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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.
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.
First against the wall when the revolution comes
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.