paused, but not terminated state. I haven't used a single Android app, or written any code that I can say honestly benefits from the multitasking aspects of Android. The runtime can shut down my app any time it sees fit. Planning for resumption from an abruptly terminated app is the norm when developing for Android anyway. The way I see it, the apps would have more resources if the platform didn't have to multitask.

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[petermgreen]

The obvious usecases I can see for multitasking on a pda/smartphone are things like music players and chat clients. Maybe a VOIP client too.

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[macs4all]

GAWD! Replying to an AC that is replying to an AC. What am I thinking?

But here goes...

I don't think anyone in their right mind, Apple fan or not, would have said that, given the choice, that "multitasking" (of 3rd party apps) would inherently be a "bad" thing.

There is a big difference between UNDERSTANDING usability trade-offs (battery life vs. "multitasking"), and PREFERRING them.

I would imagine that this is being offered primarily because the iPad has a much larger battery capacity than the iPhone/iPod Touch, and thus Apple can feel confident that the battery life will not be as adversely affected by "multitasking" on the iPad than the iPhone/iPod Touch.

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[macs4all]

Here's another thing people don't stop to think about: In a "multitasking" OS (which the iPhone/iPad OS already is!), or more specifically, when "applications" are allowed to "multitask", such as in the desktop version of OS X, I cannot tell you how many times I have looked at the Dock on people's Macs, only to see virtually EVERY application up and running (but with no open windows). An amusing "cluck-cluck" moment in a desktop OS, but, running on extremely low-end (by today's desktop standards) hardware (like a phone), this "app cruft" would probably slow the response of the UI to an unusable crawl (does the iPhone OS even HAVE "virtual memory"?).

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[bemymonkey]

The multitasking aspect is essential for things like keeping an instant messenger or VoIP app running in the background (a 24/7 scenario here)...

Although I've got to say - most Android IM apps suck at staying connected in the background. Fring, eBuddy, Nimbuzz - they all disconnect (and then don't reconnect automatically!) or crash after a while...

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[beelsebob]

There's only one exception to this rule that I can think of – chat clients.

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[koding]

Okay, I don't know what kind of apps you are creating, but you seem a little narrow minded here. If you can't see the benefits of multitasking on a mobile phone, with all the media possibilities, notifications, location aware services etc, well...

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[jfanning]

You obviously don't think about the usecases very much.

I was using my Nokia E71 the other day and it was tracking my walking using GPS (Sports tracker) in the background. I was checking directions with Ovi maps and looking things up online in the browser. So all were running at once.

In your world my tracker application would been killed the moment I switched to another tool. That it totally useless and the reason I will never use an iPhone as long as multitasking is missing.

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[Anonymous Coward]

If I'm listening to Pandora Radio, I'd like to be able to check email, surf the web, send a txt, etc. Currently I cannot do that with an iPhone.

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[hmar]

Except that I never heard anyone say otherwise, Apple Fanboy or not. I heard some say they didn't care about it, and that it wasn't a deal breaker, but I never heard anyone say that multitasking was not a good thing. There are plenty of things to hate, in or out of Apple, without making shit up.

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[Blackjack Joe]

For myself, the one type of app I'd like to see be able to multitask is streaming audio, such as Pandora or Slacker.

Re:ipad might be worthwile

[AmiMoJo]

That's not a good assumption to make. I use a app called PaperDroid which is basically an offline web page reader for when I am overseas without unlimited data, and when ever you switch away from it and back again it re-renders the entire page from scratch. On a long page that can take a second or two, more with images and complicated layout.

Some apps really need to update in the background too. An IRC client needs to keep accepting messages, a wardriving app needs to keep scanning etc. Android's ability for apps to sync in the background is also very useful, and allows apps to poll RSS feeds or other "pull" only data sources so they can notify you of updates. iPhone apps can't do that.

i'll believe it when i see it

[jacktherobot]

I think i've heard this before...

Re:i'll believe it when i see it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's called speculation, it's what Apple does to gain market before releasing a product, just to mess with other companies.

Re:i'll believe it when i see it

[WillyDavidK]

That's because it's old news

Battery Life

[mingbrasil]

If you can really use iPhone for more than 3 hours for an heavy user, magine with multitasking....

Re:Battery life

[natehoy]

Most apps written for the Blackberry are pretty well-behaved. Those that aren't get uninstalled pretty quickly. You learn pretty quickly which ones to ALT-TAB out of (leaving them in the background) and which ones to use the EXIT option on the menu to get out of (shutting them down).

I have a Geocaching application called Blackstar that runs the GPS whether it's in the foreground or background. That thing can gobble my battery dry from full charge in about 3 hours. I make darned sure to exit out of that app unless I intend to go back into it quickly. And that's exactly how it should work - I should decide whether to leave it running or not. Re-engaging a GPS lock takes a minute, so I should be able to hop out and log a cache on the web browser while it maintains my location (or I can choose to exit the app to save battery if I know I won't use it again for a few minutes).

On the other hand, Google Maps shuts down the GPS and falls back to cell tower triangulation unless it is running in the foreground. Most apps that use powergobblers like the GPS will shut them down when you aren't actually using them at the moment. I'd really have to work hard to need to recharge my phone more often than once every 24 hours, and even with a bunch of (well-behaved) background apps running I still usually get 48+ hours of normal use between charges.

I also have a car charger cable in my car, so if the battery starts to run down quickly I can add some juice. Mine uses mini-USB so very inexpensive car chargers are very easy to find, but I'm sure they make Apple-connector car chargers pretty cheaply by now, don't they?

Re:Battery life

[toadlife]

This is not an issue for me with Windows mobile. In the wild wild west of Windows mobile, badly behaving apps that needlessly suck battery are shunned via word of mouth and as a result apps are generally battery friendly. I would imagine iPhone's appstore vetting process would take into consideration battery consumption and keep battery killers from the app store.

real chat client

[Anonymous Coward]

These kind of apps make me laugh. You've got a phone with SMS & web browsing capabilities, and you want a chat client?

Re:real chat client

[Ma8thew]

Maybe because you don't want to use an antiquated protocol designed as an afterthought which carriers (in many countries) charge a fortune to use?

Re:real chat client

[AvitarX]

Let's see, I've had 100+ message long SMS threads with someone in a day (using it as IM in Gogole voice, them on a phone).

If I were to do such to one of my friends over seas, I just spent a decent amount of money. So with them I use gchat.

Also, in general I SMS for a quick question or message, and IM for a conversation (my first sentence not withstanding). Different mediums for different purposes. You may-as-well ask why does the iPhone have SMS, you can just use IM. Or why does IM exist, just use e-mail.

Re:real chat client

[StikyPad]

Only if you're counting each of the 50, nifty, United States as its own country. Pretty much everywhere else in the world charges little to nothing for SMS. Or "setup" fees. Or incoming calls for that matter. Whether it's medicine, cellphones, or the internet, "Pay more for less!" is the motto of the US corporation.

But on the upside, at least all those massive profit margins have given us a flourishing economy. Oh, wait...

Re:real chat client

[Ma8thew]

FYI, I'm not American. In the UK all contracts have limits on the number of texts you can send or charge 10p per text on pay as you go. I think Canada uses a similar model to the US, and the situation in Europe is similar to the UK. Given that SMS messaging does not consume any extra resources anything over 1p a message is pretty steep. And most packages include free data, so you might as well use it. That and SMS messages can sometimes disappear into the ether, to be received hours after they were sent.

Re:real chat client

[icebraining]

Price is not directly related to cost. As long as people are willing to pay 10p, that's what they'll charge.

Re:real chat client

[Ma8thew]

I'm aware of that. But text messaging certainly has the appearance of industry wide price fixing.

They haven't been phones for years

[Colin Smith]

It's a computer with wireless.

 

Re:They haven't been phones for years

[Anonymous Coward]

To you it is a computer with wireless. It isn't to the vast majority of consumers, to them it's a phone, PDA and content delivery platform (music and video).

Re:They haven't been phones for years

[Skarecrow77]

That's their loss.

Re:They haven't been phones for years

[CharlyFoxtrot]

It's a computer with wireless.

It is and it isn't. Apple seems to think they've finally hit on the much anticipated "computer as consumer appliance" while most geeks think it should just be a computer which does phone calls. This is the reason for most of the controversy around some aspects of the iPhone and iPad.

Re:They haven't been phones for years

[colourmyeyes]

To me my laptop is a computer with wireless. It isn't to the vast majority of consumers, to them it's a chat/email device (occasionally a phone), PDA and content delivery platform (music and video).

Re:They haven't been phones for years

[Guy Harris]

To you it is a computer with wireless. It isn't to the vast majority of consumers, to them it's a phone, PDA and content delivery platform (music and video).

I.e., "the vast majority of consumers" who own an iPhone have never gotten any third-party apps for it (and don't even use Mail or Safari)?

Re:They haven't been phones for years

[NoOneInParticular]

How so? I would love to have a phone, PDA and content delivery platform. For computing with wireless, I'd use my laptop.

Re:They haven't been phones for years

[Anonymous Coward]

or gain... the sales figures will tell

Re:They haven't been phones for years

[The End Of Days]

I would say, based on iPhone sales figures, that the "controversy" largely exists in the minds of the people who spend their time on Internet forums, believing that because they share an opinion with a few hundred other people, they are some sort of hidden majority. The echo chamber effect is insidious like that.

The iPad is ridiculous, though.

Re:They haven't been phones for years

[Wovel]

While I think that is true of every other smart phone on the Market, based on mobile browser statistics, the iPhone is the exception.

Re:They haven't been phones for years

[Ihmhi]

I agree. The iPad is definitely ridiculous... -lous... -lous... -lous... ...

Re:They haven't been phones for years

[Anonymous Coward]

this is true of other smartphones but not the iphone. Its got custom hardware that only resembles a computer.

In any case, the OS is locked down enough that it is more an appliance than a computer. This is the reason for its success, but also the reason why I dislike it. I prefer to be in control of the device/computer, not to have my computer controlled by a third party.

Apple make awesome consumer devices and then cripple them by limiting how you can use them. Works great for non-technical people, but not people (like myself) who like full control of what they buy and use. I dont think that bothers Apple at all however.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, it should perform only one task at a time, ie either transmit what_you_speak or receive what the other person speaks. Just like a walky-talky. Sound absurd? So is your argument!

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Mekkah]

YEAH! Why have a cell phone.. I think there are pay phone things somewhere... I saw one on Superman.

Streaming music player + other app

[tepples]

What if I want to use a streaming music player and some other app at the same time? As it stands, current iPhone OS is capable of multitasking the built-in iPod software with other apps, but not streaming music with other apps.

Re:Streaming music player + other app

[nangus]

Well if multi tasking is implemented as a series of call backs so that any process that is waiting on data is not consuming clock cycles then there should be no more drain when "multitasking" then when running one application. I have never written anything in objective C but with most of my embedded c programming I am able to put any processes that is not doing anything to sleep, so it does not consume extra power.

As far as I can tell using the backgrounder on my jail broken iphone when not actively working most programs still consume cycles. So almost all of this could be fixed if the wait() call is not properly implemented in the lib.

Re:Streaming music player + other app

[netsavior]

jailbroken iPhones can run pandora streaming in the background while doing other stuff (including email, web, etc)... the same as the iPod background mode. Honestly that was my number one reason to jailbreak.

Re:Streaming music player + other app

[dch24]

Push notifications were supposed to do this. The app has most of its logic on the server, and only pushes things to the iPhone when needed. (Push notifications are a relatively new feature, so they may not be all they're hyped up to be.) I think that's the iPhone-blessed (ugh!) way of "getting a series of call backs"

If iPhone OS 4.0 allows background tasks -- and I'm not convinced it will -- they really only become useful if the background process is *not* sleeping. Examples of background processes would be:

• VOIP (while doing other things on the phone, like looking up an email address)
• Streaming music
• GPS navigation (because the GPS information needs to be processed before the app knows whether to alert you about the next left turn, or not)

I have heard that wait() is broken in the current implementation, and it needs to be fixed in order for multitasking to really work well. +1 on that one.

Re:Streaming music player + other app

[Brian Feldman]

Very much incorrect. Most computer programs spend most of their time "sleeping" while they are not actively updating the display, receiving input from somewhere, or actively processing something. This is the standard non-realtime paradigm used for almost two decades in commodity computers. Did you ever notice that your CPU is not running "at 100%" all the time?

Re:Streaming music player + other app

[Guy Harris]

I have heard that wait() is broken in the current implementation,

You mean the API for waiting for a subprocess to exit is broken in iPhone OS? launchd probably won't be very happy about that.

Or are you thinking of, say, msleep(), the kernel interface in Darwin for blocking on an event? If that's busted, Mac OS X won't be very happy, either.

Re:Streaming music player + other app

[Guy Harris]

+5,000,000,000,000 Informative. Do people really think that, unlike what happens on every other frigging UN*X on the planet, processes on iPhone OS would spin in a busy loop when they're waiting for something to happen, rather than just blocking?

Re:Streaming music player + other app

[Guy Harris]

Well if multi tasking is implemented as a series of call backs so that any process that is waiting on data is not consuming clock cycles

iPhone OS is a UN*X; multi-tasking is ultimately implemented as "calls that wait for something to happen end up making a system call and the process blocks".

then there should be no more drain when "multitasking" then when running one application.

...unless, for example, an app is continuously updating the display, showing an animated ad, or displaying a game screen, or.... Perhaps the app would be told "you're going into the background, stop updating the screen (but don't necessarily stop playing audio)".

s far as I can tell using the backgrounder on my jail broken iphone when not actively working most programs still consume cycles.

What indicates that they're consuming cycles, rather than just blocked in a system call?

So almost all of this could be fixed if the wait() call is not properly implemented in the lib.

As per another comment of mine, iPhone OS being a UN*X, wait() is the call you use if you've started a subprocess (fork()/vfork(), posix_spawn()) and you wait to wait for it to exit. There is no single call that is the call to wait for something to happen - there are a whole bunch of blocking system calls such as read(), recv(), recvmsg(), connect(), etc., as well as the usual wait-for-events calls such as select(), poll(), and kevent(), plus the Mach messaging calls. Most apps probably use higher-level APIs that are built atop them.

Re:Streaming music player + other app

[SlashDotDotDot]

You've missed his point rather badly. He isn't saying he wants background processes that never sleep. He's saying he wants process that are allowed to do some work, some of the time, when they aren't the actual task in front of the user on the screen. Sure, they might sleep most of the time, but they might, say, wake up for 10 milliseconds out of every 300 milliseconds to process a data stream, decide not to bother the user, and then go back to sleep.

That said, I don't think you deserved the troll mod. Maybe, "+1 Incorrect Point About A Interesting Topic".

Re:Streaming music player + other app

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine has problems running Pandora and a few other tasks. Anything that causes a beep or uses the audio will cause Pandora to go away. It doesn't crash exactly but it does stop making noise.

Re:Streaming music player + other app

[lupine]

The standard iphone os is capable of much more than it allows you to do. How do you think push email works? How do you think the phone app works?

I jailbroke my phone for the extra features, I could care less about the pirated apps. I have backgrounder installed which allows limited multitasking. I listen to public radio player(c89.5 seatle, 89.9 madison) which helps me get my groove on while I browse the web, use google reader, read email, whatever.

I also have adblock for the iphone and a small hosts file which combined with iphone's lack of flash filters out most ads.

Yes multi tasking it eats the battery faster but it is worth it. I have version 3.1.2 and used blackra1n(excellent).

Re:Streaming music player + other app

[lupine]

Btw I also use the kirikae app to do task switching.

Re:Streaming music player + other app

[jfanning]

That whooshing noise was your answers going over the head of most commenters here.

It is obvious that hardly anyone actually has any concept of how a modern operating system works and how multitasking is done.

People listen! Unless you are doing something incredibly stupid like running a while(true){} loop then your program will spend almost all of its time doing nothing! It will almost always be blocked in some system call or waiting on an input event.

So all those background applications for the most part are not consuming any processor cycles, they are not using battery, they are not doing anything except taking up RAM (and in the N900 they can even be swapped out).

Only if the application is actively doing something like fetching data from the network, playing audio, using the GPS, etc will it have any effect and any smart developer will minimize this activity anyway.

A minor point...

[slagheap]

The iPhone OS has always had real pre-emptive multitasking. The phone, email, iPod, calendar, and other applications run all the time and can do things simultaneously.

Multitasking just hasn't ever been made available to 3rd party developers.

It has never been a technical limitation in the OS. Rather, Apple kept control over it for battery life and security reasons.

Re:A minor point...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny. My android device can multitask (any app, not just the ones Apple lets you multitask with), and the battery life is solid as well.

Perhaps Apple is full of shit and just wanted to shaft users/developers again?

Re:A minor point...

[Anonymous Coward]

What security reasons are there to restrict multitasking from 3rd party developers?

Re:A minor point...

[truthsearch]

Personally, I prefer it this way. When I'm using any app the only thing I want interrupting me is a phone call. And the only thing I want running in the background is iPod, which already does. If multitasking third party apps becomes an option I'll probably turn it off.

Re:A minor point...

[vijayiyer]

It ensures there are no daemons running, making it nearly impossible to have a botnet of iPhones.
With multitasking, how do you know that a thread doesn't get spawned off that now runs and listens on an arbitrary port for incoming connections?

Re:A minor point...

[Fahrvergnuugen]

There are plenty of UI design concerns as well. Currently there is no standard UI for dealing with apps running in the background. The phone gives you a green bar across the top of the screen. The iPod gives you a special alert with buttons when you double click the home button and a play icon in the top right of the screen. The calendar doesn't have any UI at all, it just alerts you with a message. The Mail app displays a numeric badge and plays a sound (a feature available to all 3rd party apps using the notification API).

It will be interesting to see how they unify the UI for running multiple apps at once without compromising the usability of the device.

My guess is that everything will basically look and function the same, except the App's icon will have a glow or a badge indicating that it is running in the background. Each app will have to explicitly be granted permission to be able to run in the background by the user (same way each app has to be allowed to send notifications now).

Re:A minor point...

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather, Apple kept control over it for battery life and security reasons.

So in the meantime I' ll keep using my non-crippled N900 with a full linux distro that allows me to run whatever I want at the same time as whatever else ;)

Re:A minor point...

[steelfood]

Multitasking has never been a huge security problem, so long as inter-process communication is disabled. Sure, it introduces file and device access control issues, but the OS should be handling that properly, multitasking or not.

For the record, the iPhone does have the ability for apps to save their state, which is a poor man's multitasking. But true multitasking isn't really necessary in a form factor like the iPhone. A desktop PC, sure, a laptop, maybe, but it's rare to ever be doing multiple things at once on a device as small as the iPhone.

At most, you're listening to music while reading an electronic document (because most other apps come with sound already), but it's possible to avoid multitasking by putting the music playback calls into libraries behind an API and let the individual apps use it if/when they want to.

The iPad, which falls closer to the iPhone than the laptop in terms of capability, has a better case for multitasking beyond state-saves. It is possibly a technical limitation, that there'd be enough programs running of a sufficient size in a typical usage scenario that the background processes wouldn't all fit into RAM or swap. I suspect the enabling of multitasking is for that more than anything else, as to be honest, I'm not sure why the iPad, with its closed environment, would need multitasking otherwise. It's not like somebody's going to be encoding their MP3's while running a FTP daemon while compiling code while reading a document. And while a regular tablet could be rendering a scene in the background, the iPad's closed environment makes that use case likewise highly unlikely.

As the iPhone already has multi-threading, even IM's and chatting can be handled without multitasking. They can be processed the same way as text messages (but perhaps without the preempting that happens). It's a matter of the OS being able to properly handle the incoming packets, and the application being able to smartly handle the incoming messages.

Re:A minor point...

[pete-classic]

The Mail app displays a numeric badge and plays a sound (a feature available to all 3rd party apps using the notification API).

I don't think this is strictly true. I believe that the Mail app is running, and is able to set its badge unilaterally. The 3rd party notification API requires some application NOT running on the phone to notify Apple to send a message to the phone to set the badge on the app, which isn't running. The effect for the end user is largely the same, but the mechanism is radically different.

-Peter

Re:A minor point...

[garcia]

Or maybe they'll cave and have another button to "tab" between applications or just holding down the one they have will do it. I'm sure they'll come up with something but in the mean time I'll probably switch to Verizon and the Droid because it'll cost less and do more.

Re:A minor point...

[kainewynd2]

This isn't a really good example of why they limited multitasking, though someone probably said it in the marketing staff meeting. I think it has a lot more to do with iPhone battery life than anything else... it's short enough as it is without AIM, Pandora and Echofon using more.

If this is true, hopefully they figured out a software way to expand battery life.

Re:A minor point...

[imp]

I've used the various add-ons that make multi-tasking possible on iPhone OS 3.1.2. Of course, I just mean "being able to run multiple GUI applications at once" by this statement, but that's kinda what it means in the popular, non-technical press...

I have a few observations.

First, some applications react very well to running in this mode. In fact, most of the ones I've tried do act well. I can get my facebook updates, have my chat client running, etc. So long as I'm careful with memory usage, things are all fast.

When memory gets tight, things fall apart. Sometimes the app dies, sometimes it gets really slow, etc. I have an old 2G phone, so memory is limited there. I doubt that native support for this would be stable enough to be enabled in iPhone OS 4 by default on the 2G.

Finally, the one reason I'd want this, assuming I had the memory, is that Apple would likely improve the GUI aspects of multi-tasking. There's no notification right now if I get a chat message. There's no mail notification. I'd love to have that stuff be possible while I'm playing a game (or disabled, depending on the game). The various jailbrake add-ons don't address this aspect of things. It is a rough edge in an otherwise highly integrated environment.

Warner

Re:A minor point...

[EraserMouseMan]

If it isn't ready for prime-time release to 3rd party developers it can't be compared to what everybody expects a true multitasking OS to be. When they get some engineering talent in there who can write a multi-tasking phone OS that can intelligently handle any number of apps, 3rd party included, simultaneously then it will be able to join the club.

Locking it down to out-of-the-box Apple apps only is tacit admission that if they let any app multi-task the iPhone would be brought to it's knees.

Re:A minor point...

[trapnest]

It ensures there are no daemons running, making it nearly impossible to have a botnet of iPhones.

I have seen a working, functional botnet of hundreds of jailbroken iPhones. It's an interesting thing to watch. Change your root passwords!

With multitasking, how do you know that a thread doesn't get spawned off that now runs and listens on an arbitrary port for incoming connections?

Very few mobile providers give phones public addresses.

Re:A minor point...

[Dog-Cow]

You haven't really used an iPod Touch or iPhone, have you? You also haven't read many replies in this discussion, or the numerous threads in other discussions that give reasons for multitasking on these devices.

Most games that I've played which have sound allow you to disable it so that you can listen to music. If you use a streaming service to get music, you'd like to continue while performing other tasks.

You have no vision what-so-ever.

Re:A minor point...

[strength_of_10_men]

The (jailbroken) app "Backgrounder" handles it quite well. It displays a small activity-wheel icon on apps that are currently running in the background. It also does this for the native Apple apps that run in the background. What's so hard about that?

Re:A minor point...

[Scoth]

I realize I'm an edge case, but I've been known to be listening to streaming music while having an ssh session open in MobileTerminal to my server to check on something, with Facebook and a chat client running in the background that I switch over to now and then.

Uses tend to expand to fill a device's capability.

Re:A minor point...

[Scoth]

You may want to Google on iphonevm . It's a virtual memory implementation for jailbroken iphone/ipods. Standard warnings about write cycles on flash apply, but it's made a huge difference with my multitasking on my iPod touch.

Re:A minor point...

[zullnero]

Actually, if you have a halfways intelligent notification system, that's not a problem at all. My Palm Pre does all that multitasking, and I've never had a phone call interrupted by anything. We've got over 2k apps now for the Pre in about 8-9 months, and I've got a lot of apps running on my phone, and I've never had a phone call interrupted by any app. We get notifications that show up as a little icon on the bottom of the screen, so when the phone call is done, I tap it and deal with it then. Or, I can choose to deal with it during the call if I so choose. In fact, I frequently open up my email while in a call on my Pre, because people call me all the freaking time and ask me if I got that email they sent. Or my calendar. Once, I opened up solitaire during a long conference call and had the call on speaker.

Re:A minor point...

[bennomatic]

Even the iPod/iPhone allows this. I can listen to music through my iPod Touch's native music player app while playing a game without a problem. It's only the use of third-party music players like Pandora that are blocked here.

I'm not saying that there's no use at all for multitasking, but I agree with the GP that for the great majority of users, "save-state-and-switch-app" is a good enough solution.

Pandora must be thrilled that they're essentially the poster child for what's wrong with the lack of multitasking. I'm sure it's great for their business. But the market--outside of the /. crowd--I'm sure most people wouldn't notice that it's missing.

Now, in my ideal world, an i{Pad,Pod Touch,Phone} would have the ability to dock, drive a full-sized monitor or two, connected to a USB or bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and when docked, act like a full MacOS X computer. But do I want my 3d rendering programs giving life to my animations while I'm talking on the phone on the same device? Nah.

Vision, schmision, I say.

Re:A minor point...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then the right solution is to allow you to turn it off. Not disallow you from turning it on. I love Apple products, and I admire their dedication to security on the iPhone, but this is not a security issue, it's battery life. And I'd like to make my own choices in that regard, tyvm.

Re:A minor point...

[ihatejobs]

Agreed!

Re:A minor point...

[Anonymous Coward]

it would be nice to be able to listen to NPR or Live365, spotify, geolocation etc while using other apps like camera, bloomberg, wikipedia, NY Times etc.

Re:A minor point...

[zullnero]

WebOS isn't really as far off from iPhoneOS as you'd think, and it handles notifications and apps running in the background just fine. WebOS basically runs Safari as a fairly majorly integrated part of the UI on top of Linux, with a lot of custom stuff in the middle layer. The main reason why iPhoneOS doesn't do what WebOS or Android does is because iPhoneOS apps are written in screwball Objective C instead of being actual managed code running in a reasonably efficient virtual machine or interpreter of some sort (even if most apps...except for 3d games, of course...are basically web apps running in a tightly integrated browser). That makes it much tougher to actually deal with multiple apps running in the background in a usable way. They're allocating memory, hitting data sources, and doing other things without a substantial management layer to deal with them properly (like hibernating tasks, locking data sources, and other things that you can do to save power and have a multitasking UI).

Re:A minor point...

[xxdinkxx]

That is assuming they let you turn it off. If they are going to allow multitasking, then it seems to me fluxbox or some other window managers are now more viable.

Re:A minor point...

[Anonymous Coward]

But you can never listen to music, surf the web and keep your cardio trainer running at the same time. I can, because droid does :).

Re:A minor point...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love this mainly for pandora

Re:A minor point...

[peragrin]

Where does verizon cost less? My last price comparisonshad verizon priced higher with data caps to limit data. Theworse is while they have a 3g network they often deliver dialup speeds outside of main roads and cities.

As a comparison my company is just about to switch to AT&T for cell phones as it is estimated to save us 30% a year compared to what verizon was willing to work with us. Almost literally saving the wages for a minimum wage worker for the year.

         

Re:A minor point...

[bennomatic]

As long as the Death Penalty exists, there can be no justice.

There: fixed that for you.

Re:A minor point...

[tlhIngan]

If it isn't ready for prime-time release to 3rd party developers it can't be compared to what everybody expects a true multitasking OS to be. When they get some engineering talent in there who can write a multi-tasking phone OS that can intelligently handle any number of apps, 3rd party included, simultaneously then it will be able to join the club.

Locking it down to out-of-the-box Apple apps only is tacit admission that if they let any app multi-task the iPhone would be brought to it's knees.

More likely, third party devs are stupid. Yes, stupid. They do stupid things, and we end up in the state we're in for stuff like Windows and IE6 because the devs do stupid stuff. Lots of windows private resources and code have been hijacked because devs took the easy way out - like looking for a window called "Program Manager" (it's the desktop window caption). Or the Display control panel having a special window class just so drivers can do anything they want to it as they try to override stuff. Or programs hard coding "C:\Documents and Settings\" instead of calling the API to get the true name (which is localized!), resulting in the nice pile of hard links and a really messed up \Users\ directory on Vista and 7.

A stupid daemon that polls once a second to do something kills battery life quite significantly, even if you don't turn on the screen. And people complaining about how their Windows Mobile phones seem to have crap battery life and crash, probably due to some installed app doing crap like this.

Laptops allow this because they have huge batteries, so stupid apps and OSes are hidden in the brute force method of having a decent battery life. It's why Linux has the no-tick kernel option, because even the OS scheduler clock tick causes battery life to go down on a phone. (OS X does a variable tick since the beginning - the scheduler looks at when the next event is supposed to happen and schedules the timer to tick once then. Windows and tick Linux have a regularly scheduled timer interrupt).

Re:A minor point...

[davidbrit2]

I'm guessing it would be an optional feature, and when enabled, pressing the Home button will only switch back to the launcher without closing the program. Pressing and holding the Home button for a second or two could actually close it. I'd certainly like to have this capability on my iPod Touch, in any case. It would be great for momentarily jumping out of a game to look up some info, then coming back to it, or leaving AIM running (and many other scenarios, of course).

I've never understood the battery life argument. When I press the power button on my Windows Mobile phone, it goes to sleep, and if a program was running, well it'll just have to wait until the phone gets turned back on if it wants more CPU cycles. Why would the iPhone/iPod Touch be any different?

Re:A minor point...

[dfghjk]

"Rather, Apple kept control over it for battery life and security reasons."

You don't know this, it's only speculation. Once Apple committed to it's overly simple UI, allowing multiple programs to run became a problem. Apple didn't originally provide an SDK for 3rd party development and, from the sound of their initial comments, didn't intend to. I believe lack of true multitasking had nothing to do with battery life or security.

Re:A minor point...

[amRadioHed]

You prefer being limited to using only Apples music player? Personally on my phone I listen to streams from last.fm as much as I listen to local MP3s, and I wouldn't be able to do that on an iPhone.

Re:A minor point...

[Skuld-Chan]

Its kinda cool - having multitasking on my Symbian phone. While a web page is loading (thanks at&t - fastest network alive... cough cough) I can flip over and check my email, or change a track on an album I'm listening to.

Your argument is so similar to the ones the ms-dos users on our local bbs used to use when I told them how wonderful multi-tasking on my Amiga was. In other words - I don't have it and I'm glad for it!

My response was always something like - I like listening to music, managing files, editing graphics etc etc while responding to this post - while the machine was busy applying a filter, copying a file or playing a mod I was still typing away on another app.

Re:A minor point...

[Anonymous Coward]

I frequently background apps with backgrounder on my jailbroken iPhone. The only notification I get is a small noise, or in teh case of the facebook app a badge update and that's only because I turned the others off ;)

Re:A minor point...

[tux0r]

When I'm using any app the only thing I want interrupting me is a phone call.

Me too, with one important modification: I want the app I'm using to be able to wait in the background until the phone call is done, then bring me right back to where I was (ie mid-calculation/-level/-video) without delay.

The phone app should be one that executes "over top" of the others, causing the other apps to pause, rather than quit.

Re:A minor point...

[sjames]

Even wayyyyy back in the dark days of DOS,people at least wanted TSRs (terminate, stay resident). The best way provide that capability on a modern OS is to spawn a process.

Re:A minor point...

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, I frequently open up my email while in a call on my Pre, because people call me all the freaking time and ask me if I got that email they sent. Or my calendar. Once, I opened up solitaire during a long conference call and had the call on speaker.

Those are things that you have always been able to do on non-jail broken iPhones, as the phone app is one of the few that have always been allowed to multitask.

Re:A minor point...

[Wovel]

Of course all of the things you just described work the same way on an iphone. All of the apps you mentioned already multitask.

Re:A minor point...

[Wovel]

I am amazed you have not yet been modded funny. This is the funniest post of the year. GJ.

Re:A minor point...

[Anonymous Coward]

This issue truthsearch mentioned isn't apps interrupting phone calls, it's apps interrupting other apps.

You can already run other apps during a phone call.

Re:A minor point...

[flink]

There is a last.fm app in the iTunes store. I don't use it that much, but it streamed just fine on the few occasions I used it.

Re:A minor point...

[amRadioHed]

While you're writing email or browsing the web? I've used it before on my girlfriends iphone, and I seem to remember having to stop the music when I needed to look something up.

Re:A minor point...

[mjwx]

Personally, I prefer it this way. When I'm using any app the only thing I want interrupting me is a phone call. And the only thing I want running in the background is iPod, which already does. If multitasking third party apps becomes an option I'll probably turn it off.

Because the last thing I want is for my phone to carry on with whatever I was doing whilst I take a phone call. I'd much rather it shut the whole thing down whilst I was in the middle of working or worse yet, took the time to save it before I could answer the call. And the last thing I want to be able to do is access another program whilst talking, I never need to tell someone numbers, people or directions I cant remember over the phone.

But fear not, I highly doubt that multi-tasking will come the the iphone. So you need not worry about being able to work on two things at once, like transferring some information out of your G-mail into some kind of document. or editing a file whilst waiting for an IM response.

Re:A minor point...

[sam0737]

It will be interesting to see how they unify the UI for running multiple apps at once without compromising the usability of the device.

While the foreground app will run on the front side screen, shouldn't I expect background tasks running on the screen on the backside??

+5 funny.

Re:A minor point...

[mattack2]

You're SURE that the phone uses exactly the same amount of power 'asleep' if an app was running than if it wasn't?

Obviously a phone isn't completely asleep, it's still 'listening' for calls... (and if it's playing music or something, definitely something is running)

Re:A minor point...

[Raul Acevedo]

I think the real reason is that Apple never planned to open the iPhone to other developers. When it first came out it was a completely closed platform and Jobs swore it was critical for security that no one be able to install any 3rd party software. Then everyone went nuts and Apple realized they had to allow 3rd party development, hence the app store. Point is, it was all very last minute and rushed, so it has taken a while to make this happen since it was never planned in the first place.

The hypocrisy of Jobs censoring iPhone development, when 3rd party apps are now touted as one of the great features of the iPhone, is truly staggering.

Re:A minor point...

[hazydave]

I don't think it's got anything to do with battery life. It's "Apple" vs. "everyone else"... Apple wants their apps to be special, no one else's. It's fairly trivial to ensure multitasking works fine. And given Apple's heavy hand in the iTunes store, they could easily demand that all apps behave properly as multitasking apps (eg, they go quiescent when they lose focus, other than in the case of daemons, and are otherwise well behaved), or they get booted from the store. Apple's contract with developers already gives them the ability to kick out any app for any reason, and even to kill those already out and installed on iPhones. Surely this isn't a problem of their level of control. Thus, not a real power issue... that's just the excuse some people make.

Re:A minor point...

[hazydave]

It's quite true that Apple's system of alerts is completely broken when it comes to multitasking. But hey, the Android alerts system works exceptionally well... Apple can certainly copy that kind of behavior, if they can't figure out something for themselves.

Re:A minor point...

[hazydave]

Already being on Verizon, the Droid cost me an additional $30/month over the cost of service for a non-smart phone. It's a family plan.. we have four phones on for slightly over $100 per month. The general prices between AT&T and Verizon aren't significantly different... one may be better or worse, depending on the specifics of what you want. The data plan, at least for individuals, is the same... "unlimited" data for smart phones (where "unlimited" in both cases is subject to arbitrary definitions, both companies will go after you if you're using more data than they think possible under their license... like tethering)

As for coverage, the entire Verizon network is 3G, only about 20% of AT&T's (by area, not by population) is 3G. That's nothing more than the difference between CDMA and GSM... the CDMA 3G protocols run over the same frequencies and bandwidth used for 2G/Voice, while GSM always requires additional bandwidth, and often, additional frequencies. This is further compounded by today's AT&T being a mix of two previous companies, Cingular and AT&T Mobility. Cingular bought AT&T Mobility to become the country's second largest cellular network, after Verizon. But AT&T Mobility was using DAMPS (they called it "TDMA"), not GSM. So the company has spent many years just establishing full 2G GSM coverage and phasing out DAMPS (the DAMPS network went dark in mid 2008). This is also why AT&T's slightly more likely to drop calls than other GSM networks... DAMPS has slightly better coverage than GSM, so upgraded DAMPS cells are often not ideally placed for GSM.

At its peak, the AT&T network is faster than Verizon's. Regular HSPA cells deliver up to 3.6Mb/s down to clients, versus 3.1Mb/s down to clients for CDMA's EvDO Rev A. By this summer, AT&T will have HSPA+ coverage in as many as 40 cities, which can deliver 7.2Mb/s down to clients, if you have a fast enough phone (you'll need an iPhone 3GS for this, and the iPhones are all still crippled on the upload side... HSPA+ can go upstream at up to 2Mb/s, but iPhones only do 384kb/s). All networks degrade over distance, and all fall back to "EDGE" speeds if you're too far from a cell site for 3G performance. AT&T and Verizon both have an advantage in range, though, generally being the companies owning one of the two 850MHz slots available in any area of the USA. You get much better range at 850MHz than at 1900MHz... Sprint does its 3G at 1900MHz (and WiMax 4G at 2500MHz, though they don't have any 4G phones out yet), T-Mobile does 2G at 1900MHz and 3G split between 1700MHz and 2100MHz. Verizon is starting 4G service at 700MHz this summer, using the LTE standard; AT&T will be starting 4G next year, also at 700MHz (Verizon won the largest 700MHz spectrum block, 20MHz of spectrum, while AT&T got the other big win here, 12MHz worth of spectrum).

Re:A minor point...

[hazydave]

It's rare to be multitasking, much, on an iPhone because, well, you can't. If you use an Android phone, you'll probably find yourself multitasking all the time. I certainly do, on a daily basis. Works great. And yeah, I might not be too likely to compile code, but I could certainly be playing MP3s while running an ftp daemon (not to mention a dozen other daemons, for GPS and communications features), while reading a document.

Re:A minor point...

[peragrin]

Your still only talking about cities. once you get outside of a major area/ road verizon drops their data speed for range. massively drops to the point were AT&T's edge is faster. So yes while verizon is all "3G" not all locations actually get 3G data speeds. In fact only a map area about the size of AT&T's 3G area gets those speeds. Stop talking about the tech and actually go for a drive into the country some day. The difference is very obvious.

The only other good point about your post is that with LTE both companies will be basically in the same band. and we will have real competition between them. Not to mention the abaility to move between them and keep existing phones.So the iphone 4G won't be limited to just AT&T for technical reasons.

Re:A minor point...

[davidbrit2]

If I'm understanding it correctly, the "listening for calls" is handled by the separate radio hardware (called the "baseband" in an iPhone for whatever reason), which then sends a "wake up" signal to the phone when a call or message is received.

Now, using Exchange Activesync on my phone definitely reduces battery life, but I'm not sure if it's because of the TCP connection it has to leave open while sleeping, or all the times it has to wake up to either reestablish the connection (every 30 minutes or so, I believe), or sync with the mail server because something was just received.

Whatever the case may be, it seems like it would be trivially simple for the iPhone to tell the kernel's scheduler to suspend any user-installed applications when it goes to sleep, regardless of whether or not it's truly powered down.

Re:A minor point...

[kainewynd2]

Thus, not a real power issue... that's just the excuse some people make.

I won't disagree that Apple uses a heavy, and many times unfair, hand in management of their apps, but when the 3.0 firmware came out and things like Push notifications and Apple-built multitasking apps came to the fore, a lot of people started seeing substantial battery drainage. Add to this the introduction of 3G and the battery life plummets.

I'm certainly not suggesting this is the only reason, but I think it has a lot more to do with the current lack of multitasking than any conspiracy by all of the upper level execs at Apple.

Re:A minor point...

[truthsearch]

You seemed to miss the part where the phone does work in the background. The built-in functionality of the device does multitask, just not 3rd party apps.

So yes, I am perfectly happy with how it works today. And I've never lost any data.

But thanks for the obnoxious reply.

Re:A minor point...

[Skuld-Chan]

My understanding was that music would play in the background, but that the iphone wouldn't download web pages, and email at the same time.

Re:A minor point...

[EvilIdler]

Actually you could. If the Last.fm app lets you, that is. You can call up the iPod library in any app since OS 3.0.

I hope it's optional in settings

[rolfwind]

There are real uses for multitasking, which the iPhone already does - like listening to iPod while surfing or the like. Maybe chat as mentioned, but I also hope to set which apps can be multitasking - I don't trust the developers always to make the correct call - there is no reason to leave a game running in the background while I surf, it would be better to save state. I would actually say saving state and resuming again is better the vast majority of times over running in the background.

But oftentimes I try to hang up the phone by hitting the home button instead of the end call button (even though I think I did), and while surfing, I still see that "Return to Call" blinking on top.

To conserve battery life, I already turned off push notifications and other things. And I would turn off multitasking for my parents phones, they hardly can use a computer as it. With this, they'll only be wondering why the phone battery is dying even faster.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[Em Emalb]

I am glad to see you posted what I was going to post, since I don't have mod points, I'll do the AOL thing.

I agree with this post.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[Anonymous Coward]

As an iPhone developer, I can tell you this just isn't coming. Apple has lots of (NDA'd) guidelines about how much CPU juice you get (since iPod etc can work through your app) and this would seriously topsy turvey the existing software base. They have gone out of their way to make a UI that works well without multitasking, and stuff like APNS was engineer specifically not to require it.

Aside from having my SSH sessions die when I want to goto an email or phone call, multi tasking has never actually been lacking.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[Anonymous Coward]

If you quit an app, it's no longer running. If you switch from one app to another, it's still running in the background. Is that hard to understand?

So, if you don't want that game to keep running in the BG, quit it; don't just go back and run another thing. You get to choose if a given task will stay in the background every time you leave it. That has always worked for everything since the Amiga; should work for an iPhone, too.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[IDtheTarget]

There are real uses for multitasking, which the iPhone already does - like listening to iPod while surfing or the like. Maybe chat as mentioned, but I also hope to set which apps can be multitasking - I don't trust the developers always to make the correct call - there is no reason to leave a game running in the background while I surf, it would be better to save state.

Good point. The major reason that I look forward to multi-tasking is that I believe it to be a requirement for true VPN applications. It would be nice to be able to use my iPhone to VPN through our firewall at work so that I can handle emergency systems admin tasks.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[tepples]

Apple has lots of (NDA'd) guidelines about how much CPU juice you get (since iPod etc can work through your app)

Then why doesn't Apple open the "iPod etc" API to allow for streaming music players?

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[Ma8thew]

Just as it took till 3.0 for Apple to introduce copy and paste, it will take them till 4.0 to introduce multitasking for exactly the same reason. They want to do it right. Copy and paste on the iPhone is intuitive and easy, but they didn't figure out how to do it in such a great way immediately. Rest assured, Apple won't do multitasking like Android, you won't need a task manager. Whatever form it takes, Apple will err on the side of making it limiting but easy to use.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[Anonymous Coward]

If you quit an app, it's no longer running. If you switch from one app to another, it's still running in the background. Is that hard to understand?

Hard for you to understand? No. Me? No. Grandma? Pure f**king voodoo.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've ever used another phone that supports it, it's been lacking.

Multitasking is just like copy/paste. When the iphone didn't have it, everyone went on about how they would never use it anyhow and they didn't see what the big deal was. Then when they got it they were blown away by how awesome it is and how they couldn't get by without

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[Dog-Cow]

CPU usage guidelines that the developers don't know about are not guidelines.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[trentblase]

Try using the sleep button to end the call. I often hit it instinctively to turn off the screen during a call, and it hangs up on the person I'm talking to.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[kehren77]

I think the key, especially for your parents, is making it very obvious as to whether you are closing or backgrounding a program. That's one of the things I hate about my Blackberry Curve 8330. Almost every app is different, some you "Exit", some you "Close", some close when you hit the back button, some stay open when you hit the back button.

It makes it a pain in the ass to try and figure out what all you have running.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[0xdeadbeef]

Android has a task manager? Where?

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[Anonymous Coward]

If grandma can't understand smartphone usage, why does she have one?

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[Anonymous Coward]

You need something other L2TP, PPTP or IPsec?

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[Ma8thew]

There is a third party task killer for Android. I'm presuming demand for it stems from phones being slowed down by too many apps running.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[0xdeadbeef]

Only complaints I've heard are the crap that Sprint adds to their devices.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[dotancohen]

Maybe she saw a flashy ad? The salesman told her she needs one? It was a gift?

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[ClosedSource]

"They want to do it right"

Right. It's not as if copy/paste was something OSs have been implementing for years. They had to go back to scrapbooks to really figure out the whole text moving Zeitgeist.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[amRadioHed]

Android 2.1 has a task manager under Settings/Applications/Running Services. I never use it to kill apps though. Apps that don't multitask right get uninstalled from my phone.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[bennomatic]

Why do people care so freakin' much about streaming music players? I just don't get it. What's wrong with buying your music and synching it on your phone if you want to browse at the same time?

I mean, I understand that it's a nice feature, but if a restaurant opens around the corner and they don't serve caviar, I wouldn't freak out and say that they're not worth their salt as a restaurant because they don't serve caviar. They serve what they serve because they're good at it, and it's something that they feel will serve the dining needs of a significant target market.

Like, OMG! Pandora FTL! What's up with that?!

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[bennomatic]

I think they did copy/paste as well as they could with the interface, but I kind of hate it. It's not uncommon that I'm doing something and the "copy/select" option comes up, and I'm just not interested in it. I think it triggers too easily.

I probably use it once for every 50 times the option shows up on my screen. And even then, I think I could live without it.

God bless the crybabies; we would never get the features we don't need or want if it weren't for them.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[chartreuse]

...and that's exactly why his parents shouldn't have to. Any system Apple comes up with is going to have to be transparent/intuitive if it isn't going to be a misfeature for the ~90% of the iPhone (etc.) user base that aren't geeks like us.

Requiring the user to keep a table in their head of the closing/backgrounding characteristics of their apps is a cognitive load most would find burdensome. I've already seen people on desktops who couldn't keep track of single-clicking (on a URL link, say) and double-clicking (to open an app), so they just triple-click on everything.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[Ma8thew]

And how is copy and paste normally implemented? Keyboard shortcuts or mouse. Neither of those are present on the iPhone.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[derfel cadarn]

I'm not sure if they want to do it right or if it's just a calculated move to keep the masses from upgrading their phones every time a new version comes out. It just has to be "good enough" to sell the current version. After all, there is one less reason to upgrade if it is already available on version N-1. Apple is the king of marketing after all!

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[ClosedSource]

No fan for the Mac? Inability to move files from one NeXT to another without a network? No keyboard for the iPhone? Hey, it's form over function for Steve, baby.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds a lot like Android, I must say...

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[indiechild]

I think it may be an option that you have to turn on in the settings. Kinda like the caps lock feature.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[Ma8thew]

Honestly, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[ircmaxell]

Just being pedantic, but that's not a task manager. It only monitors services, not applications. A service is a program that always runs, and only ever runs in the background. An example of a service would be an app that periodically updates its data (Like an RSS reader, or a sports score updater, etc). It's the same concept as a service in Windows, or a daemon in *nix. The Running Services manager lets you see what background services are running, and to terminate them. But there's no task manager in the traditional sense (that shows you every program that's running). That's why programs like Advanced Task Killer exist. BUT --from my experience-- most of the applications that I've used just work. There's a convention. If you exit out of a program with the back button, that program stops running. If you exit out of it with the home button, it keeps running. Simple as that. But even if they don't stop all together, if the phone becomes low on resources (out of memory, out of CPU, etc) Android will automatically kill lower priority applications (those that aren't being actively used at the time, and those that were last used the longest ago)...

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[rinoid]

I just love to see a gaggle of AC's get all riled up at each other.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[arose]

By that logic they chould have something better then a virtual keyboard to input text, since normally it's done with a keyboard and the iPhone doesn't have one. Virtual keyboards suck, if they wanted to do it right they should start with major features, not hold back trivial ones.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[arose]

Any system Apple comes up with is going to have to be transparent/intuitive if it isn't going to be a misfeature for the ~90% of the iPhone (etc.) user base that aren't geeks like us.

One can only suppose that unintentional roaming charges are not a misfeature.

Re:I hope it's optional in settings

[fm6]

If a feature is a niche item, then it's analagous to caviar. But if a feature is popular, than it's analagous to a more popular menu item.

A lot of people prefer to get their music from a stream. I know I do. It's more convenient, and if the person programming the stream is any good, you'll get a nicer mix and a chance to sample new artists and genres.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[BitwiseX]

If I wanted a freakin' phone I would have just bought a RAZR or something, but I wanted a SMART phone. You don't think iPhone users want this? *raises hand* I do!

Another feature Android will steal, no doubt!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why Apple should sue the shit out of Google, because once iPhone OS 4 is available, Google will inevitably steal every single idea from it.

Re:Another feature Android will steal, no doubt!

[Skarecrow77]

Damn Google and their time-machine!

Re:Another feature Android will steal, no doubt!

[Anonymous Coward]

so in order to make it at "slashdot style" they should not sue google, they should go to campus, steal their time machine and go back in time an kill Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page's great grand parents before they even meet!!

I cannot believe i was about to post this under my user, and i had no karma points, i hate I always get modded down just before a nice comment is growing up inside me!!

Re:Another feature Android will steal, no doubt!

[Anonymous Coward]

are you talking about the feature of multitasking? android has had that from version 1.

Re:Another feature Android will steal, no doubt!

[bennomatic]

Woosh. :)

Re:Another feature Android will steal, no doubt!

[mutu310]

I hope you're joking, because Android already has multitasking. It's more of a case of it working vice versa.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[c 0xFF]

Except it's not just a phone ... it's a "smart phone."

The term may be vague/undefined, but it's understandable that some think it implies a more general computing environment. Apple's "app" concept doesn't help that perception. Why should multitasking be such a foreign concept?

SMS on a land line?

[tepples]

You've got a phone with SMS & web browsing capabilities, and you want a chat client?

As I understand it, you can't SMS to or from a U.S. land line. Nor can you SMS to someone who primarily uses AIM, Windows Live Messenger, EFnet IRC, or Freenode IRC.

Re:SMS on a land line?

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the service provider. Many Telecoms provide SMS to Speech services, so you Can send SMS -to- a landline. And you can message someones phone from Messenger - likewise you can reply to it all the same, or you could send an email, since you need that for messenger or AIM.

And also - an iPhone isn't a landline.

Re:SMS on a land line?

[Vectormatic]

not to mention the fact that for various providers, SMS costs you a small amount of money (between 5-20 cents here in the netherlands, depending on contract), and every iphone comes with unlimited 3g usage

chatting through sms quickly adds up

Re:SMS on a land line?

[olddotter]

SMS costs a fortune in the US. I had it disabled.

Re:SMS on a land line?

[dotgain]

Unlimited 3G usage? Every iPhone? Try 250 megabytes on Vodafone New Zealands NZD$80/month plan!

Re:SMS on a land line?

[tepples]

As I understand it, you can't SMS to or from a U.S. land line.

Many Telecoms provide SMS to Speech services

Can you name any of these operators that operate in the United States, home of Apple, Slashdot, and myself? I'd like to see citations about this so that I can understand the limitations of SMS-to-speech.

And also - an iPhone isn't a landline.

Allow me to rephrase: You can't SMS from an iPhone to a U.S. land line or from a U.S. land line to an iPhone. Nor can you SMS with an iPod Touch.

Re:SMS on a land line?

[trapnest]

Can you name any of these operators that operate in the United States, home of Apple, Slashdot, and myself? I'd like to see citations about this so that I can understand the limitations of SMS-to-speech.

Sprint.

Re:SMS on a land line?

[trapnest]

You have no unlimited SMS options?

Re:SMS on a land line?

[Scoth]

I SMS from/to my iPod Touch all the time, though it needs wifi access. Works nicely.

Re:SMS on a land line?

[tepples]

The iPhone side of the connection doesn't work with Sprint. As for the land line side, Sprint spun off its home phone service division into EMBARQ, which is now part of CenturyLink. Google centurylink land-line sms is failing me; can you provide more information?

Re:SMS on a land line?

[Vectormatic]

sorry, i meant here in the netherlands, T-mobile has the iphone exclusively, and offers it ith a plan with unlimited 3g, unfortunately their 3g coverage is the worst of all providers, sometimes you dont even have GSM coverage.

compared to the us and such, phones here are not all that expensive, but i still think it fricking sucks how expensive those things are

Re:SMS on a land line?

[Vectormatic]

i'm not entirely sure, but you would pay through the nose for that, while on a 30 euro/month plan you can have a iphone with unlimited 3g, but only 150 minutes/sms'

Re:SMS on a land line?

[roc97007]

If you pay by message, sure. Just like, if you buy internet access by the kilobyte, it adds up quickly.

I bought unlimited SMS for daughter's phone because she's a deamon texter. I think it's $10 a month.

I have SMS capability on my (non-i) phone because it's the way my daughter and some of my friends communicate. I have the gtalk app on my phone because other of my friends use that and nothing else.

Telling my family and friends that they must use email because I have an i-phone and that's all it supports makes me look like a chump.

Your mileage may vary, I guess. I suppose as a fanboi one could hand-select one's family and friends such that they all communicate via email.

And fer crissake, blink once in awhile. Your eyes are all shiny.

Re:SMS on a land line?

[hazydave]

The reason you want a chat client is obvious... you're talking to others using that specific chat protocol. My company uses Yahoo messaging for regular communications during business hours. That's our standard, and the ability to have that on my Droid, keep myself logged in, get a beep when a new message comes in, is very useful.

The big advantage of smart phones over other devices is that they function, ideally, as universal communicators. So do PCs, but they rarely fit in one's pocket and last all day on a single change. And yet, new forms of communication keep being invented: chat, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Sure, not everyone needs every new form, but a smart phone ought to be able to hook in any new form as a perfectly first class form of communications. That means things like background notifications, just as you get with SMS or phone calls. If your device can't do this for arbitrary new forms of communications, it's broken.

Re:SMS on a land line?

[trapnest]

I can get unlimited web/data/sms for about 40 USD (a bit less then 30 euros) Why is it everything thinks american communications are terrible?

Re:SMS on a land line?

[trapnest]

You didn't say that they had to be an iPhone provider. I am fairly sure that it is Sprint that does the conversion on their end, and then transmits to the land line as a voice call.

Re:SMS on a land line?

[tepples]

I can get unlimited web/data/sms for about 40 USD (a bit less then 30 euros)

Where, and which carrier?

Why is it everything thinks american communications are terrible?

Because not everybody lives in a major city, and not everybody chooses where to live.

Re:SMS on a land line?

[trapnest]

I can get unlimited web/data/sms for about 40 USD (a bit less then 30 euros)

Where, and which carrier?

T-Mobile, MetroPCS.

Why is it everything thinks american communications are terrible?

Because not everybody lives in a major city, and not everybody chooses where to live.

I suppose, but the vast spaces between our cities are never taken into account.

Existing Apps?

[hemlock00]

At one point when looking into developing an Application for the iphone, one of the requirements for *all* apps is that it had to be able to close with in a small time window upon hitting the home button as to kill any chance of running more than 1 app at a time. The reason for this, as I read it, was to avoid having a ton of applications running (w/o the user aware) and killing battery time and other software conflicts. I'm not really sure thats a bad thing. I can remember with my blackberry, If I got a call while in an application I may forget and before I knew it--dead battery. Since it's a phone first and a app platform 2nd, multitasking might not be the best thing for it.

Re:Existing Apps?

[Skarecrow77]

My droid doesn't have any problem with apps in the background eating up battery life, except for a select few apps that by their very nature have to be chewing up cycles and using phone resources (gps, 3g, etc) even while in the background, like Trapster.

I've got about 20 things running right now and my worst concern is free memory, of which I've still got 48mb. I can look at battery usage readout and see that none of them are using anything of note.

It's about time apple gave this to it's users, not that that's enough to make me even think about switching.

Re:Existing Apps?

[zach_the_lizard]

The app I use on my jailbroken iPhone lets me see exactly what is running and close it, so if they have similar functionality to this app, they could make it very easy to avoid that problem.

Re:Existing Apps?

[Dog-Cow]

The OS kills any application after 5 seconds that does not end itself when told to quit. It has nothing to do with preventing 2 apps from running at the same time. Rather, it is because there is no provision to switch apps in the UI, so if the app didn't quit quickly, it would appear to hang the phone.

The only requirement on timing is that state must be saved quickly to avoid data loss when the watchdog kills the process.

Re:Existing Apps?

[larkost]

Android does not actually run the other applications that are in the background. The only things allowed to run in the background are "services" that some of those apps rely on for things that need to continue. This gets confusing to users as in some apps (take Pandora as an example) the service is 90% of what you want the app doing, and the actual app is only a thin skin over the top.

If Apple does go the route of "background apps", then I hope they adopt a similar model, but are even more aggressive on resource-limiting the background services running. I saw all of the warts and problems of not doing this with my old PalmOS phone (not WebOS, but the one before). If I left my email application running the background it could well (and often did) crash the phone and I could not receive phone calls. And anything running the background and my battery life dropped to less than a working day.

I have an iPhone now, and appreciate that I never have these problems. It might be nice if my RSS reader could have things ready for me when I switch to it, but it is not that big a deal. And I am not silly enough to think that something like Pandora or an IM client that holds open a TCP/IP connection is not going to kill my battery life.

Re:Existing Apps?

[mjwx]

I have an iPhone now, and appreciate that I never have these problems.

I have an Android phone and I appreciate that I have this functionality and that I never have these problems.

Your comparing an OS that had the functionality but a few problems to an OS that simply doesn't have the functionality and then appreciating that it doesn't have problems with the functionality it doesn't have.

This gets confusing to users as in some apps (take Pandora as an example) the service is 90% of what you want the app doing, and the actual app is only a thin skin over the top.

This is confusing to you because you don't understand that the service is part of the application, the UI is temporary but the UI itself is not an entire application rather it is top of the application stack.

You'd have a point if it ran as part of the Android system processes but each application has it's own process. Doing a ps command on my phone I find out that my email client runs as com.nitrodesk.nitroid not com.android.process.acore. Even different android functions run as different processes, acore is the home screen application (IIRC) where as the phone (radio) is the com.android.phone process and will not crash if acore does (which, when you're running a modded OS it does occasionally but I've never had a problem with acore not restarting). At it's core Android is essentially Linux, so it behaves in a very similar fashion.

Re:Existing Apps?

[hazydave]

Actually, apps in the background can run just dandy.. it's just that most are interactive and/or well behaved, and simply get put on the wait queue when they lose focus. That's what they're supposed to do. There are a few that are not correctly written, though, and it's completely possible for an app to drop to the background and keep churning away under Android. I found this out the hard way with a GPS monitoring program... of those things that gives a nice compass and satellite view. This particular one (can't recall the name) didn't process the "going to background" message, and kept churning away... not at all good for one's battery life.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[memnock]

i was gonna ask what's the point of chat? but i suppose if it could more than 2 people at a time, that could be useful.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Vectormatic]

not having multi-tasking means you cant run the chat app in the background, so everytime you want to go to your webbrowser, the chat app completely closes, you go offline etc...

so even when not chatting with multiple people at the same time, this could be extremely usefull for chat apps

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[StikyPad]

Well if full-duplex is your definition of multitasking, you'll be pleasantly surprised to know that the iPhone already multitasks just as well as the StarTac.

Would be Great

[olddotter]

But if they do allow multitasking, I hope Apple becomes MORE restrictive on what they let on the App store. I don't want crap apps sucking my battery down.

As a developer concerned with power usage I would like more access to tell the OS things like how often I need a GPS location update. You can tell the API to update your app when you have moved x distance, but that implies the OS is watching movement constantly and only updates you every so often. I'd also like to shut down such resources when on a screen that doesn't need them, if I can quickly bring them back up.

Re:Would be Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a wild idea: don't install them.

Oh sorry, Apple has to tell you what to think. And apparently everyone else too.

Re:Would be Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would "crap apps" suck your battery unless you start them? And why would you download "crap apps" in the first place?

Re:Would be Great

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a crApple iPhone after all

Re:Would be Great

[olddotter]

Its hard to tell an app is crap until you use it. "Can't judge a book by its cover." Its much more true that you can't judge software by what marketing told you.

I would have to carefully evaluate each app one at a time never loading or running more than 1 per day, to be able to figure out which one was written by an idiot.

Re:Would be Great

[ReverendJ1]

With Android you can look at exactly how much of your battery has been used by which apps. This is built in and you can look at it whenever you want. Whenever the battery life gets to 15% it will tell you to start charging it and ask if you want to see this report.

Re:Would be Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I don't see any reason why apps would suck the battery so much. There are basically two such possible reasons:
1. Preventing the phone from going into Sleep mode (or waking it up too often). This is why Longitude (Latitude updater for Jailbroken iPhones/iPods) recommends you use a 15 mins or larger update interval. This is somewhat of a problem with apps that need to be "always on" and respond within 1 or 2 seconds. (f.e. incoming calls in Skype). I assume the normal phone app on the iPhone has hardware assistance in this regard.

2. Taking too much processor time (preventing processor sleep cycles) or memory. This could be easily solved by saying that background daemons could take max 1% processor time, or using something like Nice 10 on them. The memory limit could be implemented as well. For example, with something like Skype, the whole app doesn't need to run in the background, just the networking part. The GUI could be loaded dynamically when needed. The same thing is true of things like Longitude (It seems actually it works this way).

Even if the GUI is running the whole time, the OS knows which program is in the foreground, so it would be easy enough to have things like OpenGL calls, etc. turn into NOPs.

So if they implement multitasking for 3rd party apps officially, they could do one of two things:
a. Actually allow entire apps to run in the background.
b. Require developers to split the app into a GUI part and a Daemon part (which is good design anyway).

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[nangus]

So people that use the iphone never want to say use last.fm or ustream and aim or some game at the same time? Just from a user prospective I would like to be able to use more then one app, that is not part of the default install.

It's already been there

[zach_the_lizard]

This is why I jailbroke the thing in the first place (well, that, and a few other things): multitasking for everything, not just Apple's apps. For some time now, I have been able to listen to music and browse the web, text, chat, etc. by just switching apps. It works fairly decently, too, and doesn't make it very slow. I am simply amazed they decided this was a proper limitation.

Re:It's already been there

[Joe Tie.]

Backgrounder's probably the single biggest reason I have mine jailbroken. I'm always amazed at the people freaking out like multitasking would cause the thing to explode. People have been multitasking on it for years now. I've had a couple issues with backgrounding and sound, but that's about it. For the most part it's worked great for me.

Re:It's already been there

[whisper_jeff]

For some time now, I have been able to listen to music and browse the web, text, chat, etc. by just switching apps.

Uh, you do know you can do that with a non-jailbroken iPhone, right? You didn't mention anything that a stock iPhone is incapable of doing so, if that's why you jailbroke your iPhone, you wasted your time... If there are other apps that you're running with backgrounder, fine, but that was a bad list of example tasks given the iPhone can do that out of the gate.

Re:It's already been there

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the only app that you can use to listen to music is the iPod app. Way to shoot from the hip...

Re:It's already been there

[zach_the_lizard]

I admit it was a bad list, but there are plenty of other apps that I have that I run in the background quite a bit.

Re:It's already been there

[whisper_jeff]

Ok, so, I'm curious - what apps (not names since I doubt I'll know what the jailbroken app does by name - I'm interested in function) beyond the core apps which already run in the background do you find beneficial to have running in the background? I can see it being important to have apps that wills ave their state as you switch from one to another (switching from a word processor app to Safari to research something and back to your document to continue writing, for example), but that can easily be handled with saving the current state and relaunching within that saved state which most apps that could benefit from that already do. What app processes do you find you need to have actually, actively _running_ in the background? Also, keeping in mind apps that don't benefit from push notifications (chat software, for example, which can get notifications of new messages via the already-existing push notification functionality).

I'll pre-empt things by noting that, yes, I realize having Skype run in the background would be beneficial but it's far from essential given that you're using an iPhone which already has _phone_ functionality. I know there are various apps that do things that the core apps already do on specific networks that some people would love to have running in the background. I'm curious about functionality not covered by a core app.

Re:It's already been there

[Anonymous Coward]

Backgrounder + Krikae = FTW

Re:It's already been there

[amRadioHed]

The apps most likely to be running in the background on my phone are various audio players, google navigation, and other various gps apps for recording trip information.

Re:It's already been there

[Anonymous Coward]

I can only think of two such examples:

The first is iPhone specific: Google Latitude. I personally would never want to run something like that but other people certainly do.

The second is iPad specific: being able to watch TV or other videos (e.g., through the EyeTV app) in a small window talked at a corner of the screen while I do something else like web browsing. That is the only kind of multitasking that I do on my laptop that actually translates to a device like the iPad (but not to the iPhone).

Re:It's already been there

[ADRenalyn]

You're assuming that he listens to the stock player instead of a streaming music service like Slacker or Pandora. The Iphone/Ipod kills those apps if you hit the home button. I couldn't even stream the comedy channel from Slacker and use my grocery list app while shopping (need something funny while I shop so I don't run over people with my cart) until I ran the jailbreak.

Re:It's already been there

[Anonymous Coward]

The best case I've had for backgrounding is a VoIP app, which lets it ring even if it is running in the background. There have been cases where there is little phone signal, but I'm blanketed by wifi (think hospitals).

Thank God

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess we should thank god that our overlords at Apple didn't release the first version of iPhone with a DOS/BASIC prompt!

Multitasking comes now -- what's next? Multiple windows?? Hallelujah!!

Re:Thank God

[Scoth]

10 print "Enter Phone Number? "
20 input A$
30 OPEN "COM1:9600,N,8,1,DS,CD" FOR OUTPUT AS #1
40 print #1,"atdt " + A$

Re:Thank God

[hazydave]

You could have that BASIC prompt, but sadly, Apple saw the Commodore 64 Emulator as a major threat to the future of the iPhone, and outlawed it. Works just dandy in Android.

Riiiight.

[wiredog]

And it'll be on Verizon's network, too.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[religious freak]

Obviously, they do want it. And I was in the "geez, why doesn't Apple enable true multi-tasking?" crowd along with most other people. However, after playing with my new iPod touch (thanks sis - she knows I'm too cheap to buy this stuff myself) and comparing it to my Android, I think Apple is smart.

The Apple UI is so smooth compared to Android's, there really is no comparison. I HATE lag when I'm dealing with a UI, and Android's multi-tasking Java based applications take a good 1-3 seconds to do anything I tell them to do. If there's any chance Apple would have impacted their UI performance to enable multi-tasking, I think they made a great move.

I still wouldn't switch from an Android to an iPhone because of the restrictions (and I'm not going to wager hundreds of dollars on a jailbreak), but now I see why people enjoy Apple products.

For most users multi-tasking is a secondary concern to a nice UI.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Anonymous Coward]

It also means AT&T will make more money as apps that use the internet will be backgrounded and sending bits of data.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Skarecrow77]

What Android phone do you have? My Motorola Droid is mostly instantious (give or take a few milliseconds) unless it's low on memory. Sure it has the occasional slowdown, but 98%+ of button presses are more or less instant.

I have no problem with the Android UI. It's pretty damn simple. Press the button on what you want to do, and there is an auxillary button for options. I havn't used an Iphone, but what do they do that's really so much better?

Firewall spec in an app's manifest

[tepples]

With multitasking, how do you know that a thread doesn't get spawned off that now runs and listens on an arbitrary port for incoming connections?

That's not an argument against multitasking but an argument for using the kernel to block incoming connections to ports other than those that an application has specified in the manifest.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

A real chat client? What's missing from it currently? BeeJive with push notifications enabled has been as good for me as any backgrounded chat app I've ever used.

not sure why

[fermion]

I am not sure why I want multitasking on the iPhone. The stated use is to allow a chat window to be always present. What would that look like though, a piece of my small screen dedicated to such an application? Does this mean I have a small browser window.

In the old days, we had background processes that always had to run. Now we have signals and the like that can awake idle processes so they do not have to run. Then we had TSR applications, and similar items on the Mac, like the Talking Moose. The former was created to solve the long start up time of applications on DOS and Windows. Multiple windows and such were useful on the PC, with larger screens, but somewhat harder to use on the Mac. The Mac seemed to launch applications faster, so I don't have a recollections of being annoyed that Finder was not multitasking.

Multitasking is a solution to solve some problem on the general computer. I am not sure it is the right solution for a small screen mobile small battery device. I would rather see innovative solutions rather than rehashing the same old thing. I think there this might be a useful solution for the iPad. My concern is that iPhone 4.0 is built for the next iPhone, and will make current iPhones harder to use. This is what happened with iPhone 3.0, which does not run very well on the first generation iPhone.

Re:not sure why

[natehoy]

I can only give an example based on the Blackberry, the iPhone implementation (if it ever happens) may be entirely different.

There is a section of the home screen devoted to a "notification area" (similar to the one found in Windows, at least in concept). Any application that wants to handle push-type notifications registers with the OS, so notifications (ringtones, number of vibrations, whether it blinks the LED, etc) are all handled through the same place you choose your ringtones for calls.

If I'm running the native apps for IM, I'll get my notification plus an icon with a little red star appears on the home screen. Most of the native apps also allow the icons to show in the top bar. I then know to ALT-TAB to the IM application running in the background and read my incoming message, and reply to it if I like. Most third-party applications lack the notification icon, but usually change their application icon on the home screen and also vibrate or beep based on how I've set them up in the notifications profile.

There are several useful problems solved by multi-tasking, at least for me:

1. I run an RSS reader, and that is programmed to go out every 8 hours and pull all the news articles from all of my news sources. That way, if I end up in a no-service area, I still have relatively recent news.
2. Instant messenger, which has the same "push-style" notifications as SMS, but can be done from any IM client (currently logged in to AOL, Yahoo!, and MSN) and doesn't incur SMS charges. I also use SMS for those friends of mine who don't get charged per-message.
3. Google Maps / "Me" multitasking. I like being able to exit out of Google Maps to go check something and know the GPS is still running, and when I go back into Google Maps it's right where I was before with the GPS running and my street route intact. Same is true of web browsing - I can start loading a complex page, then hop over and do something else while it's loading.

Multitasking can make up, in large part, for the deficiencies of the Blackberry I have - it's an EDGE-only phone, so I can't surf the web as fast as a 3G iPhone. But I can have it pull data while I'm doing something else. Nothing can make up for the teeny little screen as compared to the gloriously

Battery life is less important to me. Even with a bunch of background apps running gathering data for me, I still get a solid two days of actual use out of it, and it's a 16-month-old phone on the stock battery. If an app goes misbehavin', I uninstall it and move on. Having all the information I want at my fingertips, even if I've lost service (which happens all the time inside my workplace) is far more important.

To me.

Maybe not for you.

Re:not sure why

[natehoy]

PS: I think there's a difference between multi-tasking and a windowed interface that might be part of your issue with it, if I read your post correctly.

The stated use is to allow a chat window to be always present.

That's not entirely accurate. The intended use of multitasking is to have a chat

application

always running (eg. logged into an instant messenger server, able to receive a message and notify you in real time). Not actually visible at all times, but running in the background.

All actual applications would still run in full-screen.

You'd be able to, say, continue talking on the phone while you switched over to the IM app and replied to the instant message you just received.

Or go check something on the Web while in the middle of an IM conversation but still receive the messages from the person on the other end while you are surfing (you'd just have to switch back to the IM application to read and reply).

Or click/select the URL you just got over IM and check out the YouTube video they wanted you to see, without losing the connection to the IM server so you can continue your conversation as soon as the video is done.

Or surf to a web site that does streaming music, and then go back to another application and leave that music running while you work on a document, or chat on IM, or whatever.

Sure, it's not useful for everyone, but for those of us who like it the lack of it is a deal-breaker.

Re:not sure why

[natehoy]

Darnit, "application" was supposed to be in bold above, not quotes. Stupid fingers. Stupid brain telling them what to do.

Re:not sure why

[Anonymous Coward]

No body said the background apps had to always be DISPLAYED... just that they had to always RUN. If the chat program is always running in the background (invisibly), then when you get a message, it can beep or pop something up immediately.

Unlike the notifications, which aren't always reliable or timely, if the application is running in the background, it could let you know right away of an incoming message or phone call. What's more, when you get a notification and the program has to open, it can take considerable time. f.e. both Fring and Skype take considerable time to open and sign in. If they can run in the background, then they can come to the foreground immediately when needed.

Also, anything that does recording of location, etc., needs to have at least some small component running in the background. As for the OS, I run OS 3.1 (jailbroken) on an iPod 1g, it works fine...

Best way to get a Nokia N900 in the USA?

[tepples]

The Nokia N900 has multitasking and is fully open

Which U.S. mobile phone operator carries the Nokia N900? Or if you happen to live in a T-Mobile covered area, which U.S. retail store chain carries an unbranded Nokia N900 that I can try before I buy?

Re:Best way to get a Nokia N900 in the USA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. I really WANT to get this phone, but I'm not going to buy it without ever actually seeing one in person. It would help if it were on a better carrier than TMo, but I think I'm even willing to compromise and get it with EVDO only on ATT (Verizon would be nice, but I'm not going to go there). Nokia has done a terrible job marketing this device in the US; it's almost as if they want it to fail here.

Re:Best way to get a Nokia N900 in the USA?

[jonbryce]

In Britain you can buy an unlocked version from the Nokia shop, and there is one in most large towns, and use it on any network. In the US, you would be able to use it on any GSM network, which I believe means T-Mobile or AT&T.

Re:Best way to get a Nokia N900 in the USA?

[hazydave]

EDGE only? EvDO is the 3G protocol on CDMA networks... it's not part of the N900 on GSM.

Re:Best way to get a Nokia N900 in the USA?

[hazydave]

The problem with unlocked smart phones in the USA is the 3G network. GSM's 3G protocols demanded more bandwidth than you had for EDGE/2G/Voice. AT&T, being a mixture of two companies (Cingular and the old AT&T Mobility) had both 850MHz and 1900MHz slots in many areas, so they could roll out 3G using both (regular HSPA need 10MHz of bandwidth, versus the 2.5MHz used for EDGE, Voice, and CDMA 3G, the new HSPA+ needs 20MHz of bandwidth). T-Mobile didn't have any 850MHz slots and less bandwidth at 1900MHz, so they had to wait for new spectrum... that's now 1700MHz and 2100MHz (a full 3G connection will use both).

So, simply put, most GSM phones will support at most one of either T-Mobile or AT&T on 3G protocols. Like healthcare, this was handled much better in Europe.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[TooMuchToDo]

Android Lag? Check out a Nexus One. I had an iPhone user today try mine out and literally order one 10 minutes later. Thanks Snapdragon!

Battery life

[Cro Magnon]

The big issue for me is battery life. I don't want some random app draining the battery of the device I use to call a tow if my car breaks down.

Don't forget 2G phones !

[Rastignac]

iPhone2G is as powerful as iPhone3G, but Apple seems now to forget these old models. New firmwares for 2G lack features found on 3G. I hope FW4 won't be for "3G / 3GS / 4G only". First iPhone buyers love Apple; Apple, love them !

Re:Don't forget 2G phones !

[Comboman]

Other than hardware-based features (like GPS & compass) what new features do 3G/GS have that 2G does not? Have you updated your firmware lately?

Re:Don't forget 2G phones !

[Rastignac]

For example: 2G phones don't have MMS. They can do them (a Cydia app does it for 2G phones, so the hardware is able to), but Apple didn't enable them in the firmware.
And there are already words about "no firmware 4 for 2G"... ;(

Re:Yah but...

[Dog-Cow]

Yes.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[not already in use]

What android phone are you using? I have a nexus one and it is just as snappy as any Iphone, at a considerably higher resolution. There are also optimization techniques that Google hasn't made prime-time yet, that really increase the overall performance of all apps running in a dalvik vm: zipalign-on-install.

Apple's decision to not include multitasking from the start was likely a decision to keep things as simple as possible. Now they're playing catch-up and tacking on multi-tasking to a system that was built from the ground-up without it. I don't understand how this will not break app compatibility. Existing apps only understand certain "states." Multitasking will introduce new application states that existing apps will not know how to handle. I am very interested in how they plan to reconcile this.

Multiple sources also claim...

[Anonymous Coward]

... that Apple will open up the app store, and will allow any and all third party applications. In addition, multiple sources indicate that the iPhone 4.0 will cook dinner and fold the laundry.

In other news, multiple sources are rumors, same as always.

... responds to iPad

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't wait to see the next Hitler Responds to... video about this.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[kainewynd2]

As a counter to your example, I tried a Nexus One a couple weeks ago and still prefer my iPhone 3G. Just putting it out there.

Apologists

[RightSaidFred99]

Anytime you mention multitasking to an Apple fanboi they come up with 20 reasons why it's a bad idea and wasn't implemented. I'm sure they're just irate about this new feature and will be pissed off to no end that Apple is adding it, right?

Re:Apologists

[Deathwish238]

Lol yeah I've definitely noticed that. Same goes for widgets. However, if they had multitasking and widgets they would use and would enjoy them

Re:Apologists

[larkost]

I note that you have not commented on the merits of the idea that multitasking might not be a good thing, but rather resort to an Ad hominem attack (name-calling) on anyone who might disagree with you. Do we really need to resort to third-grade level arguments... and how in the world did this get moderated "insightful"?

Re:Apologists

[david_thornley]

Insightful? As something of an Apple fan, I never had the need for background apps, although I understand that being able to stream and play music in the background would be awfully nice for some people. The idea struck me as a great way to drain the battery before lunchtime, and (aside from the music issue) all the suggestions I read as to why it would be useful struck me as great ways to drain the battery before breakfast was quite over.

It was never actually a bad idea, but app multitasking is considerably less important with rapid app switches, which the iPhone does have, and it does have its potential downsides. It's a battery concern, a performance concern, and a security concern. (My personal experience with malware was that there was a process left to run, and since this was my Linux box I hadn't bothered rebooting in several months. Without non-system background processes, that particular method of attack would have been useless (along with my Linux box, of course, which has significantly different requirements than my phone (yes, I am a Lisp fan)).)

Presumably, Apple has some good ideas on how to implement it currently, and the more recent iPhones are more powerful than the older ones, so that'll help.

Re:Apologists

[onefriedrice]

Anytime you mention multitasking to an Apple fanboi they come up with 20 reasons why it's a bad idea and wasn't implemented. I'm sure they're just irate about this new feature and will be pissed off to no end that Apple is adding it, right?

Umm, yeah.. Congratulations, you just completely owned that straw man you set up there. It didn't even stand a chance against you!

Now back to reality, most iPhone users I've talked to have admitted that multitasking would be a nice feature and have expressed their opinions that it would probably be added eventually (just like copy and paste was later added). A minority of iPhone users expressed their satisfaction with the current model and wouldn't care to use a multitasking feature if it ever was offered. Personally, I've never met any of your straw men, but I'm willing to wager they're a minority if they exist. Or do I just associate with exceptionally rational people? Probably not...

Re:Apologists

[RightSaidFred99]

That word... strawman. It doesn't mean what you think it means.

I have had Apple fans literally in front of my face explaining why Multitasking was a bad idea in a phone. You can find similar comments all over the web...and this posting thread.

The point was simply to mock Apple fanbois. I find them silly.

Re:Apologists

[toadlife]

The idea struck me as a great way to drain the battery before lunchtime, and (aside from the music issue) all the suggestions I read as to why it would be useful struck me as great ways to drain the battery before breakfast was quite over.

Unless the iPhone's battery life is terrible to begin with, or Apple doesn't implement a decent notification system for background apps to use, I don't think multitasking will cause the battery drainage you are envisioning.

I own a HTC Touch Pro 2, that runs Windows Mobile and I commute to work 40 miles every day. Before starting my drive to work every morning, I mount my phone, pair it with my Stereo Bluetooth car kit and start my music. The music keeps the screen on the entire time (I can turn it off manually, but keep it on as it's nice to have on when you're shuffling through tracks). All the while, my phone is connected to my work's Exchange account and periodically checks four personal email accounts. Background apps I use include one that monitors my SMS messages and reminds me if I have unread messages (alerts from work), a third party screen lock app that monitors my proximity sensor, g-sensor and light sensor, and an app that manages screen orientation for legacy apps that don't support the auto rotation via the g-sensor.

Right now, at 1:27PM my battery level is at 82%.

Using GPS based navigation apps during my drive will result in another 10% extra drain over the 40 mile drive. Similarly, streaming music with Pandora takes about 10% of the battery. Either way, I've never had a problem getting through the day on a charge.

Re:Apologists

[Anonymous Coward]

well double dumbass on you

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[religious freak]

I've got the first t-mobile phone; I bought it a year or so ago, so the hardware is a bit slower. But I find that when I've got browsers going, along with my background weather program and I fire up a map or a game, things are extremely slow. Yes, I could go in and close everything down, but with Apple I hop from one task to the next. However, even if I did close everything down, the UI wouldn't be as responsive (again, maybe it's the hardware or the multiple Android OS patches that have been sent my way or the last few months)

Smooth, simple, easy. And speaking for myself, when I'm using a portable computer, that's all I really need. But that's just MHO

This isnt for the iPhone

[Ralph Spoilsport]

It's for the iPad, because millions of fanboy^H^H^H^H^H^H early developers shat themselves when the iPad was revealed to have no multitasking. The iPhone is fine the way it is, and could continue in its present state for quite a while without multitasking (outside of the OS centric parts, like time and calendar, etc.). This is *all* about the iPad. I for one am very happy to see this, as the lack of multitasking was one thing that told me not to bother with the iPad.

With multitasking and iWorks, I can actually get something done with it while pissing away my life on the subway or on a bus. Now all I need is for Adobe to come up with PDF support on the iPad, and I am one happy camper.

RS

Re:This isnt for the iPhone

[Ma8thew]

PDF support on the iPad

What do you mean? Mail on iPhone supports PDF and there are also plenty of third party apps which do. Luckily, you don't need to use Adobe's shit to read PDFs.

Re:This isnt for the iPhone

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I don't own an iPhone.

My understanding is that the iPad only supports EDOCS.

I would LOVE to be wrong on this, believe me.

Re:This isnt for the iPhone

[iluvcapra]

Nah nah, you can read PDFs, Word, Excel and Powerpoint presentations in emails and on the web, as well as the iWorks-format files. It just works. PDFs themselves can be read in any WebView.

What on earth is an EDOC? Maybe you mean ePub?

Re:This isnt for the iPhone

[Ralph Spoilsport]

yeah - epub. Nasty things.

Re:This isnt for the iPhone

[Ma8thew]

You are wrong. Any format can be supported by third partys. And I'm assuming the developers of PDF apps for the iPhone will have already adjusted them for use on the iPad.

Re:This isnt for the iPhone

[Abcd1234]

Yeah, epub... that horrible free, open ebook standard. How horrible. oO

Re:This isnt for the iPhone

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Open != good.

Open = Open.

Re:This isnt for the iPhone

[Abcd1234]

Uhuh... and yet, you still haven't explained why epub is an "awful thing". PDF is an absolutely *horrible* ebook format, save for *very* specific types of documents (technical literature, in particular, where fixed layout is very important).

Re:This isnt for the iPhone

[pandrijeczko]

Yes, well being an Apple user you *WOULD* say that, wouldn't you.

Re:This isnt for the iPhone

[iluvcapra]

A = A

Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[c.r.o.c.o]

I've had my Nokia N900 for a couple of months now, and for those unaware, most of the specs are identical to the iPhone 3Gs 32Gb. Well, except that it has a much higher resolution screen, a keyboard, a real GPS, an FM transmitter and a microUSB port for data and charging. But the CPU/GPU and amount of storage are the same, except that you can also add a microSD card to the N900. But now on to the most important difference to the 3Gs. I've used both my N900 and a 3Gs, and the 3Gs just feels sluggish, while having half the functionality.

Flipping home screens on the N900, regardless of how many icons and widgets it's running is smooth, with no clipping. Even with half a dozen apps running in the background, the UI remains equally fast (several instances of the Firefox, Application Manager, Communication app, Contacts app, Skype, MediaBox, battery-eye, conky, etc). Flipping through the 3Gs icon screens clips and feels choppier. It's not a large difference, but keep in mind the hardware is identical and the iPhone has NO applications running in the background.

The N900 also starts up applications faster, in most cases instantaneously. Start up times do increase progressively after about 3-4 large apps are already loaded and actually doing stuff in the background (Firefox loading up pages, Application Manager checking for updates, MediaBox playing music). But many utilities that only refresh while in the foreground do not have any impact at all (Conky, battery-eye, disk usage, etc). In contrast, the 3Gs takes a couple of seconds to load up pretty much every app I tried, regardless of how limited its functionality is, and complex apps take even longer.

Once the apps are running, they are roughly equally fast on both the N900 and the 3Gs. But as I stated above, the N900 may be running several apps in the background, and the foreground apps do not slow down at all.

I think this is why Apple did not allow multitasking up to now. Given how slowly single apps load on their flagship 3Gs, true multitasking will bring it down to its knees. The iPhone OS takes much more resources to run than Maemo or Android, and the iPhone single tasking is a way of masking it. Of course this is speculation since except for the basic Apple apps, nobody managed run more than one app at the same time on the iPhone. And I'm sure those Apple apps are optimized and tweaked to hook into the OS and stay loaded at all times. Most likely the 4G will have a faster processor and more RAM, and will compensate for the OS shortcomings through brute force.

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[iluvcapra]

I think this is why Apple did not allow multitasking up to now. Given how slowly single apps load on their flagship 3Gs, true multitasking will bring it down to its knees.

People do jailbreak their phones and use Backgrounder, and they don't generally report any problems running multiple applications at once, no "bring it to its KNEES!" issues anyways. It does make the thing a bit less ergonomic to use, since you suddenly have to deal with a task manager...

From a hardware perspective there doesn't seem to be any problem with performance, and as other point out, the phone does run apps in the background, just not third-party ones. The no-third-party-apps in the background rule is primarily a policy decision, relating to usability and maybe security.

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[olddotter]

Except that the iPhone does run Apple apps in the back ground. The OS has a number of things running to be able to receive a call, keep it touch with the tower, update the battery icon, the signal bars, etc.

Even though 3rd party apps can't run in the back ground, the iPhone is running several tasks all the time. Its just those task were all written by apple.

I haven't seen the N900, so I can't speak to the speed difference.

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[Fatmiko1]

how about battery life?

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Flipping through the 3Gs icon screens clips and feels choppier.

Total bullshit. I've never seen an iphone (even the original) that had any lag on the home screen, or really most other places. Your iPhone is either broken or you're full of shit. If there's one thing the iPhone does right, it's making sure there is no lag anywhere. I haven't used an N900 so I don't know what it is like in that respect, but I've used several Android phones that were horribly laggy.

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a large difference, but keep in mind the hardware is identical and the iPhone has NO applications running in the background.

So why are you comparing a working Nokia phone, with an iPhone that you never powered on?

Because powering it off is the only way to NOT have background apps running, and has been that way since version 1 of the firmware...

Well, either way that is probably why the iPhone felt so sluggish.. You should try powering it on, it will process commands a bit faster that way :P

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[dissy]

Of course this is speculation since except for the basic Apple apps, nobody managed run more than one app at the same time on the iPhone.

Over a million people are hardly nobody.

I don't recal the exact date OS 3.0 was released, but advanced iPhone users have had backgrounding of all apps ever since then. Backgrounder.app plus one of the better multitasking GUI apps from cydia or rock.

Works pretty well. Since there is no native Google Latitude app currently (It's a web-app sorta, or at least a safari-app), and leaving Safari running in the background does update my location info in google maps for my friends to see, and this works while using the iPod app for music and other normal phone interruptions...

I do kinda agree on the sluggishness, but to be honest I was expecting worse when Apple claimed iPhone would be using a stripped down OS X.
But to say no one has done a thing that over a million iPhone users have access to and a percentage of are actively using is being dishonest.

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[failedlogic]

What kind of batter time are you looking at in doing this? As I'm looking to replace a Blackberry 87xx series, the N900 sounds like a nice phone. A bit pricey at that though..!

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[twitchingbug]

iPhone OS 3.x is incredibly laggy on first gen and 3G iPhones. The 3GS got a bump in CPU speed, and double the RAM. Compare a 3G and 3GS side by side. The animations/transistions are so much smoother on the 3GS.

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[c.r.o.c.o]

I am getting at least 1 day for a charge, usually 2 days. BUT here's how I use it:

- 1-2h worth of phone conversations over GSM with a BT headset.
- 1-2h a day as an ebook reader. Fbreader is AWSOME, between my old N800, N810 and now N900, I think I read 100 books using these devices.
- Constantly connected to WiFi (where available, which is almost everywhere for me) or 3G, checking my gmail accounts every 5 mins throughout the day, being available on skype, etc.

The difference between 1 day and 2 day charges is whether or not I play movies, use the FM transmitter or the GPS. Streaming flash clips off the web through WiFi or 3G will take a LOT of battery life. Same goes for using the FM transmitter to broadcast music to my car stereo, or the GPS but that's in my car where I have a charger.

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[negge]

Any phone that does "nothing" at the moment does all the things you mentioned in the background, so your argument is moot.

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[david_thornley]

As the owner and user of a first-generation iPhone running 3.1.3, I haven't noticed any lagginess.

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[rdnetto]

I agree - ~1 day of typical use. For me typical use includes (at least) a few hours of browsing Slashdot* on GPRS/Wifi, which will drain the battery. However it uses barely anything when not in use. UI is also *very* nice, easily better than Android. If you do any development it's pretty easy with C++/Qt.

*As a sidenote, Slashdot works reasonably well on the N900, except that anything involving javascript is painfuly slow. Changing the thresholds for comments is also impossible since the control requires click+drag, which isn't implemented in MicroB.

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[Anonymous Coward]

either you have the magic golden iphone or you've gobbled steve jobs balls long enough to think you do.
1st gen iphone running 3 is teh suxx. lagtastical fail. get it next to a 3gs and tell me it doesn't lag. or try to do like.. anything on it.

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[twitchingbug]

Seriously, you should compare them side by side. Go to an apple store. Start opening up 6 or 7 apps in the same order. When you open the app, it should animate like it's expanding from the center of the screen to fill it and pushes the icons away. When you press hte home button the reverse happens. The app shrinks into the center, and then the icons slide into position from the sides.

On my phone, this animation stutters,skips frames. On the 3GS, it's rock solid smooth.

Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs

[EvilIdler]

Most of the apps on my iPod touch start up nearly instantaneously (the worst still not taking more than 3 seconds to actually make things happen on the screen). It's slightly faster than an iPhone 3G and has the better 133MHz bus, but still it isn't that much more. 3GS devices are MUCH faster, and start even heavier apps instantly.

Still, some multitasking would be interesting. Since most apps are geared towards one purpose (they are all more like widgets) it would be nice to have both IRC and IM apps, as well as Skype, you could switch between.

Re:Yah but...

[Anonymous Coward]

It can, but Apple won't let you becasue they don't see the need for you to use the device how you want. It is all about what Apple wants.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Anonymous Coward]

"I still wouldn't switch from an Android to an iPhone because of the restrictions (and I'm not going to wager hundreds of dollars on a jailbreak), but now I see why people enjoy Apple products."

The current Jailbreaking method is actually very ease to implement and just as easy to undue.
Pretty much you download an EXE from blackra1n.com and then run it. Boom Jailbroken.

To undo the Jailbreak simple do a factory restore on phone from itunes.

There are more complex ways to do this, but the above method is pretty safe and simple. //cool story bro...

Jailbreaking

[dandart]

I could do this ages ago with jailbreaking (Backgrounder, Kirikae, etc). But I do wish that in Android it would make backgrounding not default unless I set the program specifically to background.

Welcome to 2005 and the Nokia N770

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple, Welcome to 2005 and the Nokia N770 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_770_Internet_Tablet. Way to go!

OTOH, I suppose you sold more iPhones **today** than all the 770s sold since they were released.

Disclosure: I have a $200 (new) Nokia N800 and routinely multitask email, music, podcost downloads and browsing while at home.
When on the driving I multitask GPS (maemo-mapper) and music/podcast playback.
When hiking, I run Maemo-mapper and GPSView to help find those geocaches.

The GPS stuff helps me to geotag my photos later. Scroogle "N800, photos, gps" for more information.
Best of all, no cell phone contract.

Someone asked about the best way to get a Nokia N900 in the USA. If best is cheapest over a 2yr life, then buy it unlocked from amazon and bring your GSM SIM card with you to the N900.

Again - Apple - welcome to the show. You should be commended on your innovative efforts!

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Itchyeyes]

Really? I've had quite the opposite experience with my Droid. Lots of freezing/crashing, and lots of instances of programs continuing to run in the background when I want them closed draining my battery and heating up my phone. If I didn't loath AT&T so much I'd go back to the iPhone in a heartbeat, multitasking or no. As it is, I'm hoping the 2.1 patch (if it ever gets here) at least irons out a few of the kinks.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[aclarke]

I don't think it would be that difficult from a third party app's point of view. The background app's state could still be "off", just like it is now. Then app makers could release a new version that supports multitasking in a background state if they feel their app could make some use of this.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Duradin]

Beejive seems to handle messages well enough with push notifications if you have to switch out to another app for a bit and most modern (hell even ICQ) chat services can handle offline messages. It can also do multiple chat sessions/services at the same time so you don't need multitasking to do that.

The screen is rather small as it is for just doing one thing at a time so if I'm not in the chat app I don't won't chat windows taking up all or some of the window when I'm doing something else.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[colourmyeyes]

Are these some examples of ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE? My favorite!

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[tixxit]

Taking a shit at work, listening to last.fm, playing Sudoku, and IM'ing friends on my phone, all at once... No way would I give that up for a slightly smoother UI.

Newton / Android style would be good.

[DdJ]

Actually, the kind of background processing that the Newton used, which has some things in common with what Android does (specifically Android "services"), would be awesome. The main problem is that developers are really not used to working this way.

Basically, you have your main app, and it runs when it's in the foreground, and that's it. But you also have these other chunks of code that the app can register with the system. On the Newton you could attach that code to the OS-level alarm mechanism ("when this alarm that I just asked the system service to execute for me at that timestamp fires, don't show a dialog box or play a sound, run this bytecode instead"). On Android, it can be a daemon-like thing that actually runs in the background (eg. to play streaming music).

The fundamental idea is that the whole app isn't doing background processing -- instead you break of very small pieces and those run in the background, under much more severe constraints. (The distinction between cron-like and daemon-like isn't really critical here. The developer still has to be trained to break their app up into distinct pieces with different constraints, instead of having one big app.)

This is simply not the architecture a lot of developers are used to (though Unix folk have a head start). But it's a way to provide actual real usable multitasking on a device like this without crushing the memory and battery usage (especially if you use the alarm-based method and your apps can schedule the alarms far apart; for some apps this is more than adequate).

Some programmers would certainly yell if they had to jump through that kind of hoop. But something like that could very well be the best compromise on these devices.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple's decision to not include multitasking from the start was likely a decision to keep things as simple as possible. Now they're playing catch-up and tacking on multi-tasking to a system that was built from the ground-up without it. I don't understand how this will not break app compatibility. Existing apps only understand certain "states." Multitasking will introduce new application states that existing apps will not know how to handle. I am very interested in how they plan to reconcile this.

iPhone OS is Unix. It's had multitasking built in from day one!

The iPhone HAS multitasking

[catchblue22]

I hate to be semantic here, but the iPhone uses a unix based kernel, and at its heart already does multitasking. Beneath the user facing side, many processes run simultaneously already. What most of the posters here, and TFA are referring to is the ability to run multiple user-facing apps at the same time. This feature has been disabled to simplify the user interface and to reduce battery depletion. While we can debate the merits of that decision, the assertion that the iPhone is like a mid 1980's computer because of a lack of pre-emptive multitasking is fallacious.

Re:The iPhone HAS multitasking

[dfghjk]

"...the assertion that the iPhone is like a mid 1980's computer because of a lack of pre-emptive multitasking is fallacious."

It is not. The iPhone kernel is capable of multitasking but iPhone apps, in general, are not. The iPhone is made up of more than just a kernel.

Re:The iPhone HAS multitasking

[Anonymous Coward]

The iPhone kernel is capable of multitasking but iPhone apps, in general, are not. The iPhone is made up of more than just a kernel.

Yet the exact same apps "magically" gain multitasking ability in jailbroken iPhones with Backgrounder... go figure...

Of course some apps are not designed with multitasking in mind, but that is a problem of the app design, not of the OS or the phone itself. OTOH, most apps do behave correctly when multitasking.

Re:The iPhone HAS multitasking

[religious freak]

Well... obviously dude.

I'm sure I could carry around a $600 device that only runs an event timer, but that wouldn't be of much use to anyone. There is SOME kind of app multi-tasking too (I can play music while I run some very limited apps), but multi-tasking in this context implies something more complex than this.

A thought about current app code...

[jackpot777]

How many of the current apps will need updates because the programmers forgot the simplest of lines of code... close(); ...?

Re:A thought about current app code...

[cbreak]

It will most likely be opt-in.

Welcome to Last Year Apple.

[d3ac0n]

Palm's WebOS has had FULL multitasking for ALL apps since Summer 2009. Go check out a Pre or Pixi on Sprint or a Pre +, Pixi + on Verizon. All the "Oh look at the cool multitasking things we can do" on the latest 3Gs commercial? WebOS had it out of the box last summer.

Oh, and then there is the remarkably simple development platform (Web standards! Yay!) and the vibrant non-official apps catalog available in the free PreWare and WebOS Quick Install applications that work in perfect sync with the Official WebOS Catalog.

    (Palm has actually been helping the community integrate the sideline catalog, and encouraging mods and patches to the base WebOS setup. Imagine that!)

For all the hype about Apple (and Droid) NEITHER of them can yet do what Palm has already accomplished in less than a year.

Stop dicking around with Apple slaveware and Google's multiple personality disorderware. Go get a Pre or a Pixi.

Please enlighten me

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post has made me curious and I’m watching now the review of the N900 right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvPTBwEg5UA

Now, I dunno if my perception is screwed or something but the apps on there take 2-4 seconds to launch and the touchscreen does lag tiny little bit in some of them.

On the other hand the apps on the vilified 3gs load - as far as my perception is concerned - within 1-2 seconds.

Re:Please enlighten me

[c.r.o.c.o]

Your post has made me curious and I'm watching now the review of the N900 right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvPTBwEg5UA
Now, I dunno if my perception is screwed or something but the apps on there take 2-4 seconds to launch and the touchscreen does lag tiny little bit in some of them.
On the other hand the apps on the vilified 3gs load - as far as my perception is concerned - within 1-2 seconds.

The latest N900 firmware resolved a LOT of issues. Not sure what firmware the review phone is using, but looking at his theme, it's an older one. My N900 with firmware 3.2010.02-8.002 released about a month ago loads up ALL apps faster than in the review. Same goes for the touchscreen lag. The next firmware, due to be released in a couple of weeks will improve things even further.

But that's not all. :) The N900 also gets faster as you use it. After a cold boot the RAM has 100Mb used, but after loading all sorts of apps it goes up to 153Mb and stays there. Those extra 50Mb contain cashing data for all your apps. I just tried every app I could think of: Communications (SMS and IM), Firefox, Contacts, Phone, Media Player (not MediaBox), Disk Usage, battery-eye, Settings, Application Manager, File Manager, Xterm, PDF Reader, Email. Every single one loaded up instantly, in less than 1 sec.

The only offender is MediaBox, because it insists on scanning your entire device for music, movies, etc. BTW, the N900 can play regular AVI movies without dropping frames or losing sound sync, AND it can output to any TV. I watched 9 (the entire animation movie) full screen on my HD TV the other day. :))

And I NEVER need to reboot my N900, it's rock solid. Even if the first time you start the apps it takes as long as on the iPhone, after 10 mins of use it's much faster.

Except that the iPhone does run Apple apps in the back ground. The OS has a number of things running to be able to receive a call, keep it touch with the tower, update the battery icon, the signal bars, etc.
Even though 3rd party apps can't run in the back ground, the iPhone is running several tasks all the time. Its just those task were all written by apple.
I haven't seen the N900, so I can't speak to the speed difference.

Well olddotter, the N900 has to perform all the phone related tasks you've listed as well. So your point doesn't apply.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[kainewynd2]

Damn straight! Best way to spend a Thursday afternoon!

Re:A minor point...-- about apple major stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

How bout they just make it so everytime I click on soemthing I want in the app store it doesn't close the app store to "install" it. Seriously.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[thetoadwarrior]

Hell, I have a G1 and it's fine unless I load some long webpage full of Javascript and I'm talking about something worse than Slashdot which it handles fine.

The closest Nokia shop is 200 miles away

[tepples]

buy an unlocked version from the Nokia shop

I would, but the closest Nokia shop is 200 miles away. Where do you recommend that I try the phone before I buy it?

In the US, you would be able to use it on any GSM network, which I believe means T-Mobile or AT&T.

That's a possibility, as T-Mobile finally gives a discount for bringing your own handset.

iPad on the side

[Anonymous Coward]

Now there are 2 tasks. You have multitasking; steve jobs' style

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Anonymous Coward]

hey, aren't you they guy who said they wouldn't be able to add copy/paste since it was built from the ground up without it?

It was the correct answer

[SuperKendall]

Because the only app that you can use to listen to music is the iPod app

He didn't specify how he listened to music. As even you admitted, the iPod app happily plays music. Therefore, the correction was correct.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Anonymous Coward]

..except for the phone and iPod app which has had multitasking since launch.

I have jailbreakon my iPhone and installed "backgrounder" which allows any app to run in the background. Works great. The icon of an app gets a small circle to indicate that it is running in the background.

I do understand why Apple have blocked this functionality to developers since it drains battery.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like Apple's ripping off Android now. Maybe HTC should sue them back.

Phone multitasking != PC multitasking

[TodLiebeck]

I can't stand hearing everyone talk about multitasking on things like Android devices as though it works the same way as it does on their desktop PC. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The first form of multitasking on Android is that applications can elect to receive messages, e.g. "someone is calling", or "wifi state changed".

If you actually need to do constant work in the background (e.g., listening on a network port), you can do so as well, using a "service". And even services will be killed by the system if resources are needed.

No one is talking about running a Handbrake encode session, Firefox with a bunch of animated Flash ads, and a kernel compile at the same time on their phone.

Multitasking on a phone is being able to record breadcrumbs of a journey with a GPS app, listen to streaming internet radio, and receive notifications from an instant messaging client at the same time.

Re:Phone multitasking != PC multitasking

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but your "informative" comment is pretty full of BS.

On Android, a normal, non-service app can run in the background. Yes, you can compile on a terminal with a bash shell while you are using other programs, and I know it because I've done it. On the same way, a GPS app can record continuously (or almost, usually GPS chips only give data every second of so), while you listen to streaming radio and receive notifications from an IM app. Like, for example, record the route with google tracks, listen to the Spotify app and receive gmail/SMS/etc notifications. Which I also do sometimes while on the bike.

Of course the OS can decide to terminate applications. That's no different from a desktop OS with its OOM, except that in this case the resources are tiny and it's going to happen a lot more. But even then, apps can say "please, I'm important, keep me backgrounded" which the OS can or cannot honor, depending on the resources.

To Little To Late

[EEPROMS]

I'm a hardware guy and after swapping from Nokia to the iPhone then to a HTC Magic my next update will be a Dell Mini 5. I really like android and it's openness and now that Android has near 40k apps the iPhone app store doesn't interest me.

Re:To Little To Late

[Black.Shuck]

I'm a hardware guy

Yeah, we can tell:

To Little To Late

Reminds me of the old engineers adage: "Three years ago I couldn't even spell the word 'engineer'; now I *is* one!"

Re:To Little To Late

[EEPROMS]

So your whole reply is based on my spelling not conjecture or adding to the subject, if the term "get a life" was ever needed now is it.

Re:To Little To Late

[Black.Shuck]

Don't be such a sourpuss.

How to try before buying?

[tepples]

What's wrong with buying your music and synching it on your phone if you want to browse at the same time?

Another Slashdot user mentioned "a wealth of great music released [that] isn't on heavy rotation on radio". But people don't have the money to buy every album that comes out, and people want to try it before they buy it.

Driving a monitor

[swb]

Would be extremely useful.

I can see in a car where you'd have an in-dash touchscreen (the 5" or whatever the screens are) and a "port" for your iPhone.

Once docked in the port, your iPhone display is on the in-dash display, and integrated with the stereo, the handsfree controls for phoning, etc.

That would be pretty nice.

I'll probably turn it off

[nurb432]

But that is the key, YOU getting the choice, not Apple.

How about bytecode interpretation

[caywen]

I think Apple should use a bytecode execution engine and explicitly timeslice jobs. They could modify LUA or Python, providing bindings to a limited, safe set of native API calls (or safe wrappers to them).

Then, iPhone app developers would have the option of providing an explicit LUA/Python/whatever script as part of their app. The only promise Apple would make is that the script would not be guaranteed to run quickly.

The scheduling could be something simple like this:
- Give each script its own small heap, stack, and VM state
- For each script, execute its bytecode for up to 20 milliseconds (or some dynamic value based on load)
- After all scripts have executed their timeslice, sleep for 1 second.
- Start again

Having a ton of background processes from a ton of different apps could cause starvation, but that would happen in a much worse way with unconstrained multitasking.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[indil]

Apple doesn't bend over backwards to preserve compatibility. They're just going to drop your app from the store if it doesn't work after upgrading the OS; hasn't that happened already?

Some use cases

[caywen]

Some use cases off the top of my head:
- Let me know when I've come into the vicinity of a historical landmark
- Synchronize my media from the cloud onto my device in the background (over, say, 3G)
- To always feel rich by knowing that I Am Rich is still running in the background.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[The End Of Days]

The Unix process model doesn't work like you think it does. I'm not sure how you got modded as Insightful on this site, of all places, when you are dead wrong about something I would expect many people here to know.

My nexus one is very laggy

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have an iPhone to compare it to, but the Nexus One IS laggy, especially when notifications are coming through for a new email, text, or whatever.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't say they were playing catchup but other phone os's used multi-tasking as a way to diff them with the iphone. An intuitive alerting system would be just as effective in a consumer device as allowing 3rd party apps to multitask. I'm also guessing if apple does open up and allow 3rd party apps to multi-task they will place some caveats in there to make sure it doesn't drain the battery or slow the UI w/o intentionally doing so...

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[sbeckstead]

I'll second that. Tried the Droid, G1 and Nexus One, and still prefer my iPhone 3G.

mmmmyep

[garote]

That's great. Good thing the iPhone has a halfway intelligent notification system, isn't it?

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[indiechild]

I think Steve Jobs was just waiting for CPU/memory/battery capacity to catch up to the point where multitasking will be smooth enough that he's happy with it. He's a control freak and a perfectionist, and if something doesn't work just right, he'd rather omit it altogether than include an inferior implementation. That's why Copy & Paste took so long to arrive on iPhone OS.

I'm still using an original 2G iPhone, and I'm wondering whether iPhone OS 4.0 will be able to run on my device. Steve might decide to disallow it if the multitasking performance is not up to par on older devices.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[mjwx]

iPhone OS is Unix. It's had multitasking built in from day one!

and artificially disabled from day 0.99. Funny how people always forget this.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[mjwx]

think Steve Jobs was just waiting for CPU/memory/battery capacity to catch up to the point where multitasking will be smooth enough that he's happy with it. He's a control freak and a perfectionist, and if something doesn't work just right, he'd rather omit it altogether than include an inferior implementation. That's why Copy & Paste took so long to arrive on iPhone OS.

If it took 2 years to get Copy and Paste right, expect multi-tasking around 2230.

Youre right about one thing, Steve Jobs is a control freak and why would a control freak give up any control.

FTFY

[Anonymous Coward]

iPhone OS is Unix. It's had multitasking disabled from day one!

mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent up.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Anonymous Coward]

You're on the right track. Steve Jobs Actually didn't include it because it would cost money he was using to feed the homeless.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Raul Acevedo]

Since when does allowing multitasking inherently slow things down? Obviously it doesn't; it only slows the system down if you run too many simultaneous apps.

Oh this is just great....

[nilbog]

Oh great ... now I'm only going to have crappy 2-3 day battery life like every other multi-tasking phone I've ever owned.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[hazydave]

With rare exception, programs in the background are consuming little or no power in Android. This is Linux after all... a program that's not doing something or waiting to do something is sitting on a wait-task queue... it's not consuming any power until the thing it's waiting for (a timer, an I/O event, etc) happens. Sure, it's possible to write an evil application that sucks power in the background... I've seen one of these since I started using Android five months ago. The small win with multitasking is the ability to very rapidly switch between applications. I do this all the time, and it's dramatically more efficient than on any single tasking OS, like PalmOS or iPhoneOS. The big win is intentional background processes, eg, daemons in Linux-speak. So any application can stick around and do its job, monitoring other forms of communications, checking the weather, tracking or changing settings based on locale, or simply offering me the same ability in any old program (Pandora, Museek) that Apple reserves for just their apps on the iPhone.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[hazydave]

I think my Droid is as snappy as the best of the iPhone line, at considerably higher resolution. Your Nexus One goes a step beyond that. And yeah, there are Dalvik improvements on the way. Nothing like an OS tweak to affect every application... Palm did this, twice now, with their WebOS (most WebOS apps are writting in JavaScript!!). Apple's playing catchup, or at least they ought to be, on a number of things. Multitasking is just one... how about screen resolution? Their treatment of the iPad, with its "run iPhone apps in the 480x360 naive mode" hack, suggests that they have no intention of supporting anything other than 480x360 anytime soon. That's fairly tragic... every modern top-of-the-line smart phone now has 800x480 resolution, or perhaps a bit higher. Also, the rumor suggesting an "interface for switching between apps" does suggest some weirdness... how about background tasks? One of the main strengths of Android is the ability to run many tiny daemons, so you have realtime updates of anything you care to update. There's no switching-between, other than in the usual Linux sense of multitasking. If developers can't reproduce any feature Apple can (as one can relative to Android and Google), the OS is still crippled.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[hazydave]

Is the "shit at work" app in the Android Marketplace?

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[hazydave]

Multitasking is a natural concept... it's the single tasking in any OS that has to be learned. Apple's been very good at teaching this as an acceptable limitation, to the point where the iPhonies defend this as some kind of intelligent choice, despite the fact their batteries last no longer than those of my Droid. I'm sure if Apple does introduce some kind of application multitasking, they'll be back to explain to us all why multitasking is suddenly A Good Thing, even though it wasn't in the past.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[hazydave]

Given that internet use on the iPhone is a flat $30 per month, this doesn't make AT&T any money. But yeah, that'll happen... there are hundreds if not thousands of apps on Android that can live in the background and do something interesting via the net.

Re:The don't really have a choice

[hazydave]

As opposed to the previous MS-OS for phones, which could play 3D games? Yeah, this is "Windows Phone 7", which is apparently what happens when you turn the Zune version of WinCE into a cellphone OS, rather than the old PalmPC version of WinCE (eg, the basis for Windows Mobile). They completely changed the GUI, so it looks, well, just like the ZuneHD... probably better for consumers, and definitely better for finger-touch interfaces, than the old WinMo.

Of course, one might also view this in a negative light. This is Microsoft once again copying Apple, turning their MP3 player into a phone. And it's also kind of a "Hail Mary" pass... the old WinMo has been steadily losing market share. So they introduce this new version of Windows for phones, which requires a totally new API. Old code won't work in the new OS, period.. as Gizmodo put it, "Windows Mobile isn't just dead, the body's been dumped, buried and paved over by a rainbow brick road." You have to write you apps using Silverlight or some other Microsoft nonsense... none of the old WinMo stuff is carried over. Check it out here. MS at least understands that WinMo was so far behind, the only way to catch up with iPhone and Android was a clean, new, Zune-shaped slate.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[Fred_A]

YEAH! Why have a cell phone.. I think there are pay phone things somewhere... I saw one on Superman.

Laugh all you want but Superman isn't going to change inside his iPhone anytime soon. Even if it multitasks.
Apple obviously still has a long way to do.

Let me 'splain,No,there is too much. Let me sum up

[ClosedSource]

Jobs has a vision for his products and if that vision limits functions, so be it.

Computers get hot so a fan is needed, but Jobs didn't like fans so the original Mac didn't get one.

Transferring files from one computer to another without using a network was an important capability at the time that the NeXT computer was introduced, but it would have compromised Job's vision, so it wasn't included.

If including a standard cut/paste option would logically require a real physical keyboard, than Jobs will convince himself (and his most loyal customers) that copy/paste isn't needed for the iPhone.

Later when it is obvious that most people think copy/paste is a necessary function, Apple found a way to shoehorn it in.

semi-background apps

[JoshuaJ]

There are a few apps that don't need much more than the very basic notification system that the iPhone already uses. Then, there are a few apps (like music players) that absolutely require full-fledged multitasking. (It'll be nice to finally be able to listen to pandora while checking my email.) But there are a lot of apps that could get by with something in between: a more robust notification system that lets the app register for notifications from the OS when certain conditions are met (example: notify when a phone call comes in, or when the phone enters a geographic area, or connects to a particular wifi network), and run arbitrary code when that happens. This can give the best of both worlds: an app that runs whenever it needs to, but can't waste battery power the rest of the time, even by accident. I wish there were an API that allowed developers to do this.

Re:It's a freakin' PHONE

[not already in use]

We're not talking about the Unix process model, are we? We're talking about the iPhone multitasking capabilities. What you and a million other idiots don't seem to understand is that just because the iPhone OS is based on Unix, doesn't mean that the iPhone supports multitasking in a way that is meaningful to end users. If it did, we wouldn't be having this conversation, would we?

Re:Let me 'splain,No,there is too much. Let me sum

[Ma8thew]

The first two are valid, but the last is bullshit. Of course Apple wanted copy and paste on the iPhone, but to implement it and have it work crappy is worse than not implementing it at all. It may be acceptable in a niche device, but it would compromise user experience. And Apple really cares about user experience.

Re:Let me 'splain,No,there is too much. Let me sum

[ClosedSource]

So you really think that cut/paste was such a challenge for Apple that they couldn't put it in the original iPhone? It's not as if they had to rush the thing out the door in June so that they could sell them for Christmas.

can it

[aminorex]

can it tether?

Re:Let me 'splain,No,there is too much. Let me sum

[Ma8thew]

So you really think that cut/paste was such a challenge for Apple that they couldn't put it in the original iPhone?

Yes.