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During the end of Palm OS's Garnet's existence, it was [rightfully] criticized for not being able to run several applications at the same time. Of course it was not as if Palm did not want to add application multitasking to its phones/PDAs, it was simply a limitation of the OS: Palm OS was never designed to run multiple apps at once.
Then comes the iPhone, which can't multitask either. And all of sudden it not an issue anymore. Some people even go as far as to state that it is actually a good thing, as they do not need to manually close down apps! In other words, what wasn't good enough 5 years ago is now, for some people, the best thing since bread came sliced.
How's that for hypocrisy! Or maybe it is just ignorance... or living in denial....
Follow up:
Which brings me to my point.
As I noted in another post, I do not consider the iPhone to be a smartphone, the primary reason being its lack of application multitasking. Now some people say "Multitasking is overrated, I can do perfectly fine without it!" (and as noted in that other post, if you do say this you probably belong to that majority of iPhone users who have never used a smartphone before). So I will give two examples of real-life situations where multitasking would make all the difference on an iPhone (or any other platform for that matter, but the iPhone is the only "smartphone" OS that cannot run multiple applications simultaneously).
- iPhone got the first mobile Spotify app. Good for you iPhone users! Really. The other platforms can only wish they had gotten it first.
However, if you have come around to actually using it you already know that you cannot stream music through Spotify while you use any other app, Spotify needs to run in the foreground at all times.
Can someone honestly state that it would not be useful to listen to music through Spotify while you use another app? Of course not. - You are entering an appointment in your calendar. You have already entered the subject, the time, the alarm, some text in the note field, when you need to look up some information in an SMS that you received yesterday. So you open up your Messaging app (that you had to launch from the main menu of course), look up the info you are after and then go back to the calendar (that you, again, had to launch from the main menu). What happened to your appointment that you were entering? Since you did not save it before you exited the calendar you lost it. You will have to start all over again.
Wouldn't it be convenient if you could simply continue from where you left off? Well, on all other platforms you can since they do not automatically close the apps when you exit.
So obviously, being able to run multiple applications simultaneously on your phone is not a "geek feature" - it is fundamental for taking full advantage of a modern smartphone's capabilities.
Now, some people argue that the iPhone does multitask, saying that they can listen to mp3 while using other apps.
Well guess what, Palm OS could also reproduce mp3 in the background. But that is not enough on a modern smartphone OS; it was not enough on Palm OS, and it is even less sufficient on an OS that, according to Steve Jobs, is 5 years ahead of the competition.
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The fact is, for every person who wants multitasking, there are at least 100 who couldn't care less, and HATE the fact you have to manually close apps down.
As long as you can multi task between the core phone features that's all most people need in the REAL WORLD.
I believe it's a non issue, created by the geeks.
Heck, there's even the option for those geeks to jailbreak their device and use backgrounder, if it's so important.
If you look at the other platforms they all multitask with little negative consequence for the user. In other words, it simply works the vast majority of the time. The point is that on a modern device I do not think you should need to be concerned about running 10 apps in the background: the OS, and the hardware, should be up to the task; memory management, which includes closing down apps in the background if necessary, should be transparent to the user and should not impact negatively on the user experience.
Regarding jail-breaking, that is geek feature for sure, and not entirely without its hazards.
Bottom line: if you think that the examples I gave are not "geek features" but actually something that all users would find useful then we probably agree at some level.
Either way, I bet that Apple will add multitasking to the iPhone in version 4.0 or 5.0 of the OS. And when they do, you can be sure that they will proudly market it as great new feature, just like they did with MMS and video recording. When they do, very few iPhone users will say "I don't need it nor do I want to be bothered by having to manually close down apps"; instead I am sure they will appreciate it.
Also, I would prefer to not have to use iTunes to manage the phone, but oh well.
Memory leaks is a problem that is caused mainly by the applications, not the OS, meaning that you can easily have memory leaks in a "singletasking" OS as well; I would occasionally get them on my Treo 650 caused by a bug in an app or simply from bad coding, and you could have a memory leak in OS X as well. It's true though that the OS needs to be able to efficiently recover the memory from closed apps, but this is different from memory leaks.
In other words, I don't think that "classic" iPhone users would necessarily notice if OS X went multitasking all of sudden - at least they shouldn't if done correctly.
Nokia/Symbian has actually had, and still have, the opposite problem: many S60 users are not aware of that they can multitask with their phones, which is why they [Nokia] have now added the menu option "Show open apps." as the first option in ALL menus, with the purpose of increasing the users' awareness of Symbian's multitasking capabilities so that they take more advantage of it.
As for not considering Mac OS X on the iPhone a smartphone? Really? Wow. Plain and simply, wow.
The argument about "decision based on priorities" reminds me of Palm once again: when users were begging Palm to add Wifi to their phones, Palm always responded that they deliberately chose not add it as Wifi is "too draining on the battery". Now I don't know about you, but I certainly do not want nor need anyone to babysit me regarding how I use my devices. If my phone is left without juice before the end of the day because I overused Wifi or "multitasked too much" (which sounds plain ridiculous) then that is my problem. Neither Palm, nor Apple, should make those kind of decisions for me.
But at the end of the day it boils down to this: when Apple finally *do* add unrestricted application multitasking (perhaps even in the upcoming version 4.0), I am sure that everyone will consider it to be, at the very least, a great new feature. At the same time Apple *will* market that new feature as something positive, just like they did with copy&paste, MMS, etc, when they finally added those features. And when that happens I very much doubt that anyone, including yourself, will complain or worry about "memory, processing, battery life, etc" - instead you'll just enjoy it and realize that "Hey, multitasking actually works fine!", while not missing your "pre-multitasking" iPhones one bit.