Mobile Info Planet

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....

...

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.